Greta Gerwig & Christopher Nolan Nominated for 2024 Director’s Guild Awards

Awards Season is currently in full swing as more guilds and organizations reveal nominees for their upcoming events. This week already saw the results of the Golden Globes, which ended with Oppenheimer and Poor Things taking home the big prizes in their respective Best Picture categories. The SAG Award nominations were announced today with Barbie and Oppenheimer leading the film categories. “Barbenheimer” is having a pretty big day as both films were also nominated for Directors Guild Awards. You can check out the nominees for the ceremony’s biggest award, “Outstanding Director Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film,” below:

The DGA nominees include Greta Gerwig (Barbie), Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer), Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), Alexander Payne (The Holdovers), and Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon).

The DGA has a great track record of picking the same Best Director as the Academy Awards. In 75 years, they only differed from the Acadmey’s choice eight times. The frontrunner is currently Nolan, who just won the award at the Golden Globes. However, it’s a tight race this year, and it could be anybody’s game.

Christopher Nolan on Re-Creating The Trinity Test in Oppenheimer:

It was previously reported that Nolan recreated a nuclear explosion without CGI, but some fans were confused by what that actually meant. The director recreated the Trinity test, which was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon back in 1945, but Nolan didn’t actually set off an atomic bomb. While chatting with The Hollywood Reporter, Nolan reacted to fans thinking he took such extreme measures to get his movie made.

“It’s flattering that people would think I would be capable of something as extreme as that on the one hand, but it’s also a little bit scary,” Nolan shared. 

“I think recreating the Trinity test without the use of computer graphics, was a huge challenge to take on,” Nolan previously told Total Film. “Andrew Jackson – my visual effects supervisor, I got him on board early on – was looking at how we could do a lot of the visual elements of the film practically, from representing quantum dynamics and quantum physics to the Trinity test itself, to recreating, with my team, Los Alamos up on a mesa in New Mexico in extraordinary weather, a lot of which was needed for the film, in terms of the very harsh conditions out there – there were huge practical challenges.” 

Who are you rooting for for Best Director this awards season? Tell us in the comments.