Oscars 2015: who will win best director?

Conventional Oscar wisdom has it that the best director award goes hand-in-hand with the night’s top prize: “How can the best-directed film not be the best film?” is the question asked by many, and while such an argument undersells the contribution of writers, producers and many others to the finished product, category statistics prove the Academy usually feels the same way.

For the past two years running, however, that logic has been upended – Ang Lee and Alfonso Cuarón the beneficiaries of the first consecutive splitting of the awards since 1951/52. You have to go back to the 1930s to find three mismatches in a row, but in a season where key precursor awards (including last weekend’s Baftas and Directors Guild of America awards) have demonstrated significant differences in opinion, such an outcome seems entirely possible.

Back in the simpler days of five best picture nominees – was this age of innocence only six years ago? – the so-called “lone director” slot was a near-annual fixture on the ballot: the film-maker sufficiently admired by his directing peers to land a nomination, but whose film wasn’t universally pleasing enough to crack the list. The expansion of the field has since allowed such lesser-loved films into the top race, but the Academy drew the line at Bennett Miller’s icy, inconclusive masculinity-in-crisis drama Foxcatcher. That omission wasn’t surprising; that Miller made it, becoming the first “lone director” nominee since Julian Schnabel in 2008, was an outright shock. (They both won best director in Cannes, for whatever that’s worth.) A welcome one, however, in this critic’s book: A previous nominee for Capote, Miller exerts immaculate control over the form and tone of this slippery story, drawing uniformly startling performances from a diverse ensemble, and balancing potentially hoary symbolism on a knife edge. Also the only nominee here unrecognised by the DGA, he’s coming in last, but shouldn’t be.

Certainly not behind Morten Tyldum, the proficient Norwegian making his English-language debut with The Imitation Game. His is the nomination that has met with the most critical resistance: he supervises good work from able actors, and consistently keeps the camera from falling down, but otherwise, there’s nary a directorial choice in this largely televisual biopic that couldn’t have been made by Alan Turing’s prototype computer. Even Bafta held back, nominating Whiplash upstart Damien Chazelle in Tyldum’s place, but one underestimates Harvey Weinstein’s campaign clout with the Academy at one’s own peril. He’s not winning, but consider this nod a green light for Hollywood to hand the Headhunters helmer a stream of spit-and-polish for-hire projects.

On to the three bona fide auteurs in the race, beginning with the one least likely to triumph here, despite across-the-board affection for his film. As discussed in the best original screenplay breakdown, it’s taken Wes Anderson eight films across 19 years to receive an unqualified invitation into the Academy’s club: after a couple of place-holding mentions in the writing and animated film categories, The Grand Budapest Hotel is his first film to land him in the best director circle. Given the highly distinctive, highly conspicuous intricacy of his technique, it’s perhaps surprising that it’s taken this long; given the strenuously serious-minded Academy’s frequent aversion to choux-pastry diversions, perhaps it’s not. Still, while Michel Hazanavicius proved three years ago that Oscar voters can appreciate the directorial vision behind a retro romp, they’re likelier to reward Anderson for writing; it’s telling that Bafta was sufficiently enamoured of his film to hand it a night-leading five trophies, but not this one.

Instead, Anderson lost again to the man who has repeatedly beaten him to the punch throughout the season – follow indie-outsider-made-good Richard Linklater. With the Bafta, the Golden Globe, a Berlin Silver Bear and a groaning shelfload of critics’ prizes, Linklater is handily the year’s most lavishly honoured director, which is to be expected, given the conceptual daring and committed follow-through of Boyhood, the coming-of-age tale that was (as if it needs to be repeated by this point) 12 years in the making. There has even been talk (idiotic talk, but talk nonetheless) of resentful industry folk claiming an unfair advantage on Linklater’s part, given that he had years, and not mere months, to hone his pet project. There can’t be enough faulty logic within the Academy for that to damage his chances; likelier is that a sizeable faction of tradition-bound voters simply don’t get the fuss about Linklater’s low-key, narratively loose opus. Still, he’s been on the scene, producing a broad range of work within the studio and arthouse spheres, for over 25 years, with only a pair of writing nominations from the Academy until now. Many in the business think it’s his time.

Not enough, however, for Linklater to beat Alejandro González Iñárritu at Saturday’s Directors Guild of America awards, traditionally the most accurate bellwether of Oscar victory in the category. Only seven times in 67 years has the DGA winner not been echoed by the Academy, though over half those exceptions have come in the last two decades. Iñárritu’s victory caught a few pundits off guard, but wasn’t as unexpected as it would been a fortnight ago, before Birdman flew off with top honours from the Producers’ and Screen Actors’ Guilds. And you’d be hard pressed to deny the directorial verve of Iñárritu’s work in the backstage drama: like Boyhood, it’s a high-wire novelty item, though its artificial one-take conceit lends it a lot more flash and dazzle. Thus have the lines been drawn, with Linklater the clear critics’ choice and Iñárritu (the lone previous nominee in this category, for Babel) favoured by his awed peers. Bafta, however, blurred the picture last night with a rallying victory for the former; this one’s going down to the wire, but it seems the Mexican may just follow his friend and compatriot, Gravity champ Alfonso Cuarón, to the podium.

Will win: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Should win: Richard Linklater

Hey, where’s ... Ava DuVernay? In the #OscarsSoWhite hysteria that followed last month’s nominations announcement, much was made of the Academy failing to hand its what would have been a history-making nomination to a black female film-maker. Demographics, however, are a secondary concern: it’s DuVernay’s formally vibrant, sociologically astute direction of Selma that deserved the nod, not her skin colour.