A growing trend of the last several awards seasons has been the increasing amount of recognition for new-school filmmakers such as David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Danny Boyle, P.T. Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, Darren Aronofsky, and others. All of these guys have been directing films for at least a decade, and a few of them are approaching twenty years of service in Hollywood, so I hesitate to refer to them as new-school, but it's certainly something of a new era in the grand scheme of things.
David Fincher's breakthrough film was 1995's Seven, and he followed that up four years later with Fight Club. Both films were received warmly by moviegoers and critics, but neither were nominated for any major awards. Skip ahead to 2011, and Fincher already has one Oscar nomination for his directorial work in 2008's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. His new film, The Social Network, has been racking up all kinds of awards and nominations over the last month or two. To say that it's the frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars this year would be like saying that Charlie Sheen loves hanging with pornstars and doing coke... it's quite obvious.
Directors such as Danny Boyle, Chris Nolan and Tarantino have also been enjoying mainstream success over the last few years. Boyle dominated the Oscars in 2009 with Slumdog Millionaire, and Tarantino got a well-deserved directorial nomination for Inglorious Basterds last year. Chris Nolan pretty much single-handedly caused the AMPAS to expand their best picture field from five to ten films last year, as an overwhelming amount of The Dark Knight supporters voiced their dissent over the film's 2009 Oscar snub. Nolan did score a DGA nomination in 2009, however.
