chloé zhao

The Directors Guild of America announced its nominations Thursday for outstanding directorial achievement in theatrical feature film, offering one of the clearest snapshots yet of the Oscar race for director as guild voters begin to weigh in.

Nominated for the DGA’s top film award are Paul Thomas Anderson for “One Battle After Another,” Ryan Coogler for “Sinners,” Guillermo del Toro for “Frankenstein,” Josh Safdie for “Marty Supreme” and Chloé Zhao for “Hamnet.”

Winners will be announced at the 78th annual DGA Awards on Feb. 7 at the Beverly Hilton.

The DGA award remains one of the strongest predictors of Oscar success. Twenty of the last 23 recipients of the guild’s top directing prize have gone on to win the Academy Award for best director. Last year’s DGA winner, “Anora” director Sean Baker, went on to repeat at the Oscars.

Several of this year’s nominees are familiar figures to the guild. Anderson’s nod for “One Battle After Another” marks his third time being recognized by the DGA in the top film category, following his earlier nominations for “There Will Be Blood” and “Licorice Pizza.” Zhao, who won both the DGA Award and the Oscar for “Nomadland,” receives her second nomination for the wrenching period drama “Hamnet,” making her one of a small group of women — including Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig — to be recognized more than once by the guild.

Del Toro, who won the DGA Award for “The Shape of Water,” earns his second career nomination in the category for his long-gestating “Frankenstein” adaptation, while Safdie receives his first DGA nomination for theatrical feature film for his gonzo sports drama “Marty Supreme.”

The DGA nominations often track closely with the Oscars in part because of overlapping membership: most directors in the Academy are also members of the guild. While the groups vote independently, that shared base has made the DGA one of the most reliable bellwethers in the Oscar directing race.

This year’s DGA nominations overlap significantly with the Golden Globe nominations for directing, which also included Anderson, Coogler, del Toro and Zhao. The Globes additionally recognized Jafar Panahi for “It Was Just an Accident” and Joachim Trier for “Sentimental Value,” two filmmakers who didn’t appear in the DGA lineup. The differences highlight the contrasting makeup of the Globes’ voting body of international critics and the DGA’s more industry-focused membership.

The guild also announced nominees for the Michael Apted Award for outstanding directorial achievement in a first-time theatrical feature film, a category that has increasingly served as a spotlight for emerging talent. This year’s nominees are Hasan Hadi for “The President’s Cake,” Harry Lighton for “Pillion,” Charlie Polinger for “The Plague,” Alex Russell for “Lurker” and Eva Victor for “Sorry, Baby.” Last year’s Apted Award winner, RaMell Ross, went on to earn a best picture Oscar nomination for “Nickel Boys.”

Television, documentary and other DGA nominations were announced earlier this week, recognizing directing work across drama, comedy, limited series and nonfiction programming. In dramatic series, nominees included “Severance,” “Andor,” “The Diplomat” and HBO Max’s “The Pitt,” while comedy series nominees included “The Bear,” “Hacks,” “The White Lotus” and Apple TV+’s “The Studio.”

No, our Women in Film issue doesn’t exclusively feature women — Noah Baumbach and Brendan Fraser feature in our Dec. 16 edition as well — but it does shine a particular spotlight on their extraordinary contribution to the year in film.

As performers and production designers, writers, directors and more, the women included here helped fashion deeply felt stories of parenthood, friendship, grief and betrayal, and that’s just for starters. Read on for more highlights from this week’s Envelope.

The Envelope Actresses Roundtable

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

This year’s Oscar Actresses Roundtable was full of laughter, sparked by everything from Gwyneth Paltrow’s impression of mother Blythe Danner to Sydney Sweeney’s tales from inside the ring on “Christy.” But when it comes to self-determination, this year’s participants — who also included Emily Blunt, Elle Fanning, Jennifer Lopez and Tessa Thompson — are dead serious.

As performers, producers and businesswomen, the sextet told moderator Lorraine Ali, the boxes that Hollywood and the broader culture seek to put them in need not apply. And realizing that is its own liberation. As Lopez put it, “I don’t ever feel like there’s somebody who can say to me, ‘No, you can’t.’”

‘Hamnet’s’ last-minute miracle

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times))

Since the moment I first saw “Hamnet,” I’ve been raving to everyone I know about its climactic sequence, set inside the Globe Theatre during a performance of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” (Well, if you can call it “raving” when you preface your recommendation with the sentence, “I sobbed through the last 45 minutes.”) As it turns out, though, the process of making the film’s final act was as miraculous as the finished product.

“There were only four days left of shooting on ‘Hamnet’ when Chloé Zhao realized she didn’t have an ending,” Emily Zemler begins this week’s digital cover story, which features Zhao, actors Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Joe Alwyn and production designer Fiona Crombie. What they created from that point, combining kismet, creative inspiration and grueling preparation, will buoy your belief in the power of art. “It was like a tsunami,” Buckley tells Zemler. “I’ll never forget it.”

A Is for Animal Wrangler

When I first read Helen Macdonald’s transporting “H Is for Hawk,” which combines memoir, nature writing and literary criticism, I can’t say I closed the book wondering when we’d get a film adaptation. Little did I know that director Philippa Lowthorpe, star Claire Foy and a pair of married bird handlers would provide such a thorough answer to my skepticism.

As Lisa Rosen writes in her story on the marriage of art and goshawk in “H Is For Hawk,” that meant shaping the production around the notoriously wary birds of prey, including its lead performance. “It wasn’t like having another actor who had another agenda or actions or a perspective that they wanted to get across in the scene,” Foy told Rosen of her extensive screen time alone with the five goshawks who stood in for Helen’s. “I was along for the ride with these animals.”

More stories from our Dec. 16 issue