Unusual suspects are top picks for Best Director

Each weekday until the Oscars on Sunday, Inquirer film critics Carrie Rickey and Steven Rea will discuss their picks for the winners in one of the six major categories - best supporting actress, best supporting actor, best director, best actor, best actress and best picture.

Best Director

The nominees for achievement in directing are: David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount and Warner Bros.); Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon (Universal); Gus Van Sant Milk (Focus Features); Stephen Daldry, The Reader (The Weinstein Company), and Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight).

Carrie: Three of the best director nominees are, to coin a phrase, the usual suspects. There's Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon), many times a nominee and previously a winner for A Beautiful Mind. There's Gus van Sant (Milk), a prior nominee for Good Will Hunting. And Stephen Daldry (The Reader), perhaps the only filmmaker to get the best director nod every time he makes a film: His prior noms were for Billy Elliot and The Hours. This year, though, the frontrunners are the unusual suspects, Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.)

Steven: Stephen Daldry's three-for-three record is remarkable (what's he doing next? how long can this go on!?) , and there are scenarios out there that have him winning for The Reader - and The Reader winning for best picture. But these are scenarios that have been stoked and stirred by Reader distributor Harvey Weinstein, who obviously has a lot riding on the outcome. Never underestimate this savvy mogul, who has pretty much written the book on modern-day Oscar campaigning....

But still, at the end of the day (or night), I believe Danny Boyle, the Brit behind Slumdog Millionaire, and a filmmaker with keen, kinetic storytelling chops, will hold the statuette aloft.

David Fincher is a director to be reckoned with, and for all Benjamin Button's faults and faux folksy charm, visually it's a winner. But my feeling is that the Academy members are going to opt for Boyle and his Mumbai underdog story - or, if there's a surprise, to Daldry for his sex-and-books Holocaust drama.

Carrie: The only way Daldry wins is if the votes for Fincher and Boyle cancel each other out and Daldry gets the 21 percent plurality that means a win. I don't think that will happen. While Fincher is a terrific filmmaker – how I wish Zodiac had gotten him a deserved nom – Button, like Forrest Gump, is the triumph of old-school filmmaking married to cutting-edge technology. It felt embalmed to me. Boyle's Slumdog is cinematically inventive, incorporates music and subtitles in a way that's fresh and alive and seems to really breathe. I go for Boyle.

Steven: Boyle it is. Unless he gets lanced by Harvey (and the 20.2 percent plurality).

And I would have given Fincher the Oscar for Fight Club.