How To Predict the Best Director Oscar Nominations

If there's one Oscar category you can count on to send shockwaves on nominations morning, it's Best Director. Be it for Denis Villeneuve’s two Dune snubs or Ruben Östlund’s shocking nomination for Triangle of Sadness, it seems like every year the directors branch throws us a curveball.

Let’s take a look back at the biggest shocks in the category over the last decade to see if we can find any patterns or trends to help us predict who the nominees will be on nominations morning on January 22nd, 2026.

How to predict a snub in Best Director

To figure out who the Academy tends to snub and who they tend to nominate in their stead, we have to first identify which directors were expected to receive a nomination and which weren’t. We’ll base this on what major precursors they were nominated for (those being Directors Guild Awards, BAFTA, Critics Choice and Golden Globes). The following are the directors who were nominated for at least three of the four major precursors but failed to get the Best Director nomination (the “snubs”) over the last decade.

Among the eight biggest snubs in this category over the last decade, half of them were snubbed by BAFTA as well. It’s worth noting that between 2021 and 2024, a jury voted on the BAFTA nominees; as of last season, only the longlist is voted on by a jury, with the nominees voted on by all BAFTA voters. How the absence of jury nominations will impact future ceremonies is unclear, but during the jury years, 60% of Best Director Oscar nominees were nominated at BAFTA as well, a similar rate to pre-jury.

Another trend worth looking at is the lack of commercial blockbusters nominated in this category at the Oscars. Only four films with a budget exceeding $100 million over the last decade have been nominated for Best Director ( Killers of the Flower Moon, The Revenant, The Irishman, and Mad Max: Fury Road ). If we expand the field to include films that had a budget of exactly $100 million, the number goes up to nine (including 1917, Oppenheimer, and West Side Story). But these big-budget films are not necessarily your typical blockbuster. Among these nine films, only Mad Max: Fury Road fits the bill as a commercial blockbuster; the rest could be considered expensive awards bait. To illustrate this point, below is a list of all Best Picture nominees of the last decade that had a budget over $100 million.

Interestingly, the most awards-baity of the big budget films nominated for Best Picture were all also nominated for Director. And as stated before, Mad Max is the only commercial blockbuster to receive a Director nomination in the last decade. What this shows is that the directors branch is seldom eager to nominate the directors of commercial blockbuster films. This could explain why Christopher Nolan, for example, didn’t get nominations for the likes of Inception or The Dark Knight, but did for period war dramas Oppenheimer and Dunkirk.

Otherwise, it’s hard to find similarities between the eight big snubs. Farrelly, Cooper, and Sorkin may have been sneered at by the directors branch for moving towards awards bait filmmaking (Farrelly was mostly known for his low-brow comedies, Sorkin for his writing, and Cooper for his acting), but in the cases of Green Book and The Trial of the Chicago 7 specifically, the direction doesn’t exactly stand out. We’ve seen the likes of Todd Phillips and Jordan Peele get nominated before, but perhaps the branch appreciated the distinct visual styles of Joker and Get Out. The snubs for Cooper, Berger, and McDonagh, however, are more challenging to reason with. Perhaps it's more important to look at who they were competing with, and why those options stood out to the Academy more.

How to predict a surprise in Best Director

To identify the biggest surprise nominees for Best Director over the last decade, here’s the table for the nominees who were nominated for one or no major precursors.

Among the nine biggest surprise nominees identified, only Mangold was a DGA nominee. The odds of finding the branch’s next surprise among the DGA lineup is low, but Mangold being the most recent entry could signify the start of a new trend. For now, though, it might be safe to consider it an anomaly.

Five of the nine directors were nominated by BAFTA, and of those five, all of them directed foreign-language films: Pawlikowski, Vinterberg, Hamaguchi, Triet, and Glazer. This means that every time the Academy went with a director of a foreign-language film as a dark horse in this category, they were first nominated for a BAFTA. Six of the nine films (notably, all five international features plus Triangle of Sadness) were among the Official Selection at Cannes.

Which leads to another interesting stat: 11 out of the 14 times BAFTA nominated a Cannes-competing director over the last decade, the Academy followed suit. The four exception were Ken Loach (I, Daniel Blake), Todd Haynes (Carol), Julia Ducornau (Titane), and Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave). Out of these four, only Carol was nominated in any other category at the Oscars. No Best Picture nominee that competed for the Palme d’Or in the last decade (out of ten total) has failed to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars.

What this means for 2026

Unfortunately, this season, the BAFTA nominations come out after the Oscars’, so the BAFTA-Cannes correlation won’t be of much use to us in January. You can bypass BAFTA, though, and look to your Best Picture predictions. This year, both Sentimental Value and It Was Just an Accident have a good chance at getting into Best Picture, according to Awards Expert users, and both films competed for the Palme d’Or. If either Trier or Panahi miss the Director lineup, they’ll be the first director since Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!), all the way back in 2002, to compete in Cannes and get their film a Best Picture nomination without being nominated for Best Director as well. For this stat to work in your favour, though, you have to be right about your Best Picture predictions, which was not the case for many the year Triangle of Sadness snuck in.

When looking for this year’s “surprise”, Panahi is currently just outside the top five according to our community predictions, but It Was Just an Accident is firmly in the top ten for Picture. Based on the Cannes stat, he looks to be a fair bet. Unfortunately for fans of Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice did not compete in Cannes. If Park were to be nominated, he’d be the first director of an international film to get a Director nomination without competing for the Palme d’Or since Fernando Meirelles for City of God back in 2003 (excluding the likes of Slumdog Millionaire, Minari, and Letters From Iwo Jima, which are all by American or English directors). And even then, City of God did premiere at Cannes, but wasn’t eligible to compete for the Palme due to Meirelles being in the jury.

Looking at who might be this year’s snub, we, again, can’t utilize the BAFTA nominations to help with our predictions. However, the stat regarding the lack of commercial blockbusters in this category could point towards Ryan Coogler being left out this season. Currently in third for Best Director among Awards Expert users, Sinners’ budget is currently estimated to be between $90-100 million, and it certainly belongs into the commercial category as opposed to the Oscar bait one (complimentary). Coogler would have to follow in the footsteps ofGeorge Miller, James Cameron, and Peter Jackson to direct a big-budget blockbuster and get into the Best Director lineup. One Battle After Another cost well over $100 million, but as we’ve seen with The Revenant, Killers of the Flower Moon , and The Irishman, the branch will nominate big-budget films if they are by beloved auteur directors making awards-friendly films.

For that reason, I have Paul Thomas Anderson firmly in my predictions for Best Director. I don’t believe Chloé Zhao has much in common with the directors who’ve been snubbed over the last decade, which makes me believe she’ll get in as well. Of course, Hamnet could be this year’s Three Billboards or Conclave, but the fact that she’s won before, and that she has a far more recognizable and distinct visual style compared to Berger and McDonagh, make me doubt this to be the case. Based on the Cannes stat, I can’t ignore Panahi and Trier; I would place them both in my top five. If the remaining contenders are Park Chan-wook, Josh Safdie, and Ryan Coogler, Safdie is the only one that doesn’t break any of the trends outlined in this article (70M budget, but awards friendly), and thus I’d predict him for my fifth spot. Of course, we won’t know where the momentum for each director will lie until the precursors come around. If Safdie only gets a Critics Choice nomination, for example, I’ll consider him donezo.