Oscars 2026 Best Director Predictions: Nominees & Winner

Best Director at the Oscars 2026 will pit some of the biggest creatives in Hollywood against each other, and there’s no shortage of contenders a year removed from Sean Baker’s win for Anora. It’s again my pleasure to bring you ScreenRant‘s view of the race and analysis of where things stand.

So far, the best movies of 2025 are a great reminder of all the talented directors working today. We’ve already been treated to new films from filmmakers Bong Joon-ho, Ryan Coogler, Paul Greengrass, Mike Flanagan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle, and Spike Lee.

Not all of them have realistic chances of getting recognized at the 98th Academy Awards, but some of them and their colleagues will be. There are multiple previous Best Director winners in contention again, including two of the three women Best Director Oscar winners.

This sets up an exciting race ahead of nomination morning on January 22, 2026. This is how I see things at this point, but keep checking back, as I will be updating this as the Oscars season continues to unfold.

Commentary and predictions updated on October 29

The Best Director Nomination Frontrunners

Currently, the Best Director race has a few names who appear firmly etched into contention. Factoring in how films have fared in theaters or at festivals, an individual’s Oscar history, and more, here is my current Oscars 2026 Best Director nominations prediction:

Predicting that Paul Thomas Anderson will get an Oscar nomination for his direction of One Battle After Another feels like a foregone conclusion at this point. The response to the movie has been euphoric, and the masterful work bringing his vision to life is a big reason why.

It helps that PTA has a great history with the Academy too. He has three Best Director nominations overall, including getting them for his last two movies: Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza. His lack of Oscar success, though, lingers over this race. That could make him more vulnerable than most suggest right now.

Chloé Zhao, on the other hand, is already a Best Director Oscar winner. She won for Nomadland, which also won Best Picture. This gives her a certain amount of prestige with Academy voters. There doesn’t seem to be a world where she’s not nominated, at the very least.

The rave reviews for Hamnet out of Telluride and TIFF heaped praise on the director’s work. This includes ScreenRant‘s Rachel Labonte saying “Zhao has achieved pure magic” in her 10/10 Hamnet review. Hollywood at large should continue celebrating her achievement.

And so far, they are. The Gotham Award nominations included Zhao and Anderson as Best Director nominees. With the Gothams ability to help shape the race to come, their nominations help eliminate any doubt that they could be overlooked by Academy voters.

That also gives more support to Jafar Panahi, the director of It Was Just an Accident. He was another Gotham nominee. The movie is going to contend for Best International Feature Film as France’s selection. The increasing international membership in the Academy in recent years has brought a director from a Best International Film nominee in six of the last seven years.

If that is going to happen again in 2026, Panahi is as strong a bet as any. It Was Just an Accident was met with great acclaim after debuting at Cannes, winning the Palme d’Or. Adding to his case is Neon’s involvement in the film, as the studio has delivered a Best Director nominee the last three years, including Sean Baker’s win.

Elsewhere, Ryan Coogler is very much in contention for a nomination, and possibly even a win, for Best Director. Sinners is one of the defining films of the year due to how he brought his vision for this thematically layered, brilliantly told, and incredibly entertaining blockbuster to life in an uncompromised form.

Should he get the nomination, as predicted, Coogler would have the chance to become the first Black director to win Best Director at the Oscars. He’d also be just the seventh Black filmmaker to get a nomination in the first place, highlighting once again just how often the Academy has overlooked people of color in its nearly 100-year history.

The newest name on this prediction list is Josh Safdie, the half of the Safdie brothers duo that made Marty Supreme. While his sibling has more prestige from a precursor perspective, the response to Marty Supreme out of the New York Film Festival gave Josh more momentum. Notably, he was not eligible for a Gotham nomination due to the film not being finished in time for consideration.

As more people start to see the film, it will be fascinating to see if Safdie’s position will move higher. He is A24’s best chance at a nomination in the category. A director of an A24 movie has been nominated in Best Director the last three years: The Daniels (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest), and Brady Corbet (The Brutalist).

Directors Still In The Mix

The director category has some room to move as the rest of the award season plays out. The filmmakers attached to the Oscars 2026 Best Picture nominees will get a boost, but there’s also plenty of big-name talent ready to gain a nomination on the strength of their work alone.

Looking strictly at my Best Picture nominee predictions, there are five directors not part of the predicted nominees here. Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein), Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value), Jon M. Chu (Wicked: For Good), James Cameron (Avatar: Fire and Ash), and Clint Bentley (Train Dreams).

Of those names, I’d put Trier, Del Toro, and Chu in the “next five” group who have the most realistic chances of jumping into the race. People have seen Trier and Del Toro’s movies more broadly, while Chu’s work still remains largely embargoed.

Del Toro is a former winner in the category with The Shape of Water, which gives him some extra support. He’s the only major contender in Best Director who has won before, so if there is some debate about the final nominees, his history could give him a major advantage.

Speaking of former winners, I’m not expecting Cameron to earn a nomination. It’s not impossible that one comes to pass, but it would take the Academy embracing Avatar: Fire and Ash on a wider scale than it did with Avatar: The Way of Water, where he wasn’t even nominated.

Image Credit: Abaca Press/INSTARimages

Chu still has some work to do after he was snubbed for Wicked. And while Baumbach has delivered movies that the Academy nominates, his direction hasn’t been recognized previously. That could continue with Jay Kelly, which has stronger contention in Original Screenplay.

Yorgos Lanthimos is another name with Academy history that looks to be on the outs. Bugonia has been well received, but it needs to really pick up momentum if it wants to contend here and beyond.

Curiously, early awards wins for Filho (Best Director at Cannes) and Benny Safdie (Silver Lion at Venice) have not translated to stronger positions in the race. They are both on the outside looking in at the moment, but if one is to be viewed as a sleeper contender, it’d be Filho, as The Secret Agent is in a better spot with the Oscars than The Smashing Machine.

There are other dark-horse contenders lurking that could emerge. Clint Bentley (Train Dreams), Mona Fastvold (The Testament of Ann Lee), Park Chan-wook (No Other Choice), Craig Brewer (Song Sung Blue), and Mary Bronstein (If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You) all just need some recognition to bolster their cases, as Bronstein got with her Gotham nomination.

Unfortunately, the chances for filmmakers like Scott Cooper (Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere) and Kathryn Bigelow (A House of Dynamite) to get nominations are very slim. Neither film landed as strongly as desired. So, unless they gain steam through critics groups, festivals, etc., in the near future, their campaigns could come to a close.

That’s a real fall from grace for Bigelow, who was in the group of predicted nominees previously. But, the wide release revealed major complaints with A House of Dynamite‘s ending, and that negative discourse has potentially killed the movie’s hopes of contention across the board.

Predicted Best Director Winner

Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection

Choosing the winner of Best Director is not a prediction that should be made on its own. Oscar history tells us that there is a strong correlation with Best Picture. The winner of Best Director has been responsible for the Best Picture winning film 72% of the time — or 70 of 97 times. This includes the last three Director winners.

With my current prediction of Hamnet as the Best Picture winner, that logic points to it being wise to select Zhao as my winner in this category. Yet, that’s not what I’m going to do. That’s because the Picture and Director winners coming from the same movie has become slightly less common in the 21st century.

The Oscars have split Best Picture and Best Director nine times since 2000. To put that into some historical perspective, there have been more splits between these categories in the last 25 years than there were in the previous 50 years.

In some of these cases, the Academy has split to give a director an overdue win, such as with Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain, Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity, and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog. That same narrative now exists with Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another.

He’s made movies that have contended for Best Picture and won other Oscars, but he is personally 0 for 11. There’s no sign that he’s slowing down or losing his fastball, so there should still be plenty of opportunities to recognize him in the future. Yet, it’s unbelievable that the guy behind Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread can’t say he’s an Academy Award winner.

I expect PTA to clean up with wins for his directing throughout the award season. The strength of his work, plus the strong narrative, makes him my pick to win Best Director at the Oscars 2026. Only time will tell if he’s able to maintain this spot.

ScreenRant‘s additional Oscars predictions:

8/10

Location

Los Angeles, CA

Dates

March 15, 2026

Website

https://www.oscars.org/