Everyone assumed that the nominees for the Directors Guild of America’s top DGA Award would include, as they did in Wednesday morning’s nominations announcement, Emilia Pérez’s Jacques Audiard, Anora’s Sean Baker, Conclave’s Edward Berger and The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet.
The question was: Who was going to snag the fifth and final slot?
The aforementioned quartet was recently joined on the Golden Globe Awards‘ nominations list by The Substance’s Coralie Fargeat and All We Imagine as Light’s Payal Kapadia; and on the Critics Choice Awards’ nominations list by Fargeat, Wicked’s Jon M. Chu, Nickel Boys’ RaMell Ross and Dune: Part Two’s Denis Villeneuve.
But as exciting and glamorous as those awards shows are, they are actually less reliable predictors of Oscar recognition than the picks of the DGA, which more closely mirrors the directors branch of the Academy, which, in turn, solely determines the best director Oscar nominees. Indeed, here is a breakdown of the degree to which the two groups’ five picks have overlapped over the past decade: four in 2015; four in 2016; four in 2017; four in 2018; three in 2019; four in 2020; four in 2021; four in 2022; two in 2023; and three in 2024.
So it was a major — and pleasant — surprise today to see that fifth slot claimed by James Mangold, the helmer of the hit Bob Dylan drama A Complete Unknown.
Mangold, 61, has been directing films for 30 years, with past credits including Heavy (1995), Cop Land (1997), Girl, Interrupted (1999), Identity (2003), Walk the Line (2005), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), The Wolverine (2013), Logan (2017), Ford v Ferrari (2019) and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023). But prior to today, he had never previously received any DGA recognition.
Just last night, I was talking about Mangold with Edward Norton, a star of A Complete Unknown, who likened him to Howard Hawks, the great workmanlike director of Hollywood’s golden age who, like Mangold, made solid but not showy films across the entire spectrum of genres — crime pics like Scarface (1932), comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), adventure pics like Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Westerns like Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959), musicals like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), biopics like Sergeant York (1941), noir films like The Big Sleep (1946) and whatever To Have and Have Not (1944) is.
The problem is most people — even fellow directors — take such guys for granted. Hawks was Oscar-nominated only once, for directing Sergeant York. Mangold has been Oscar-nominated twice, but never for directing — his nods have come for writing (Logan) and producing (Ford v Ferrari). For A Complete Unknown, he wasn’t even included on BAFTA’s best director longlist of 10 finalists for the five nomination slots.
But this DGA nom suggests that Mangold may still be in the hunt for a best director Oscar nom — and it is also just the latest piece of evidence that A Complete Unknown is shaping up to be a top Oscar contender across the board.
Again, Golden Globe and Critics Choice noms are great, but they are chosen by journalists, who have no presence in the Academy. Guild noms, though, are chosen by people who actually make movies, which describes almost the entire membership of the Academy. So the fact that Mangold’s DGA nom came on the same morning that A Complete Unknown landed four SAG Awards nominations, second only to Wicked — for best ensemble (one of only five slots, and the closest thing the guild has to a best picture nom), best actor (Timothée Chalamet), best supporting actor (Norton) and best supporting actress (Monica Barbaro) — amounts to a very big deal. And you can take it to the bank that A Complete Unknown will also receive noms for the top honors of the Producers Guild, which will be announced on Friday, and the Writers Guild, which will be announced on Monday.
For Mangold, who crammed to get A Complete Unknown shot and edited in time for a 2024 release, it may turn out that it wasn’t such a bad thing to be the last major awards hopeful of the year to screen for voters. His film is playing like gangbusters — it has a 96 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an A CinemaScore, and it has grossed $44 million worldwide in its first two weeks in theaters — and he is finally getting some respect.
