2015 Oscar Predictions: BEST DIRECTOR – The Rise of Morten Tyldum

As with the November Best Picture predictions, the Gold Rush Gang’s thoughts on Best Director follow suit. That means Boyhood, Birdman and The Imitation Game continue to be strong with the TIG director Morten Tyldum seeing the biggest jump of the month, up 12 points. That also means that Bennett Miller (Foxcatcher), David Fincher (Gone Girl) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) all take hits with DuVernay’s being especially devastating. That bad word of mouth for Selma and the lack of a marketing push (it’s now the only major Best Picture contender without even so much as a trailer) is making people nervous and cautious. Currently, only Kenneth and myself are keeping her in our predictions. We’ll see if things change after the upcoming trailer drops and the 30-minute preview at AFI Fest this week.

Lack of faith in the Academy finally rewarding Interstellar‘s Christopher Nolan drops him a bit but with still enough votes to keep him as a top 5 contender, for now. Many of us are starting to look at outliers in previous Oscar winners Clint Eastwood (American Sniper) and James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) to shake up the race and feed off the dying hopes for the bottom-tier vote-getters here. And, just as last month, I am the single vote for Angelina Jolie (Unbroken) again. Foolish or brilliant? It will only be one or the other and we should see things start to take shape in the coming weeks.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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