15 Best Director contenders for the 2024 Oscars

After not making the cut in the Best Director category for his debut, A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper has a better chance this time around for Maestro, based on the life of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (whom Cooper also plays in the film). Rather than attempting to broadly cover Bernstein’s life story, the film narrows the scope of its focus to Bernstein’s relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan). A lot of the Oscar conversation surrounding Maestro so far has been about the performances, but Cooper’s deft direction puts him in contention in this category too. Should he be nominated for both acting and directing in the same year, he would become the 16th actor to do so in Oscars history. Only two men have managed to win two awards in one year: Lawrence Oliver for Hamlet in 1949 and Roberto Benini for Life Is Beautiful in 1999.

A late entry into the Oscar race this year, The Iron Claw is poised to become a bit of a surprise disruptor. The film tells the true story of the Von Erich wrestling family, who experienced a series of unthinkable tragedies on their way to glory. The premise doesn’t quite fit the mold of uplifting sports stories the Academy tends to honor. Still, it’s generating buzz based on strong performances, especially from Zac Efron as Kevin Von Erich, and for its dual appeal to both die-hard wrestling fans, and indie film aficionados. Director Sean Durkin, who occupies the space in the middle of the Venn diagram depicting the two factions, may not be a household name to the general public, but he’s become well known in directing circles for his acclaimed films Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest. That may be enough to earn him recognition in the form of a nomination this year.

Spanning multiple decades and cultures, Origin follows the journey of journalist and writer Isabel Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis), as she researches the book that will eventually become Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the inspiration for the film. It’s an interesting, ouroboros-like approach to adapting challenging source material, and it makes for some emotional storytelling. The film is reportedly testing very well with audiences, even better than Parasite, another Neon release that went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars in 2020. DuVernay herself has some experience on the awards circuit. In 2014, her film Selma was nominated for Best Picture, though she wasn’t nominated for directing that year. The Academy made up for that infamous snub with a nomination in 2017 for her documentary 13th, making DuVernay the first Black woman to be nominated for directing a feature film. That said, Origin won’t be expanding to a wide audience until January 19, so it will have less time to build momentum than other releases in the race this year.

Emerald Fennell’s sticky black comedy Saltburn, which she also wrote, drips with acid and debauchery. Part Brideshead Revisited (she even name checks Evelyn Waugh), part The Talented Mr. Ripley, it turns the recent trend of eat-the-rich movies on its head. With its focus on obsession and poisoned relationships, Saltburn feels like a spiritual follow-up to Fennell’s first film as a writer-director, 2020’s Promising Young Woman, which earned her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. She certainly gets some impressive performances from her talented cast, including Barry Keoghan as an Oxford student who befriends a wealthy and charismatic classmate (Jacob Elordi), and Rosamund Pike as the aristocratic matriarch who welcomes him into her stately household. The film is challenging and deliberately provocative, featuring some transgressive moments sequences you’ll likely be hearing about in the coming months. Whether they prove too much for Academy voters remains an open question.

Barbie probably didn’t need to do much campaigning for the Oscars, but Warner Bros. is giving it a big push anyway, with a series of screenings, appearances, and interview opportunities just for Academy voters. Though we fully expect it to be among the 10 films nominated for Best Picture this year, its best chances for a win will be in the technical categories like production design, costumes, and editing. It’s not a stretch to say that director Greta Gerwig also has a chance of landing in the Best Director category, as she’s the driving force behind everything that made the movie so much better and more meaningful than it had any right to be. In the hands of anyone else, Barbie would have been a very different, and arguably less transcendent, experience.

If last year’s trend was maximalism (Everything Everywhere, Elvis, Avatar) this year we may see the pendulum swing in the other direction. Take The Zone Of Interest, for example. It’s a stark, minimal historical drama set during World War II in which the horrors of that era are only alluded to as background noise. Literally. The bare-bones story follows the ordinary lives of a German family going about their daily business in a protected compound right next door to Auschwitz. The camp is so close you can hear the faint sounds of human suffering just beyond the walls (the film’s sound design is one of its most impressive aspects), but director Jonathan Glazer (Birth, Under The Skin) refrains from depicting any of that on screen. Instead, he puts the audience in the position of voyeurs, observing the domestic life of the characters while knowing that not far away the patriarch of this family is committing atrocities as commandant of the camp. The film earned accolades at Cannes earlier this year, taking home the Grand Prix award and a prize from the International Federation of Film Critics.

Although Todd Haynes has been steadily delivering critically acclaimed films for years, he has yet to receive an Oscar nomination for directing (his only nod to date was for the screenplay for Far From Heaven). He’s arguably overdue, and his latest film, May December, was a highlight of the summer film festival circuit, generating enough heat to carry it into awards season with favorable odds. Natalie Portman gives a dauntless performance as an actress who injects herself into the life of the complicated woman she plans to portray (played by Julianne Moore) in a movie based on her true story. Haynes deals with contemporary, sometimes uncomfortable topics, with a humor that straddles the line between melodrama and camp, allowing the audience to draw its own conclusions. And the conclusion some critics have come to is that May December is one of the best films of the year.

First-time director (and one-time Gawker editor) Cord Jefferson brings the sensibilities that made him an award-winning TV writer to one of the year’s sharpest comedies, American Fiction. The film, based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, is about an English professor (played by likely Oscar nominee Jeffrey Wright) who becomes frustrated with the literary world’s centering of stereotypical Black books and writes one of his own under a pseudonym as a joke. When the book becomes a bestseller he gets drawn into an increasingly complicated web of lies, while simultaneously dealing with his own family drama. Jefferson’s confident debut shows an affinity for tone and structure that makes him a legitimate contender in a race full of seasoned veterans this year. Expect to hear more about this well-received film as the race heats up.

There’s no one working in Hollywood today, or anywhere else in the industry, quite like filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. He lives in his own world, a wild alternate reality of imagination and style, and brings the rest of us into that world through his films. Poor Things, the latest journey into the mind of this mad genius director, is masterfully crafted and delightfully surreal. Bolstered by a career-high performance from Emma Stone in the lead role of Bella Baxter, a Victorian woman brought back from the dead, it follows her quest of self discovery and sexual liberation. Lanthimos extends the narrative theme of experimentation to the formal elements of the film, combining color with black and white footage and using an array of lenses to change the audience’s point of view from scene to scene. His previous film, The Favourite, garnered 10 Academy Award nominations in 2019, including Best Picture and Best Director, and the reception for Poor Things so far has been just as enthusiastic, so it’s reasonable to expect it will also be a major player this year.

Whether or not he receives an Oscar nomination for directing this year (which would be his second after The Insider), the fact that Michael Mann is still making high-octane films at the age of 80 without any sign of slowing down is worthy of recognition. Ferrari is more of a biopic than a car movie, though it’s clear Mann has an appreciation for both the legendary sports car brand and its eponymous creator. The film is set during a time of personal and professional turmoil for Enzo Ferrari, played by Adam Driver, whose passion for the dangerous sport of auto racing becomes the crux of the action. Both Driver’s involvement and the Italian flavor have drawn comparisons to 2021’s House Of Gucci, but with Mann at the helm this is a very different beast. He stages the film’s incredible and harrowing action scenes as if he’s got something to prove.

From the moment Oppenheimer was announced, it was pretty obvious Christopher Nolan made it with the Academy in mind. If ever a film screamed “Oscar bait” with its whole chest, it’s this one. That probably won’t hurt its chances, though. Even with all the other films that have been released since its premiere back in July, Oppenheimer is still topping lists of the best films of the year. As a comprehensive biography of the father of the atomic bomb, its enormous scale is undeniably effective. With a massive, all-star cast led by Cillian Murphy and featuring Robert Downey Jr. and Matt Damon in supporting roles (any of whom could receive nominations of their own for their performances), the term “tour de force” has been frequently evoked in conversations about the film. If Oppenheimer isn’t one of the most nominated films of the year, regardless of whether it wins anything, it’ll be considered a major snub.

When talking about The Holdovers in interviews this year, Alexander Payne has been insistent that he didn’t start out to make a period film set in 1970, but a film that looks as though it was actually made in 1970. That may be a distinction without a difference, but if he intended to give The Holdovers the feel of watching a lost classic from the likes of Hal Ashby or his late ’70s contemporaries, then Payne has succeeded here. Based on an original script by David Hemingson (making it one of the few films that Payne has directed but didn’t write), it takes place over winter break at a prestigious boarding school for boys. Paul Giamatti, who worked with Payne previously on Sideways, stars in this three-hander as a caustic, unpopular teacher who takes on the responsibility of staying on at the school during the holiday closure. He’s joined by the head cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and a single troublesome student (newcomer Dominic Sessa). As he usually does, Payne explores the humanity in his characters, contrasting a surface coldness (both literal and figurative) with unexpected warmth. Payne already has two Oscars, for his screenplays for Sideways and The Descendants, but the Best Director honor has eluded him so far.

Every Oscar category has its sure bets, and when it comes to the award for direction the safest prediction this year is Martin Scorsese for Killers Of The Flower Moon. It’s hard to imagine a world in which he doesn’t score his 10th nomination for Best Director, putting him ahead of Steven Spielberg, who’s holding steady with nine (the all-time record is still held by the late William Wyler, with 12). The film has been hailed as Scorsese’s best in years, proving that even at the age of 81 he’s still capable of epic feats of filmmaking. Based on the true story of the systematic massacre of a community of oil-rich Osage citizens in the 1920s it stars two of Scorsese’s favorite collaborators, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. Native-American actress Lily Gladstone has also been turning heads for her performance in the film. But the bulk of the acclaim has been reserved for Scorsese, and will almost certainly translate into plenty of awards recognition for the renowned director.

Speaking of renowned directors, Ridley Scott also has to be considered in strong contention this year for his historical drama Napoleon. Despite a crowded race with many talented artists and critical favorites, you can’t count out the combination of a big-name director and a biopic that’s also partly a war film (two of the Academy’s favorite genres). And with four-time Oscar nominee Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role of the most famous military commander in history, it could be a winning formula that results in multiple nominations. The $200 million-budgeted film hasn’t been quite as successful with audiences at the box office, possibly due to its streaming availability on Apple TV+, but profitability has seldom correlated with awards recognition. There’s also the argument that Scott’s approach to filmmaking is decidedly traditional, something that may not be as appealing to audiences as it is to Academy voters.

It’s always exciting when a new filmmaker appears on the scene with a talent that makes it seem as if they’ve been directing for years. That’s the case with Celine Song, who wrote and directed one of the year’s most surprising hits, Past Lives. Critics have been talking about this romantic drama since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and the conversations have never really stopped. It’s a rare achievement that a film so attuned to a specific cultural experience can also feel so universal. Greta Lee gives an outstanding performance as a writer who reconnects with her Korean roots when a childhood friend from her past (Teo Yoo) comes back into her life. Song’s lyrical, restrained contemplation of identity, destiny, and the winding paths of circumstance that lead us to the lives we build for ourselves has already earned quite a few awards and recognition this year. So an Oscar nomination doesn’t seem all that far-fetched at this point.