Damien Chazelle winning the DGA for La La Land tomorrow night is probably the easiest call of the entire year. Actually, they’re probably all easy calls from here on out. As many have been saying, the race was essentially over in September after the Telluride Film Fest. It happens that way sometimes. Smooth sailing for the frontrunner, but it makes for a long year with nothing for awards junkies to talk about except to talk in circles.
All that’s really left are the tech categories – will La La Land sweep, won’t it sweep, will any other film have a chance? No, no other film will have a chance, etc. The last time it was this locked was in 2011, when The Artist tap danced its way all the way through the race, and here we are again.
I would love to think that Barry Jenkins had a shot for Moonlight, a film that took my breath away by taking us into the world of an unlikely hero. A kid growing up on the mean streets of Miami who is too sensitive, too small, too troubled. An outsider navigating his way, without a father in the home, as he comes of age with sexual feelings he doesn’t understand, violent rages by others he doesn’t understand, a mother lost to drugs he doesn’t understand. Eventually he gets it, and the only thing he can do is pack on the defenses. He learns to be “hard” and tough and to keep every part of himself buried underneath the pose.
Moonlight is a masterpiece: an alluring, beautiful, timely, urgent story that no one who sees it will forget. If Barry Jenkins were to win, he would be the DGA’s first black and African American winner ever. Maybe that will happen someday, but it isn’t going to happen this year.
Kenneth Lonergan’s bittersweet story of grief and personal frustration in Manchester by the Sea paints a picture of a bleak America socked in with crappy weather, a stagnant community, and a family unable to break loose from an unimaginable tragedy. If the whole town blames Lee (Casey Affleck), imagine what Lee does to himself. Watching him try to escape from the pain and horror of what he’s done is fascinating, but what’s even more fascinating is how Lonergan blends the past and the present into one cohesive whole. The past comes in real time because the past cannot be forgotten – it is with Lee every second of every day, haunting him as he tries to wrestle free of it. Manchester by the Sea is a beautiful film full of pain and sorrow, yet also somehow love. But it, too, won’t be winning the Best Director award from the DGA this weekend.
In Denis Villeneuve’s films his characters often venture into situations unknown. Arrival imagines a future where humans on the brink of destroying themselves are visited by extraterrestrial intelligent life who have come to help save them – save us – from ourselves. The heptapods remind me of everything our current government fears: opening our minds to the possibilities of seeing human life, and life itself, from a different perspective. It does this while also taking us deep inside the intimate relationship between a mother and her daughter, her baby. That connection is hard to convey because it can’t be explained. Knowing it by living it is perhaps the only way we can understand why she never would have rejected the chance to live through the future she was gifted with seeing. Arrival is the best film I saw last year, right up there with Moonlight but it, too, won’t be winning Best Director.
Garth Davis’ Lion is probably the most emotionally effective film of the year, with an ending as unbelievable as it is deeply, profoundly moving. We spend half of the film following around plucky Sunny Pawar as Saroo, an Oliver! of a different time and place but just as resourceful. We see India through his eyes – the worst of it, the best of it. But a child can’t survive alone. In order to thrive, Saroo, who doesn’t know the way back home, finds himself adopted out to Australia of all places, to people who open their home and their hearts to those abandoned and lost, the opposite of what our monstrous administration would advocate. The Trump regime wants us to fear and hate those who are not born in America, anyone who might be different. When I think of Lion, my mind and heart think about the children of Syria or Yemen who live amid unimaginable horrors every day. One child was saved in Lion, and he grows up a success by anyone’s definition. He’s able to find his mother because he was never without one. Lion is a beautiful film full of magic and wonder, but it will not be winning Best Director in the feature category. It will likely win in the First Time Director category, as Davis is nominated for both. Had he received an Oscar nod, Lion would have been a formidable competitor.
The DGA will go instead to the guy whose imagination took him through the history of musicals, to perhaps pay homage to his French father with an homage to Jacques Demy. A director who is really a musician and can’t stop the music in every frame, not in this, not in Whiplash. He thinks in musical notes and stanzas, improvising the way a jazz musician would but with the control of an emerging master. La La land is not a movie about reality and it is not a movie about pain. It is a movie about regret, and about how human things often get in the way, and get away from us, when we reach for things we think should matter more. But really, La La Land isn’t about any of these things. It is about the magic of the movies. What happens to us when we can’t get the songs out of our head, and the world we live in can disappear for a few hours and a new one emerges before our eyes. Where there aren’t real-life problems. But there is dancing. Damien Chazelle will win for La La Land because it is unique this year, and because he took a chance and hit a hole-in-one.
When these things happen, Hollywood responds. Because this is who Hollywood is. If my mind and heart are tied up with a different agenda, one that makes winning awards actually mean something, that will always be beside the point. We must never forget that most people do not vote for any reason except as an expression of who they are and what they feel
13th isn’t nominated in the documentary category at the DGA this year, leaving the win free and clear for Ezra Edeleman and O.J.: Made in America. By the way, three directors of color are nominated in the documentary category. But yeah, O.J. can’t lose.