One Category at a Time: Best Documentary

In the years since the Academy tweaked its rules to allow the entire voting membership to cast a ballot in this category, Best Documentary has gone from one of the trickiest calls to one of the easiest. Four years running now they've gone with the whichever nominee has received the most critical and guild attention. That trend will be put to the test this year as the title which fits that glove is a unique contender in the Oscar race.

My Award Nominations: Director

Tomorrow the DGA will bestow its yearly honours for the year's best direction in television and film. Barring some kind of earth-shaking upset, we can expect to see Damien Chazelle and Garth Davis take home prizes for Best Director and Best First-Time Director respectively. Best Documentary Direction is a bit more up in the air, but I'm betting it'll be Ezra Edelman for O.J.

My own ballot for Best Director follows:

Will the Best Pic Contenders Please Stand Up?

The agonizing wait for Oscar movies to finally show themselves towards year's end is annual gripe of mine. While some years aren't as bad as others, 2016 has thus far proven to be exceptionally back-ended, with nearly every predicted Best Picture contender waiting until the last two months of the year (three months if you include the inevitable January roll-outs) to debut to the public. Only next weekend's limited release of Barry Jenkins' festival darling Moonlight provides us with the faintest hope of a Best Pic nominee that dares to drop before November.

How did it get to be this bad? Looking back over the young expanded Best Picture era, every slate has contained at least two or three films that bowed in October or earlier -- heck, some from the summer and spring -- that would have been absolutely pulverized by the competition had they waited for the winter glut. I fear that fate may be lurking for some of this year's late-breaking gems, whatever they may be. The season's barely underway and already I can tell this is going to be one of my biggest pet peeves.

My Award Nominations: Best Director

These directors are all master storytellers, but what I particularly love about this group is how they've all told their stories in such different ways. They represent a rich array of stylistic voices and I can't wait to see what they churn out next!

But before looking ahead too far, one look back at the Best Directors of 2014:

Review - Selma

The image we're greeted with at the onset of Selma, staring directly at us, is the face of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But this is not the Dr. King we know from the sound bites and TV footage that immortalized him as a mighty orator with a famous dream. This Dr. King looks uncomfortable, restless and out of his element as he rehearses his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech in the privacy of his hotel suite.

The Dr. King he himself sees in the mirror is unfamiliar to him as well; All dressed up to accept an award for peace when he knows how much violence and struggle is yet to be endured in his campaign for civil rights. Just as he gazes at his reflection, contemplating how far he's come and how far he's still to go, so too does Selma hold a mirror up to modern America and ask its people to consider the same questions.

Director Ava DuVernay (working from her largely rewritten draft of an original script by Paul Webb) has no intention of taking the easy way around the story of the protest marches King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, or of dampering its echoes in the troubled racial politics of today. Though set in the summer of '65, it is a film very much about the here and now, told with a verve and vitality that historical docudramas often lack.