Wrapping up my week of personal Oscar nominations, today I’ll focus on the Best Director category. Then, over the next two weeks, I’ll count down my personal top ten movies of 2022.

I find this category the trickiest to evaluate. Given the importance of the director, one could argue that my five favorite movies of the year must also be the best directed. That’s definitely one way to go, though not the one I chose.

What qualifies as great direction, anyway? Is it about camera placement and movement? Coaxing great performances out of the actors? Maintaining a sense of pace and momentum?

I think it’s all of that, and I think the best directors use those tools to create a film that has a unique visual and emotional identity.

With that in mind, these are the five nominees I settled on:

Jordan Peele – Nope
With three movies under his belt, Peele has established himself as a hit-making brand-name director who crafts films as entertaining and suspenseful as they are thought-provoking. Nope is his biggest canvas yet, and you see his masterful brushstrokes in every frame.

S. S. Rajamouli – RRR
Rajamouli is a master of spectacle, delivering a theme park ride of a movie that hooks you from its first moments. After watching a neverending assembly line of interchangeable Hollywood action movies, firing up RRR is like seeing in color for the first time.

Steven Spielberg – The Fablemans
Nobody in the business moves a camera like Spielberg, or is better at knowing the ideal way to capture any scene. He almost never writes his movies (The Fabelmans is just his third script among 35 films he’s directed) and yet he is undeniably the author of every one of them. In The Fablemans, he applies that vision to his own life story for the first time with breathtaking results.

Charlotte Wells – Aftersun
This film is so expertly conceived and executed I can hardly believe it’s a debut effort. Wells communicates so much with her camera movement and composition, using reflections and non-traditional framing to communicate the mental and emotional state of her protagonists. She also coaxes beautifully natural performances out of her actors, including a 12-year-old in her first screen role.

Ti West – X, Pearl
I’m cheating here, naming West for both of his 2022 movies. My game, my rules. West took a tour through Hollywood history when conceiving his horror film and its sequel, riffing on low-budget 70s slashers in X and Technicolor classics in Pearl with exhilarating results.

And the winner is… Steven Spielberg. I picked him to win this award last year for West Side Story, but that’s not going to stop me from doing it again. He’s the best we’ve got and he’s on a late-career roll.