Coralie Fargeat was snubbed by the DGA Awards for her work on the Demi Moore showbiz satire/body horror movie The Substance, but that doesn't mean she won't be nominated for a Best Director Oscar.
Handed out annually by the Director's Guild of America, the DGA Theatrical Feature Film Awards have long been a bellwether for determining which filmmaker goes on to capture the Best Director statuette at the Academy Awards. Per the DGA, all but eight directors who won the DGA Award at the guild's previous 76 ceremonies went on to win the Oscar in the Best Director category.
However, being a DGA winner who goes on to win a Best Director Oscar is one thing and being a DGA nominee who goes on to be nominated for Best Director by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is another.
In fact, the last time all five DGA nominees were subsequently nominated for the Best Director Oscar was for the Academy Awards honoring the films released in 2009.
Since then, there have been 10 years where only four of the five DGA nominees received a Best Director Oscar nomination and three years where only three of the five DGA nominees went on to be nominated for the coveted statuette.
The biggest disconnect between the two awards bodies, though, happened with the films of 2012, when only two DGA nominees were among the five Best Director Oscar nominees.
Coralie Fargeat already knows she's up against the wall with The Substance as awards season heads toward the 97th Annual Academy Awards, and it simply boils down the genre in which the film is set.
Even though The Substance is partly a showbusiness satire -- the main factor that contributed to it being in the Musical or Comedy category at the Golden Globes -- at its heart it's a horror film with an ample amount of blood, guts and gore.
As such, Fargeat recently spoke out in an interview with IndieWire that she hopes the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences begins to look at horror films alongside other genres that frequently capture the attention of Oscar voters.
"I don't see horror films as any different from other movies," Fargeat told IndieWire. "They are so political. They are such a great way to tell so many things in a very rude way, and in a very indelicate way. To me, they should compete at the same level as everything else."
At the very least, the Golden Globes took a step in that direction when voters awarded Demi Moore with a Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture -- Musical or Comedy for her acclaimed turn in The Substance. Before Moore, only four performers have won a Golden Globe for acting in a horror film in the past 51 years.
The small but distinguished group is made up of Linda Blair, who won a Golden Globe for Supporting Actress in 1973's The Exorcist, followed by Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama wins for Kathy Bates (1990's Misery) and Jodie Foster (1991's The Silence of the Lambs). The sole Best Actor win for a horror performance came with Johnny Depp's Musical or Comedy win for 2007's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street).
Of course, some may argue that Misery and The Silence of the Lambs are more pyschological thrillers than they are horror films, which would make the Golden Globe for the other three performers and their respective films all the more remarkable.
At least there's another sign for Fargeat to be encouraged about. On Wednesday, the Screen Actors Guild nominated Moore for Outstanding Female Actor in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture for The Substance for the 2025 SAG Awards.
While the word "snub" might imply that the voting membership of the DGA collectively grouped together to turn their backs on Coralie Fargeat, don't believe it for a second.
Instead, the answer lies with the number of votes cast for the DGA nominations, which is something the guild has never released.
If the DGA released the information, we would find out how many of the guild's 19,500 members voted and discover and more to the point, how many votes were cast for the director who secured the fifth slot in this year's DGA nominations. For all we know, Fargeat was merely one vote shy of tying for the fifth nomination slot or two votes shy of capturing it.
Realistically, the same principle could be applied to any number of directors in the running for the DGA Awards, Oscars or other honors this awards season. In addition to Fargeat, the Golden Globes nominated All We Imagine as Light director Payal Kapadia in one of their six slots for Best Director, while the Critics Choice Association nominated eight directors for the 31st Annual Critics Choice Awards.
Four of those eight directors -- Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Sean Baker (Anora), Edward Berger (Conclave) and Brady Corbet (The Brutalist) -- were nominated for the DGA's top honor, while four others -- Fargeat, Jon M. Chu (Wicked), RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys) and Denis Villeneuve (Dune: Part Two) -- were not.
So once again, it begs the question: Between the Golden Globes and Critics Choice nominees, were Kapadia or Chu or Ross or Villeneuve -- in addition to Fargeat -- simply one vote shy of tying for the fifth DGA spot or two votes shy of nabbing the fifth spot? Again, unless the DGA decides to release their nomination vote totals, we'll never know.
What is certain is that this year's nominees for the 77th DGA Awards are Audiard, Baker, Berger, Corbett and James Mangold, who directed the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.
But if recent history proves anything, the odds are pretty good that at least one of those five directors' names will not be called for a Best Director nod when the nominations for the 97th Annual Academy Awards are announced Jan. 19.