AFT Awards: Best Director

This is the twenty-eighth category of the 3rd Annual AFT Film Awards to be announced. The AFT Awards are my own personal choices for the best in film of each year and the best in television of each season. The AFT Film Awards include the traditional Oscar categories and a number of additional specific honors. Nominees are pictured in the order I’ve ranked them. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Runners-up:
JOEL AND ETHAN COEN (A Serious Man)
ZACK SNYDER (Watchmen)
NEILL BLOMKAMP (District 9)
MICHAEL HANEKE (The White Ribbon)
JASON REITMAN (Up in the Air)

The winner:
Tom Ford (A Single Man) transitioned careers from fashion designer to filmmaker and created an astounding, breathtaking work of art.

Other nominees:
Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds) took a deliriously violent and entertaining story and embedded it within a complex and carefully-crafted drama. James Cameron (Avatar) undertook an entire planet’s worth of adventure and created an extraordinarily exciting and visually spectacular exciting movie. Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) dug deep into the horrors of war and produced a powerful portrait of the soldiers in Iraq. Pedro Almodovar (Broken Embraces) gave life to a host of colorful characters and staged a poetic and moving story.