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Considerations
Covering the annual film industry awards races, with sharp commentary on the pictures, the players, the money and the spectacle. by Tyler Coates
Awards Season Analysis: First Time Filmmakers in the 2024 Race
Janet Planet [Courtesy A24] While it’s not uncommon for a filmmaker to earn an Oscar nomination for directing their first narrative feature—directors to do so since the turn of the century include Emerald Fennell, Jordan Peele, Benh Zeiltlin, Tony Gilroy, Rob Marshall and Spike Jonze—it’s very rare for a film debut to win best director. Only six have accomplished the feat: Marty’s Delbert Mann, West Side Story’s Jerome Robbins (sharing the Oscar with co-director Robert Wise), Ordinary People’s Robert Redford, Terms of Endearment’s James L. Brooks, Dances With Wolves’ Kevin Costner and American Beauty’s Sam Mendes. This year, the best director race is packed with previous Oscar winners (Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen) and nominees (Mike Leigh, James Mangold, Ridley Scott, Denis Villeneuve) who will crowd the category with their veteran status—which leaves first-timers unlikely to break through.
But the Directors Guild of America does reward a prize to directors making their narrative feature debut. First handed out in 2016 at the 68th annual DGA Awards, the award for best-first time feature film director gives recognition to a cohort of filmmakers often overlooked by the Academy. (Jordan Peele, who won the award for Get Out in 2018, is the only nominee to also be Oscar-nominated for best director.) And while the Academy’s directors branch continues to honor mostly men, the DGA category for first-time directors is often dominated by female auteurs. For the past three years, the category saw more women nominated than men, and four women have won the award: Honey Boy’s Alma Har’el, The Lost Daughter’s Maggie Gyllenhaal, Aftersun’s Charlotte Wells and Past Lives’s Celine Song.
Bradley Cooper, Joel Edgerton, Rebecca Hall and Regina King were all nominated for their directorial debuts, as were multi-hyphenates Bo Burnham, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Aaron Sorkin. Several actors stepped behind the camera for films this year, including Babes’s Pamela Adlon, Blink Twice’s Zoë Kravitz, Woman of the Hour’s Anna Kendrick and Monkey Man’s Dev Patel (with the latter two also directing themselves in lead roles). Two directors with legendary Hollywood names also followed familial footsteps, with Malcolm Washington bringing August Wilson’s family drama The Piano Lesson to the screen (an adaptation starring brother John David and produced by father Denzel) and Jack Huston (grandson of Tony, nephew of Anjelica and Danny) wrote and directed Day of the Fight, starring Michael Pitt as a down-on-his-luck boxer attempting a comeback.
Although their names might be less recognizable, this season sees established filmmakers taking their first spins in the director’s chair. William Goldenberg, a five-time Oscar nominee who won best editing for Argo, helmed Unstoppable, starring Jharrel Jerome as Anthony Robles, a championship wrestler born with one leg. Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison, who made history as the first woman to earn a nod in the category, also debuted The Fire Inside, an against-all-odds sports drama starring Ryan Destiny as Olympic boxer Claressa Shields. Robert Kolodny, a cinematographer with All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and the upcoming Pavements on his resume, also made his directorial debut with the period boxing drama The Featherweight.
Two Oscar-nominated doc filmmakers also made their narrative feature debuts this year: Sean Wang, a 2024 doc short nominee for Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, has the coming-of-age comedy Dìdi, while RaMell Ross, director of 2019 doc feature nominee Hale County This Morning, This Evening, helmed Nickel Boys, an ambitious adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. While India didn’t select Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light as its Oscar submission, the acclaimed documentarian won the Grand Prix at Cannes for the drama.
A trio of acclaimed artists also made their first foray into film directing, jumping into a new medium with acclaimed results. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s coming-of-age drama Janet Planet features a luminous performance from Julianne Nicholson and a quirky debut from 12-year-old Zoe Ziegler, while playwright and actor Marco Calvani’s High Tide stars Marco Pigossi as an undocumented immigrant caught in limbo in the gay enclave of Provincetown. Meanwhile, painter Titus Kaphar’s Exhibiting Forgiveness is not just autobiographical; he also supplied the paintings that lead actor Andre Holland creates within the film.
Finally, a three young filmmakers broke through with striking comedic films: Josh Margolin’s Thelma, an action-comedy with June Squibb in her first lead role; Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, a comedy of manners set in COVID-era Brooklyn starring Hammel and John Early; and Zia Anger’s My First Film, an irreverent meta-textual look at indie filmmaking starring Odessa Young as a cinematic stand-in for Anger.
