Sean Baker: Anora (winner)
Brady Corbet: The Brutalist
James Mangold: A Complete Unknown
Jaques Audiard: Emilia Perez
Coralie Fargeat: The Substance
What’s Missing
2024 was a decent year in film, and as tends to be the case, a lot of the movies that I really liked didn’t get looked at come award season. Looking at the nominees for this award, you’re going to notice that, as often is the case, the Best Director category is really about epic and epic-adjacent films, while smaller films are ignored. This fact makes the omissions of Robert Eggers for Nosferatu and John M. Chu for Wicked significant misses, and we can put Denis Villeneuve for Dune: Part Two in there as well. On the horror front, Fede Álvarez was overlooked for legitimately bringing back the Alien franchise with Alien: Romulus, and Zoë Kravitz may not (yet) have the sort of heft needed for the harrowing Blink Twice to be taken more seriously. The same is potentially true with Zelda Williams and Lisa Frankenstein, a film that was far better than people give it credit for being. Animated films, like the work of Adam Elliot for Memoir of a Snail and Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow are regularly ignored by the Academy in this category (and in general). For me the biggest misses are Rose Glass’s work on Love Lies Bleeding and Walter Salles for I’m Still Here.
Weeding through the Nominees
5. It should be no shock that I’m removing Emilia Pérez off the top. Of all of these nominations, this is the one that I think clearly doesn’t belong here. No shade on Jaques Audiard in general, but this is not work that I think makes a lot of sense for a nomination. Audiard may have been hampered by this being a musical that really didn’t need to be a musical, but aside from a scene or two (El Mal for instance), there’s not a lot here that I thought was somehow improved by the way in which this story was told. I’d rather see Rose Glass or Robert Eggers here—they deserved this nomination more.
4. For me, Best Director is all about storytelling. Best Director belongs to the person who told their story better than anyone else did. Some of that has to include length and The Brutalist is a film that is far too long for the story it tells. I don’t mind the story and it’s certainly well-produced, but this story could be told just as well with an hour less running time. If you’re telling the story of a guy, do you need that much time? And in that much running time, we don’t get to see the actual architecture for more than just a shot or two? This is self-indulgent and overwrought. Do better (and less), Brady Corbet.
3. Could I say the same thing about James Mangold and A Complete Unknown? I probably could, except for two things: Bob Dylan isn’t a fictional person and Dylan is very much the most important musical and poetic voice of a generation, at least in the U.S. That being the case, I’m happy to offer a little leeway in terms of length. This is a fine movie and I enjoyed it pretty well. I don’t hate this nomination, but this is another case where I think if the list were up to me, I would give the nomination to someone else. I suppose that means that ultimately, I’m pretty disappointed with this category this year.
2. Sean Baker has made a career out of making incisive, heartfelt films about sex workers (Tangerine, Red Rocket, The Florida Project) and their lives, and Anora is more or less the apotheosis of his craft. This is a good movie, one that I genuinely didn’t love because I disliked the characters, but where the story is more important than the individual characters. It is a story that is well-told, though, and that is the heart of this award, at least for me. I don’t hate the fact that Baker won. I just think that there’s a directorial performance that tops his for this year.
My Choice
1. Coralie Fargeat should have won this Oscar, and I think a lot of people know it. For someone who had only made a couple of films before this, the nomination might well be the actual award for her, but The Substance, even as it spins out of control at the end of the film, is still the most interesting storytelling of the year. This is a movie that gets to a point where it becomes almost a farce, and in less sure hands, the final act of this film would be unwatchable. Fargeat keeps it as tight as she possibly could, and I don’t know that this story could be told better. That, for me, is exactly what deserves the statue.
Final Analysis
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