Practically every director you can think of now has at least some niche fan base of ardent supporters who could write a doctorial dissertation on the cinematic "vision" that he or she possesses. With the proliferation of film oriented websites, passionate cinephiles have never had the ability to share and discuss their feelings on their favorite directors and their films like they do now. This sort of exuberant love for filmmakers is ultimately a good thing, but it does leave for a pretty painful Best Director category when Oscar nominations come rolling into town. Just look back at 2012, when "for sure" nominees such as Katherine Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Ben Affleck for Argo missed out on Best Director nominations. While cyber teeth gnashed on Twitter and all over the web bemoaning the terrible injustice done to these directors, the real pain was felt by Oscar pundits whose assured swagger on the certainty of their nominations left them with their own healthy heap of humble pie to chow down on. These high emotions and the increasingly large pool of "big name" directors make Best Director an especially treacherous category to prognosticate, and 2015 is certainly no different. Nevertheless, the work must be done, so what follows is a ranked guess from least likely to most likely of this year's crop of Best Director nominees.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
