Oscars 2025 Best Director Nominees & Predicted Winner

The Best Director nominees for the Oscars 2025 include some of Hollywood’s rising voices hoping to secure their first win. The 2025 awards season has a very different group of contenders for Best Director compared to 2024. While Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan were the top two choices to win, this new year is a more wide-open competition. Big-time directors like Denis Villeneuve and Ridley Scott missed out on nominations, leaving the 2025 Best Director Oscar nominees to be Sean Baker (Anora), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), James Mangold (A Complete Unknown), Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), and Coralie Fargeat (The Substance).

Predicting the Best Director winner is not a task that exists in a vacuum, as nominations for all categories at the Oscars 2025 play a role in figuring out which movies are rising to the top. It’s often the heavyweight contenders that bring the director into the Best Director race. That adds attention to 2025’s Best Picture nominated movies. The results speak for themselves. Every Best Director nominee comes from a Best Picture nominee, while each of the directors is a first-time nominee themselves. That creates an open race as we look to predict the winner.

5

Coralie Fargeat – The Substance

Fargeat Is The 9th Women Ever Nominated For Best Director

Coralie Fargeat did what seemed impossible months ago and snagged a Best Director Oscar nomination for The Substance. Her nomination helps show how the Oscars are continuing to evolve in modern times. There is a poor track record historically of the Academy Awards nominating women for Best Director, as it’s only happened nine times with eight different women – as Jane Campion has two nominations. A woman has only won Best Director twice at the Oscars, too. Fargeat becomes the ninth woman nominated in the category.

This nomination comes after The Substance did well with critics and audiences; it’s now performed better than imagined with awards season voters. She may have lost the Golden Globe already, but the nomination is still big. She’s also got BAFTA and Critics’ Choice Awards nominations so far this season. All three bolster her position in the Best Director race. It’s even more noteworthy that she got the nomination, considering she was overlooked at DGA.

Fargeat’s miss at DGA didn’t prevent the nomination, but it may hold back her chance to win. There’s only been one Best Director Oscar winner who did not have a DGA nomination. Furthermore, there are only eight instances where the DGA winner did not win Best Director at the Oscars. Since Fargeat is the only Best Director Oscar nominee without a DGA nomination, there’s practically no world where she win. Still, the fact that the director a female-driven body-horror film could get this Oscar nomination is worth celebrating.

4

James Mangold – A Complete Unknown

Mangold Gets His First Director Oscar Nomination

James Mangold emerged late in the season to snag the first Best Director Oscar nomination of his career for A Complete Unknown. His nomination is an obvious sign of how much the Academy likes and respects the work he and all involved in the Bob Dylan biopic accomplished. This is arguably a long overdue Best Director Oscar nomination for Mangold, as movies like Ford v Ferrari, Logan, and Walk the Line garnered awards nominations for several areas – just not his direction.

Still, Mangold’s nomination comes as a bit of a surprise considering how far behind he appeared to be in the race thanks to various precursors. His only notable nomination for direction before the Oscars was with the DGA. He’s otherwise been mostly recognized for his A Complete Unknown screenplay. This limited visibility on his directing would have seemingly hurt his chances at an Oscar nomination, but the votes went another way.

That creates a lot of mystery regarding Mangold’s true standing in the race. If he doesn’t win the DGA, there’s likely no world where he wins the Oscar. However, if Mangold wins at DGA, he would quickly become the favorite to win the Oscar. That is not an outcome I’m ready to predict at the moment, as it would suggest A Complete Unknown could do much better at the Oscars across the board than expected.

3

Jacques Audiard – Emilia Pérez

Emilia Pérez Is A Major Oscars Contender

Following Emilia Pérez‘s debut at Cannes and getting acquired by Netflix, the movie picked up steam through Telluride and Toronto showings before it debuted on the streaming service in November. A lot of attention has gone towards the work of the three leading women, but Audiard’s direction has not gone unnoticed, putting him squarely in the mix for Best Director at the Oscars 2025. The bold approach he took to blending genres, shooting scenes, and getting terrific performances out of his cast are all reasons he could get in.

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Audiard currently does not have a lot of precursors that help point toward him edging out the competition for a win, nor does he have a strong history with the Academy. His film The Prophet was nominated for Best International Feature Film in 2010, but his directing was not directly recognized. His nominations with Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, BAFTA Awards, and DGA Awards all paved the way for his Oscar nomination. And with Emilia Pérez‘s 13 Oscar nominations, he is an obvious choice to win if the musical sweeps through the ceremony.

Netflix’s success in the category can help Audiard too. The streamer is responsible for getting Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón, and David Fincher nominations in Best Director before; Campion and Cuarón even won. Emilia Pérez was Netflix’s best chance to win Best Picture since it started chasing awards wins a decade ago. While that was expected to benefit Audiard’s position in the race, the various Emilia Pérez controversies have set the film back, hurting his opportunity to win in the process.

2

Brady Corbet – The Brutalist

Won The Silver Lion At Venice

Brady Corbet received his first Oscar nomination in 2025 thanks to his work on The Brutalist. Overseeing a historical epic with a runtime well over three hours is no easy task, but Corbet navigated the story well and executed it in a way that is not overbearing for audiences. It’s a very different movie than Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon, but both movies are recent examples of the Academy applauding the work of a director on a sprawling epic, so perhaps Corbet can follow in Nolan and Scorsese’s footsteps.

In terms of his résumé for winning, Brady Corbet already has a potential leg up on his competition thanks to the Venice Film Festival. The Brutalist‘s release at the festival led to a nomination for the Golden Lion, but Corbet won the Silver Lion – Venice’s version of Best Director. Even though no other Venice nominees got Oscar nominations, it remains an early season win for him. However, only one director has won the Silver Lion and then got a Best Director nomination: Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog.

The biggest boost for Corbet came after winning the Golden Globe for Best Director. However, that was before The Brutalist‘s AI controversy. He fell short of winning at DGA and Critics Choice following the development. The former loss is more substantial for Corbet’s chances to win Best Director, as the DGA is a historically great precursor for the Oscars. A win at BAFTA could help give him a final push before Oscars voting is over, especially if The Brutalist has lost its Best Picture frontrunner status.

Even if that does not happen, there is a world where Corbet can still beat the current predicted frontrunner. The Academy does split Best Picture and Best Director about 30% of the time. Since 2000, the categories go to different movies nearly 38% of the time, with The Power of the Dog, The Revenant, and Gravity among those to win Best Director. Most of those titles are more technically impressive films for a director than what won Best Picture. The Brutalist fits that same bill, so it could be an exception to the overall Academy trend.

1

Sean Baker – Anora

He Directed A Best Picture Frontrunner

Anora is a frontrunner for the Best Picture win at the Oscars 2025, so it should not come as a surprise that director Sean Baker is seriously in contention for Best Director. He’s been on the cusp of awards contention for a few years now, thanks to movies like Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket. But after those movies only got one Oscar nomination between them, Anora is the movie that the Academy took more seriously. It earned six nominations, including Sean Baker in Best Director.

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The case for Sean Baker’s possible win largely relied on Anora‘s standing in Oscar circles and a rather important win at Cannes for a long time. Anora won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize. This is notable because the directors of four of the previous five Palme d’Or winning movies have now got Best Director Oscar nominations: Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness), Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall), and now Baker. However, Bong Joon-ho was the only one to win Best Director at the Oscars. Can Sean Baker do the same? It’s possible.

Baker’s odds to win jumped up thanks to his surprise win at DGA. The DGAs and Oscars almost always have the same Best Director winner, as they’ve only differed eight times, with the last instance coming in 2020 when Sam Mendes won the DGA for 1917 but Bong Joon-ho won for Parasite at the Oscars. The support that Baker has from his fellow directors and the overall great performance Anora had at DGA, PGA, and Critics Choice are good signs that he will go on to claim the Academy Award.

Another reason why he could win is due to Anora being the predicted Best Picture winner. The Oscar winners for Best Director and Best Picture have matched movies three out of the last five years, including the last two years with Everything Everywhere All At Once and Oppenheimer. Overall, the winners match 69 out of 96 times; that’s a 71% match rate. Now that he has Critics Choice and DGA wins, with BAFTA still to be determined, Sean Baker is in the lead for the Oscars victory for Best Director.