Oscars 2024: Who should win best director?

Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a hot favourite to sweep the board at this year’s Oscars. If he doesn’t take home the golden statue for Best Director there will be more than a few raised eyebrows.

These things are rarely an open and shut case, but Nolan’s Oppenheimer has an awful lot going in its favour beyond the usual background lobbying effort.

It has a weighty central theme that hits all the harder in these tense geopolitical times; features stunning performances from a star-studded cast; and has a bravura sequence that recreates the terrible destructive power of a nuclear explosion using only practical effects.

Sprinkle in that Nolan is a top tier Hollywood director who has never won the big individual prize (he was nominated for Dunkirk in 2018), and you have a recipe for Best Director success.

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Could the wiley old holdout from Hollywood’s second golden age spoil the Christopher Nolan love-in? It seems unlikely, but in Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese made his most important film in decades.

His is a movie that quietly seethes at the historical injustice recounted within – the exploitation and murder of the freshly oil-rich native Osage people in early–20th century Oklahoma by avaricious white men.

Lily Gladstone is the star performer in a heavyweight cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio playing against type as a weak-willed simpleton and Robert De Niro at his most ruthlessly charming.

But it’s Scorsese who pulls the movie together, methodically damning the guilty parties across three and a half hours of drama, betrayal, and death.

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The Favourite won Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos 10 nominations back in 2019, and eventually secured Olivia Colman her Oscar for Best Actress. Poor Things has given the Greek director an even better shot at awards success, with 11 nominations in total.

While Emma Stone has been winning all the praise for her lead performance, Lanthimos also deserves his nod for Best Director. His film is undoubtedly the strangest on this shortlist, not to mention the funniest and the filthiest.

Stone plays Bella Baxter, a modern day (ish) Frankenstein’s monster who sets out into a steampunk world to fill in the blanks through sensual experience. Lanthimos moves the action from black and white to vibrant colour as our hero broadens her horizons.

It’s a remarkably brave and bold performance, from director and star alike.

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There’s a case to be made that this is the year of Sandra Hüller. The German actress finds herself starring in two of most talked about films of the 2023/24 season, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest.

That shouldn’t overshadow the amazing job director Justine Triet has done with Anatomy of a Fall, though. It’s a forensic breakdown of both a tragic domestic accident and the crumbling marriage at the heart of it.

There’s an immaculate sense of precision to this courtroom drama, with every word (whichever European language it happens to be spoken in) and expression examined and re-examined for meaning and motive.

It’s a complex, wordy film alright, but given Triet co-wrote the film with her husband Arthur Harari, you’d better believe she has a handle on the material.

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Jonathan Glazer’s latest film has been winning rave reviews across the board. You have to suspect that if the Academy Awards winners were decided purely by the critics, it might just be a front runner.

Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller (who appears elsewhere on this list thanks to Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall) play a German couple building a prosperous middle class life in a seemingly idyllic home.

The deadly twist is said aspirational property directly borders the Auschwitz concentration camp at the height of World War II. Friedel’s character is none other than Rudolf Höss, the infamous camp commandant who helped instigate Hitler’s Final Solution.

Glazer’s film is a strikingly bold treatment of the material, choosing never to explicitly show the atrocities that are occurring just over the wall.

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