Now I wonder what the overlap is between the various guilds' nominees and the Academy's nominees tend to be (what with Academy members who belong to particular fields choosing the nominees for those fields - game recognize game and all that).
For the DGA as an example you can be sure that nearly every single member of the Directors Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is also a member of the DGA. But the Directors Guild of America also includes directors of television, commercials, documentaries, and videos so their pool of members is much, much larger and contains many who will never be on the Academy's voting rolls. As of 2018 there were 512 members of the Directors Branch of the Academy, out of 7,258 total Academy members. The Directors Guild of America has around 18,000 members.
Even with that disparity in numbers the five DGA nominees and five Oscar nominees for Best Director are very similar, usually differing by one spot but rarely more than that. And the DGA Award is by far the most accurate predictor of who will win the corresponding Oscar compared to other Guild awards. The PGA (Producers Guild of America) is also a pretty strong correlator to the Best Picture winner. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Writers Guild of America (WGA), and American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) all have annual year-end awards, there is plenty of overlap with the Oscars, but they are never all identical and nothing is infallible as a predictor.
In the previous nine awards seasons the five DGA and five Oscar nominees for Best Director never matched exactly. In seven of those nine there was only one difference. The other two years had three differences once and a pair the other in their ballots. But the two bodies have had the same winner in all but one of those years. The one that didn't match being the anomaly of the DGA winner (Ben Affleck for
Argo) not even being nominated by The Academy (Ang Lee won that year for
Life of Pi) and also the year with three differences on the ballot. That is very, very rare. Last year's crop was the one with two differences on the ballots: the DGA nominated Alfonso Cuarón (
Roma), Bradley Cooper (
A Star is Born), Peter Farrelly (
Green Book), Spike Lee (
BlackKklansman), and Adam McKay (
Vice) while the Oscars had Cuarón, Lee, and McKay but nominated Yorgos Lanthimos (
The Favourite) and Paweł Pawlikowski (
Cold War) in favor of Cooper and Farrelly. Alfonso Cuarón won both awards.
The odds are the five Oscar nominees will NOT be exactly the same as the five DGA nominees. Since 1980 they have only matched all five nominees four times: 1981 (Warren Beatty won both awards for
Reds), 1998 (Spielberg won both for
Saving Private Ryan), 2005 (Ang Lee won both for
Brokeback Mountain), and 2009 (Kathryn Bigelow won both for
The Hurt Locker). If I had to guess I would say Mendes, Scorsese, and Tarantino are locks for Oscar spots, Bong Joon-Ho is a near lock, and Taika Waititi likely won't make the Oscar cut. Greta Gerwig (
Little Women) or Noah Baumbach (
Marriage Story) would be my guess as to who takes that fifth spot with The Safdie Brothers (
Uncut Gems) or Todd Phillips (
Joker) hanging around the margins to vault in. If Terrence Malick (
A Hidden Life) or Pedro Almodóvar (
Pain & Glory) were to have their names called it woulnd't be a total shock as they are well respected former nominees in this category, but I don't see them making it this time (though both made great films). Waititi is one of my favorite directors,
Jojo Rabbit was a delight, and I am hoping against hope he makes the Academy cut. But I don't think it's likely.
We'll know Monday morning