Ryan Coogler and Chloe Zhao Lead Most Inclusive Director Oscars Race

Directors are bringing laughs, tears — and an international lens.

For decades, awards season conversations about diversity have circled the same stage: the faces in front of the camera. Each Oscar cycle elicits scrutiny of who is — or isn’t — nominated in the acting categories. This year, the most vital shift in cinematic recognition is occurring behind the lens.

The best director race could present one of the most globally inclusive, stylistically eclectic and generationally diverse lineups in modern Academy history.

This isn’t the industry’s first attempt at inclusion. The 2010s belonged to a trio of Latino auteurs — Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro — who collectively claimed five directing statuettes between 2013 and 2018. Yet this year’s field suggests something more democratic and less concentrated in a single narrative.

Still, one figure looms large: eight-time nominee Paul Thomas Anderson brings his meticulous eye to the Civil War epic “One Battle After Another,” which may clinch him a long-elusive win.

“It’s going to take something significant to take down the narrative that’s building around PTA,” a veteran studio publicist says. “Show the voters what it’s like to finally have the first Black directing winner, like Ryan Coogler, or the first woman to win twice — who was also the first woman of color to win before. How great would that feel?”

Chloé Zhao — the first woman of color to win best director for “Nomadland” — returns with the literary adaptation “Hamnet.” And Coogler expands his genre-defying vision with the horror-inflected “Sinners.”

Several women are well positioned as contenders. Along with Zhao, Kathryn Bigelow — the first woman to win best director — reemerges with the nuclear-war thriller “A House of Dynamite.” Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s harrowing “The Voice of Hind…