Oscar's Best Director 2020

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Oscar's Best Director 2020 is...
26.92%
7 votes
Bong Joon-Ho, PARASITE
46.15%
12 votes
Sam Mendes, 1917
7.69%
2 votes
Todd Phillips, JOKER
7.69%
2 votes
Martin Scorsese, THE IRISHMAN
11.54%
3 votes
Quentin Tarantino, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
26 votes. You may not vote on this poll






Same Mendes won the DGA Award last night making him the prohibitive favorite to win the Oscar for Best Director. Of all the guilds and other awards shows nothing is as reliable a predictor as to who will win the corresponding Academy Award as the Directors Guild of America. Since 1950 these two awards have not matched only seven times. Seven out of sixty-eight is 90%. Some of these "predictors" from other shows and ceremonies hover much closer to 50% and 60% accuracy. Don't bet against the DGA.

Of those seven discrepancies in nearly seven decades three were even stranger anomalies in that the DGA winner wasn't even nominated for the Oscar. Those were Steven Spielberg for The Color Purple (Sydney Pollack won the Oscar for Out of Africa), Ron Howard for Apollo 13 (Mel Gibson won the Oscar for Braveheart), and Ben Affleck for Argo (Ang Lee won the Oscar for Life of Pi). Which means when the DGA winner is nominated for the Best Director Oscar they have won all but four times in sixty-eight years! Now you're up to 94% accurate.

Sam Mendes of course is nominated for both which means you are going against some serious history if you bet against him winning Oscar gold.

The four instances where the DGA winner was nominated for but lost the Oscar were 1968 when Anthony Harvey won the DGA for The Lion in Winter and Carol Reed the Oscar for Oliver!, 1972 when Francis Ford Coppola won the DGA for The Godfather but Bob Fosse the Oscar for Cabaret, 2000 when Ang Lee won the DGA for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Steven Soderbergh the Oscar for Traffic, and 2002 when Rob Marshall earned the DGA for Chicago but Roman Polanski got the Oscar in absentia for The Pianist. Quentin Tarantino or Bong Joon-Ho could hear their names called Oscar night and be added to that very short list, but it is a bad bet against the house. Ballsy to go for it, though!
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I voted for Mendes. He won the DGA. That's enough for me. Never bet against the DGA.





It took until there were only four awards left, but we finally got an upset in one of the major categories. And it's a biggie! Bong Joon-Ho wins Best Director for Parasite! This continues to be the most diverse bunch of winners among the major categories. Excellent.

The DGA Award is the most reliable Oscar predictor, but ain't none of them infallible.



I def would've preferred Mendes to win, but I'll say that at least the Academy rewarded risk-taking last night, even if I'm not with the majority on Parasite.

Parasite's victories last night certainly open the door for rewarding more risky films in the future.



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
Bong Joon Ho - South Korean
Tom Hooper - British
Michel Hazanavicius - French
Ang Lee - Taiwanese
Alfonso Cuaron - Mexican
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu - Mexican
Guillermo Del Toro - Mexican
Damien Chazelle - American
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And Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director at the 2010 ceremony (for The Hurt Locker). Not that having one woman winning in 92 years is much to crow about, but it was still fairly recently in Oscar history and just as this trend of somebody beside white American/British fellas winning was beginning.

Also note that Iñárritu and Cuarón both won a pair of Best Director Oscars in the last six years.