Oscars 2024: Directors Guild Preview and Predictions

Much has changed in the industry since I started blogging on the Oscar race. For one thing, we’ve seen some strange things in the era of the preferential ballot. In the post “Great Awokening” era, we’ve seen even stranger things. All that really means is shifting ground beneath our feet. It’s “change” that is sometimes subtle such that you barely notice it, and sometimes it’s shocking enough to fundamentally transform how we see the Oscar race for Best Picture.

One of those culture quakes was CODA winning Best Picture with only three Oscar nominations and with no DGA or Oscar nomination for Best Director. This is unheard of in terms of history.

If you wanted to look at it from the perspective of race and gender (Critical Theory), you could explain this one away by saying males have traditionally dominated the DGA and the Oscar Best Director categories, and that’s why the directors have had so much power over the film industry throughout history. That’s definitely true, but they have not yet made the leap, at least not in the DGA, of using “equity” to make things more fair. With 19,500 voting members, they can’t help but pick what they like best.

History, though, can only take you so far. The directors now have less voting power and less influence than the actors. With CODA, that was the actors so clearly wanting to make history and repeat the good vibes, or the “rapture,” they felt at the SAG awards when they leaped to their feet to honor the predominantly deaf cast. This era seems to be more of a “collectivist” era, as opposed to an “individualist” era.

Thus, a winner like Alejandro G. Inarritu or Jane Campion can ride Best Director all the way to Oscar, but that doesn’t mean The Revenant or The Power of the Dog will also win Best Picture. We are still determining if we’re in a split year or a year where Best Director goes all the way along with Best Picture (which no longer happens as much as it used to).

In general, the DGA measures their five favorite movies of the year and tempers it with the most revered directors. Was Licorice Pizza one of the five favorites of the year or do they just revere Paul Thomas Anderson. The same thing could be said for David Fincher and Mank: did they love the movie or did they just love his work and that made them gravitate to the movie? There is still a piece of the industry that admires and votes for the bravura directors. David Fincher remains one of the only DGA nominees to have his film (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) not get Oscar-nominated either Best Picture or Best Director in the era of the expanded ballot, which is a testament to how popular of a director and how revered he is, the Academy notwithstanding.

Does that mean Fincher has a shot with The Killer? In a different kind of year, maybe. This year, Netflix has Maestro and May December, which are getting the bigger boost. Does that mean Bradley Cooper gets in? Maybe. So how can we find our DGA five right now ahead of tomorrow’s announcement?

History tells us that much of the time (though not all of the time) the DGA five comes from either the Globes or the Critics Choice. So what does that look like right now? It looks like this (with six slots each):

Five out of five are matching. How often has that happened (since 2009) and went on to match the DGA five? It’s happened twice. One in 2018 with Bradley Cooper (who did not go on to earn an Oscar nod) and once in 2010 where David O. Russell also did not advance to the Oscars. In general, three or four of the matching names go on to get a DGA nod. I’ll post the full charts below.

Here are the films that got into DGA without either a Globes or a Critics Choice:

Top Gun: Maverick
Jojo Rabbit
Lion
The Big Short
American Sniper
Dragon Tattoo

All of these felt like surprises when the DGA announced; like, who could have predicted Lion? Even Jojo Rabbit was a stretch. That means we could be in for a surprise. Or not. If it goes the way it looks above, our DGA five would be easy:

Oppenheimer — Christopher Nolan has been nominated four times, though his only Best Director nomination at the Oscars has been for Dunkirk.
Killers of the Flower Moon — This would be Martin Scorsese’s 11th nomination for both DGA and Oscar.
Barbie — This would be Greta Gerwig’s second DGA nomination, and second Oscar nomination for Director.
Poor Things — This would be Yorgos Lanthimos’ first DGA nomination.
Maestro — This would be Bradley Cooper’s second DGA nomination and first Oscar nomination for directing.

But we also have Alexander Payne, who has a Critics Choice nomination. This would be his third DGA nomination.

Is there any other clue that might help us figure out the DGA? Having a Globes and a Critics Choice nomination for Best Picture enhances your chances of a DGA nomination, which also means that, in addition to those five above, the other three possibilities are: The Holdovers, Past Lives, and American Fiction.

It’s a tough call for that fifth slot.

Here are our predictions:

Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer — Sasha Stone, Clarence Moye, Marshall Flores, Mark Johnson
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon — Stone, Moye, Flores, Johnson
Greta Gerwig, Barbie — Stone, Moye, Flores, Johnson
Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things — Stone, Moye, Flores, Johnson
Alexander Payne, The Holdovers — Stone, Moye, Flores
Bradley Cooper, Maestro — Johnson