If you're tired of seeing so much 20th Century Women and Moonlight then you'll be sorely disappointed by these nominees, though perhaps you'll be excited by some of my other favorites that are finally getting mentions:
Best Director
Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius) - Harnessing film's length, images’ energy, and Braga’s magnetism to pinpoint a personal history and its intrusions.
Mia Hansen-Løve (Things to Come) - Few stylistic risks, but understated intersectionalities and frictions of radicalism, disappointment, and freedom are bold feats.
Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) - Synthesizing a triptych of experiences, filtering their reverberations through filming-styles rarely seen within this narrative type.
Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) - Exuding total confidence in his humor, frames, actors, and vision by embracing the bleak, slippery ambiguities.
Mike Mills (20th Century Women) - Seeing in Bening a mother’s ambivalence, and rooted in that ambivalence a whole ancestry of paradox.
Matches with Oscar: 1/5.
Runners-Up: Villeneuve (Arrival), Arnold (American Honey), Ahn (Spa Night), Larraín (Neruda), Audiard (Dheepan), Verhoeven (Elle), Ade (Erdmann), Almodóvar (Julieta)
