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Best Director: History or Nightmare in the Making

The DGA (which, to be fair, voted before the Globes), got Natalie Portman’s message loud and clear. They made history last week by nominating only two straight Anglo-Saxon dudes, Nolan and McDonagh, alongside a cadre of three people from elsewhere. Greta Gerwig, Jordan Peele, and Guillermo del Toro joined the ranks of a historic group of nominees. The question now is, will the Academy follow suit?

There are very few 5 for 5 matches between the Academy’s and the Directors’ Guild’s lists. One, and sometimes more (as in the year of Argo), tend to be off. So who will miss? McDonagh and Del Toro seem impossibly safe given that their movies are so safe too. Gerwig’s film has also not missed out on essentially any guild, and the same may be said for Peele. Really, you could argue it will be Nolan that will miss. Still, his movie is a directorial achievement and some of the other ones may be viewed as “smaller.” Could McDonagh miss? It is a hard category to handicap. What of Dee Rees for Mudbound?

Frankly, this could be the year they match 5/5 again.

Best Picture: What We Really Do and Don’t Know

For a couple of years now, we have been using a highly unscientific chart to predict who will get Best Picture nominations. It is highly subjective and inherently unreliable on its face because it is based on assigning arbitrary values to different precursors, because it includes bodies with zero overlap with the Academy such as the Globes, and because it omits guilds like the sound editors or the VFX artists that do have common membership. And there are other reasons, which you can see immediately.

But the chart has nevertheless done well two years in a row. Last year, all the movies with a higher than 40% chance got in. Not a single one was missing in either direction, and that is pretty good. The year prior, the chart gave room almost zero chances of showing up (because, amongst its flaws, it does not assign points to the TIFF People’s Choice, which is essentially a Best Picture guarantee). Instead, it give the higher chance to the scandalously omitted Straight Outta Compton, which itself was problematic for the Academy.

This year, the chart (at the end of the article) is helpful but it is also in some trouble. It shows what we already know, which is that there are three movies (Lady Bird, Get Out, Three Billboards) that have a Best Picture nomination in a deadly lock. Lady Bird’s tally is amazing, including nods from guilds such as art directors and costume designers, not exactly the ones you’d expect this high school dramedy to show up in. Like Get Out, its one blemish is missing out at BAFTA. Three Billboards has also done extremely well, with the WGA lack of nomination due to ineligibility knocking it down a notch (another flaw in the model).

In fourth place is Shape of Water, which is also a lock but whose lack of SAG ensemble nomination slows it down a bit. But no one is really worried about it. And that is why those four are such strong Best Director candidates as well.

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