Categories One-by-One: Best Director

Big Magilla
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Post by Big Magilla »

I think the 1968 precedent is the one we should be looking at.

In those days, there were only the New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and Golden Globes to look at aside from the DGA as to who might be the popular choices for director.

The NBR, which was firs out of the gate, went with Franco Zeffirelli for Romeo & Juliet, their no. 2 film of the year behidn The Shoes of the Fisherman. N.Y. went with Paul Newman for Rachel, Rachel while giving their Best Picture award to The Lion in Winter. The Globes gave Best Picture - Drama to The Lion in Winter and Best Picture - Musical or Comedy to Oliver!, but again gave the Best Director award to Newman. It was the DGA which was out of sync with rest of them.

Tom Hooper, who is this year's Anthony Harvey, hasn't won a damn thing except the DGA. Not only that, he looks like he could be Rob Marshall's little brother, and we all know what happened to DGA winner Marshall at the 2002 Oscars.

All this hand wringing over Hooper winning the Oscar is absurd. It ain't gonna happen.

P.S. I'll be looking for a cupcake with a hat on it next Sunday, just in case I have to eat my hat. :angry:




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Mister Tee
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Post by Mister Tee »

I'd have started some of these threads sooner, but, when you've not yet caught up to the movie with 12 nominations, it leaves you less than fluent in many categories. I'm probably not the ideal analyst for this one, either, but since the race seems to have taken on existential life of its own, I'll throw out perspective.

We all know the nominees:
Darren Aronofksy, Black Swan
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, True Grit
David Fincher, The Social Network
Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
David O. Russell, The Fighter

...but, really, do more than two matter? There are certainly those devoted enough to one of the others (or indifferent enough to the top-line outcome) to throw votes their way. But surely, at this point, most believe it'll be Tom Hooper or David Fincher, and will be casting ballots accordingly.

We have a conundrum. As Magilla noted in the BAFTA thread, the Brits choosing Fincher makes him an almost unprecedented consensus choice to win this year's directing prize, with one tiny exception -- that exception being the most historically accurate precursor the Oscars have ever seen. The organization that has spent 60 years almost always predicting best director, and forecasting best picture at nearly as high a rate, says it's not David Fincher, it's Tom Hooper.

I can't even come up with an analogy here. It's as if all weather forecasters in America were predicting sunny skies, and Al Roker foresaw a punishing ice storm; if political pollsters were unanimously predicting a strong Republican victory, but Nate Silver forecast a Democratic landslide. That's how disconcerting this is.

Not to say DGA hasn't in the past differed from the early trajectory of the Oscar race. Critics' choices Good Fellas, Pulp Fiction and LA Confidential were shunted aside in favor of the more soothing Dances with Wolves, Forrest Gump and Titanic, all of which went on to Academy glory. But in those cases, DGA was not first -- in two instances, NBR was along for the ride, and the Globes prefigured all three. This year, with DGA essentially initiating the shift, is really sui generis (I recognize PGA and SAG also chose King's Speech, but they've been off the reservation before -- PGA in '04 and '06, SAG numerous times -- without necessarily affecting the DGA-decreed outcome).

Post-BAFTA, alot of people are opting for a split-the-baby resolution of the issue -- concede King's Speech will win best film, but predict Fincher to take best director. This was an instinct some had even prior to the BAFTA pick, given recent Oscar tendency to honor auteurists in the directing spot. And maybe the people saying that will be proved right.

But let's acknowledge what a departure from precedent that would be. In the modern era (post- the 1957 membership purge, which roughly locked in current voting levels), only eight times have film and director differed. Only four times has the DGA winner not taken the best director trophy (excluding the '85 and '95 anomalies, when the DGA winner couldn't win the Oscar by virtue of not being nominated). And only twice (1972 and 2002) has the DGA winner failed to win best director, but gone on to take best picture. Yet all these things at once are what many are now predicting.

Let's look at this issue in component parts, before attempting an overall view.

First, one big reason people are moving toward this King's Speech/Fincher split is this feeling that, in recent years, voters have learned to somewhat view film and director as separate categories -- to show at least a modicum of respect for directors' overall c.v.'s, and to differentiate between the frivolously enjoyable and the artistically ambitious. None of this was the case back in the day (60s through 80s); even little-known/little-respected/neophyte directors could be pulled along by their films. Franklin Schaffner, John Avildsen, Richard Attenborough or Kevin Costner would be in no one's Directing Hall of Fame, but all won because their films took best picture -- even if the film seemed artistically puny relative to its competition (thinking especially of Rocky, here). Film/director was a package deal then, rarely violated. I think it's safe to assume that, whatever Tom Hooper's fame shortcomings, however old-fashioned an uplift piece The King's Speech is, in 1979 it would almost certainly have won best director as part of a best picture haul.

But today he'd stick out as anomaly. For, while we still sometimes have artistically conservative best picture choices, in the past decade, the most flagrant instances have been partly redeemed by alternative choices in the directing slot. (If all the best directors had won best picture, many post-Oscar gripes would have disappeared) There's one big exception, of course: 2001, when Ron Howard won for A Beautiful Mind. But, though A Beautiful Mind was maybe the least defensible best picture choice of the era, Ron Howard was obviously not Tom Hooper in the career fame category: a decades-long beloved citizen of Hollywood, a guy who'd made a ton of money for the industry obviously has pull that Hooper can't approach.

So...seen from this angle, predicting a split doesn't seem like such a gamble. But, again, the separate elements.

The split:

When Dennis B. used to hang around these parts, he'd talk about the circumstances that would create a film/director split. We puttered around with specifics, and came up with this as general outline.

1) One film -- the best picture winner -- was more enjoyed than respected; another -- the directing choice -- was more respected than enjoyed.
2) The director of the less-highly-regarded best picture winner was considerably less well-known than his competitor
3) Not always applicable, but showing up enough to be a factor: the director of the best picture choice was not American and the winning director was.

Some past cases fit this pattern better than others -- In the Heat of the Night was more "serious" than the Graduate, but Norman Jewison was a middling-well-known Canadian, while Mike Nichols was a quite famous American celebrity director (even if born abroad); both Godfather and Cabaret were clearly serious films, but Fosse was arguably more famous than Coppola at the time, given his Broadway career and even his stint in Hollywood. But other years match near perfectly: Chariots of Fire, uplifting film from a little-known Brit, vs. Reds, a famous American's respected but unloved epic; Driving Miss Daisy a tiny thing from an Australian so dismissable he wasn't even nominated, vs. a widely-known American director dealing with the anti-war years; perhaps the quintessential case, the widely-loved but unserious Shakespeare in Love, directed by a semi-anonymous Brit, takes best picture over the directing winner, the most famous American helmsman of his era with his highly serious war movie; and a sword-and-sandals epic from a decently-known.Brit topped for directing by an American (Steven Soderbergh) covering the drug war, having one of the most singularly publicized director's years in memory. (In the more recent instances, '02 and '05, the nationality factor was actually reversed -- perhaps indicative of our more international era -- but Polanski and Ang Lee were surely more famous than Marshall and Haggis, and otherwise the pattern of warm-fuzzy best picture/bracing director held)

It's very easy to fit a Hooper/Fincher split into this paradigm: a TV director showing little auteurist personality, making a film that audiences cheer, vs. a well-known director of dark films telling a story that critics embrace but some audiences find chilly. On alot of scores, the case for Fincher is very strong.

But let's get to the sticking point: the Directors' Guild.

The Guild has been in existence since 1950 (actually,1949, but the first year calendar didn't quite match, so skip that). And in those 58 contests ('85/'95 ruled out), they've only failed to match the Academy's best director choice four times. Four! Meaning over 93% accuracy rate. No wonder East Coast people stayed online till early AM to find out the winner. Knowing the DGA winner is tantamount to being given a free spot on the Bingo card. And now people want to toss that cavalierly aside?

As if those odds weren't daunting enough, most of these same folks are predicting the DGA choice, King's Speech, to hold on as best picture. A split has, as it happens, come about in three of the four years the DGA has not foretold the Oscar. But a split where the DGA is upset under best director, but not under best film? You know how many times that's happened? Twice. 1972, 2002. Two out of 58. A less than 3 1/2% chance. Anyone out there starting to rethink this?

I don't pretend to know why DGA upsets happen. Inside Oscar makes a case that Anthony Harvey/Lion in Winter suffered from Avco Embassy's lack of clout in a studio-dominated era. But then how did little Allied Artists pull off the Fosse upset four years later? Maybe it was just Harvey's near-total anonymity vis a vis Carol Reed's. (You look at the directors in the years just preceding -- Cukor, Wise, Zinnemann, Nichols -- and Harvey is a classic "Who doesn't belong on this list?") And why did Fosse top Coppola, anyway? Was it that both films were deeply beloved, and people somehow managed to bifurcate their ballots to honor both? An early instance of the voters' Nazi obsession? And did the fact that, in 2000 and 2002, people were talking about film/director splits play any role in those outcomes -- even though neither split predicted (Gladiator/Ang Lee, Chicago/Scorsese) was the one that came about? And what does the Academy have against Ang Lee, anyway? -- two DGA awards, with just one lousy director's prize to show for it.

Back on point: is there anything in those instances that makes one think this, too, is such a year?

All I know, in the end, is the DGA has won me alot of Oscar polls over the years, and, however much other signs might be pointing a different direction -- however much I may want them to -- I'm going to be very tempted to stick with the precursor that brung me.

But, you know...in spite of all this...the upset could happen. We're only dealing with 60 years of precedent -- 82 with the Oscars alone -- which is really a small sample size. Those of us who knew our history bet against Driving Miss Daisy overcoming the missing director nod, and found ourselves losing to people who went with uninformed gut feeling. I was certain Sling Blade had no shot at topping The English Patient for screenplay -- the best picture candidate HAD to win -- but then watched in amazement as it happened. If you hang around long enough, something unprecedented will come about. Which I suppose is one of the things that gets us to tune in year after year, even when the outlook is bleak.

Other perspectives?




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