“I feel like people are always talking about the business and how hard it is. But, [David] Fincher’s got a terrific movie. Alejandro’s got this movie. Wes [Anderson] has made one of his best movies ever. Richard Linklater made another great movie. Paul Thomas Anderson has made another great movie. Bennett Miller’s movie is incredible. Do you know what I mean? I mean like, c’mon. You can’t get cynical. I’ve been going to the New York Film Festival. Noah Baumbach’s got his movie. I’ve been going to the New York Film Festival every other night because there are so many. The Dardenne Brothers movie… what more do you want? How many good movies do you expect there to be?” Edward Norton talking to Indiewire
Some directors last. Some don’t. Some make you remember their names because each time they hold you in their capable hands in the quiet, dark calm of the movie theater they change you. The good ones do anyway. The best ones put their hands all over you, challenge your sensibilities, perplex you in unexpected ways. Not giving you what you want is often the best way to make a film. Because we judge movies by consensus on Twitter now and with various think pieces and/or social justice Tumblrs we often forget that art is not there to complete you.
The standout directors this year represent varying potential roads for the industry and Oscar voters. The Oscars put the period on the end of the sentence, claiming the right here, right now film to signify what captured their hearts and the zeitgeist to become worthy of being called one of the year’s best.
Throughout most of Oscar history, we’ve treated Best Picture and Best Director as conjoined twins. Splitting them was a rarity. The best picture was always credited to the director. In the silly awards community, this is somewhat “controversial.” I’m one of those who firmly believes that if it’s the year’s best picture the director should be the one who gets the credit. This is so with animated feature, documentary feature and the shorts. The director takes the credit. The only time they don’t is with the year’s top prize, where the producers take the credit.
The director is often awarded as a compliment to the year’s top film. Except when it isn’t. Though it’s rare, we’ve seen picture/director splits for the past two years. In 2012 the DGA announced after Oscar ballots were turned in. The consensus either had not yet congealed or the Academy’s choices for Best Director did not agree with that consensus. Either way, the two presumed “locks,” Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow, were not included on the list. Ironically, both films dealt with politics in the middle east. One comedically where Americans emerged the heroes. One more ambiguously, where Americans emerged victorious but lost. The combination of the likable alternative to the darker version of America, a popular actor who made good getting a perceived “snub” set the stage for a dramatic win for Argo, even without a Best Director nomination.
Once that extraordinary event happened, it seemed to represent an amicable “divorce” between Picture and Director. It suddenly seem fair game to judge picture and director differently, and/or to provide a simpler way to reward BOTH beloved films. In 2012’s case, Ang Lee became the default winner, topping the consensus favorite Steven Spielberg. Had Spielberg won, he would have joined an elite group of directors who won three Best Directing Oscars. Only three in all of their 87 year history have done it: John Ford, with 4, and William Wyler and Frank Capra with 3. Now, Ang Lee has won 2 directing Oscars (Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi) without his films winning Best Picture, another rarity shared only by George Stevens, who never won director the same year his film won picture (A Place in the Sun and Giant).
All the same, 2012 was not your usual split because the Best Picture frontrunner did not have a Best Director option. A true split happens when both are nominated and voters decide to split the vote. In Argo’s case they were going to choose it for Best Picture no matter what.
Last year, however, a more traditional split occurred, again breaking a historical record for “two splits in a row” and this time voters intentionally did it. Alfonso Cuaron would win for Gravity (which would then win the night’s most Oscars, seven in all) and 12 Years a Slave would squeak by with Picture, Screenplay and Supporting Actress. This same scenario played out in 1967 when voters settled on a split between In the Heat of the Night and The Graduate. But this split vote was traditional in the sense that the Best Picture winner won the night’s most Oscars, while The Graduate won a single Oscar: Best Director. While it happens that sometimes a film can win only one award for Best Picture and nothing else, it’s rare for a two-film race to give most of the Oscars to the film that wins Best Director but not Best Picture. Such was the case with Cabaret and The Godfather, and even 2012’s Argo and Life of Pi. It happens. It’s just not common.
The Academy’s small branch of 400 or so directors do seem to have their preferences when it comes to choosing great directors. For instance, they nominated Tom Hooper for the King’s Speech but have never nominated Christopher Nolan. The DGA nominated him three times — once for Memento, again for the Dark Knight and again for Inception. But the Academy? He’s been nominated twice for screenplay and once for producing Inception, which barely made it in with a Best Picture nomination on a ten nominee ballot in 2010.
While the DGA loves their success stories, the Academy tends to be more peculiar when it comes to choosing best. Generally, they fall in line with the DGA but lately they haven’t been. They chose Michael Haneke and Benh Zeitlin over Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck in 2012. Last year, Paul Greengrass got into the DGA but Alexander Payne was the Oscar branch’s choice.
Like Alfonso Cuaron last year with Gravity, and Ang Lee with Life of Pi, Interstellar fits nicely into what movies are likely to look like in the future: auteurs bringing that sensibility to effects movies, which aren’t traditionally the Academy’s favorite thing. The one thing these films all have in common, of course, is that they are both emotion driven and actor driven. That makes them acceptable to the Academy in ways that films like Avatar wasn’t.
But. Still. We’re talking about a version of Hollywood’s future that the actor-driven Academy might not be willing to give themselves over to. Some of them will make the jump easily — the composers, production designers, sound, animators, editors — while others aren’t going to go in so easily. For instance, last year’s win for Gravity for Director and Avatar’s massive popularity proved that writing isn’t the most important thing anymore. Visual effects can sometimes trump story. Also, fewer actors were needed to tell these stories. Again, visual effects trumped even the actors.
Many of the more traditional old-guard directors also might not be willing or even interested in throwing themselves into the effects-driven movies that are going to soon dominate the studios and multiplexes. Some of them don’t even like 3D yet. Making the leap to digital is one thing. Altering the art of storytelling, of the very fiber of filmmaking as we’ve known it for decades, is something else.
Therefore, we have once again two worlds converging on the Oscar race. Hollywood in the future and the grass roots traditionalism of what we used to call movies.
David Fincher’s Gone Girl and Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Birdman scratch the skin layer off the ways we have deceived ourselves in modern life by buying into illusions. Gone Girl is about avatar living, knowing that there is always a better you waiting online, an image you can carefully cultivate to advertise your happy life. Fincher and Flynn have scissored the pages of the book and pasted it back together as almost a satire of its source, removing what so many fans of the book turned to for some sanity. Fincher has hollowed out Amazing Amy but brought to life the monster. This subtle but significant adaptation has unearthed a lean, surreal masterpiece that it is not easily run through the Big Mac-o-meter for quick and easy understanding.
When the lights come up, Gone Girl demands you dig deeper to think about what you just saw without ever telling you exactly what you should be feeling. The chill it leaves you with takes time to shake off — but once you do, and if you go back and watch it again, a completely different movie emerges. Now you know where it’s headed, so watching the knot untangle backwards is an experience unmatched by any other film this year.
Fincher brings to this year’s Oscar race a career full of unpredictable turns, with critics not knowing exactly how to define his work. They want to say Gone Girl isn’t Se7en or Fight Club until they remember that those films were head-scratchers when they came out but over time resonate more brightly than they ever did. They want to say Gone Girl isn’t Zodiac, nor the one film they all could agree on as perfection, The Social Network. What they aren’t comfortable concluding yet is that he doesn’t do what Tarantino does — make essentially the same type of film that pulls the same types of ingredients from the bag. He doesn’t have a “return to mob” movies like Scorsese, or a “return to sappy sci-fi” like Spielberg. At best, they can conclude he is most interested in making his viewers uncomfortable, the one unifying theme of all Fincher’s films.
Gone Girl could be called a “departure” for Fincher — certainly it’s made money faster than any of his previous works and is on track to be highest earner — but the one thing it has that’s similar to his other films is that extraordinary eye for framing and that gift of insight that always looks for the alternative take, the unexpected reaction, resulting in a viewing experience where you have absolutely no idea what’s coming next and you can’t easily read the people you’re watching on screen.
Also departing from his usual oeuvre is Alejandro G. Inarritu, whose Birdman is filmed and edited to look like one long take. There are roughly 40 cuts, according to Kris Tapley, but they are seamless. With a drumbeat score and a rapid-fire script, Inarittu owes a debt to Chivo (his and Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar winning cinematographer on Gravity) who captures the entirety of Birdman with what appears to be a handheld camera. Watching Birdman is a dizzying, electrifying experience, and unlike anything we’ve really seen from Inarritu.
Birdman, like Gone Girl is virtuoso directing by an artist at the top of his game, and another film in the race that slyly comments on the right here, right now of 2014. The question of relevance, and more importantly, how fame now can mean simply being filmed running through Times Square in your underwear and cheap stunts that go viral than offering up anything of substance to the gaping collective that waits, saliva dripping, for the next humiliation.
Both Fincher and Inarritu are are directors at the top of their game, working with masters of the craft from music to writing to acting to cinematography and editing. These are the type of films that Best Picture contenders are usually made from — a collaboration of various expert arms of the film industry.
The frontrunner in the category is Richard Linklater who has, as a writer and director, taken on a 12-year project with Boyhood. While Boyhood is not so much a departure for Linklater, it’s the realization of an entire career. It takes elements from so many of his films, and is complete with his soul brother and muse, Ethan Hawke, and is a rumination of life. Linklater is a writer and director who has not stopped asking questions, or wondering about the precious time we have in our too short lives. Boyhood is the only film that really captures that breathtaking speed of time passing before your eyes. To return again and again to the story, which feels like it was filmed in a couple of months.
Other films that are fictional accounts include Wes Anderson’s crazy/magical The Grand Budapest Hotel and the upcoming Into the Woods, and Interstellar. Wes Anderson, like Linklater, has yet to be embraced by the Academy, despite a growing and already impressive canon. The Grand Budapest Hotel defied expectations and made a good deal of money, surprising given its early release date. Gorgeous art direction, costumes, cinematography — this is a film that hails wholly from Anderson’s own imagination, much like Interstellar, where we will once again have the chance to deep dive into Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s abstract storytelling set amid state of the art special effects.
Interstellar screens tonight but I won’t see it until tomorrow. Already it’s earning buzz and raves by those who have seen it, though the critics and voters haven’t yet gotten a crack at it. It’s sure to be the year’s highest grossing film, or close. It will have to beat Guardians of the Galaxy but if it does, it will do it without pre-branding, no easy feat these days.
The rest of the Best Picture race is made up of true stories, or bending the truth slightly stories. Most of those upcoming are of heroes — like Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. Or films based on true events, like A Most Violent Year.
Bennett Miller heads for a nomination threepeat with Foxcatcher, possibly his third Best Picture nomination for the third film he ever made. Foxcatcher is one of two films based on a famous but heroic figure. Miller takes the story in a slightly different direction in that it’s easy to see what American has become through the lens of this film — the poor get screwed and the rich get away with it.
Miller’s own legacy is two great films, Capote and Moneyball. Foxcatcher makes three. It is being downgraded for Best Picture right now because pundits deem it “too dark” to make it in. The relatively unknown James Marsh (Theory of Everything), the Imitation Game’s Morten Tyldum, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year and Whiplash’s Damien Chazelle are the new kids on the block. Either all of them will get in, pushing the vets out the door, or they won’t. It’s tough to gauge right now.
One funny thing about this year is that pundits seem convinced that the Academy “is cool” on David Fincher when he’s been nominated twice already, and at the same time they have Christopher Nolan as a lock for Interstellar when he’s never been nominated. While I agree that, sight unseen, Nolan seems like a lock for the category, it would be a break from tradition if they went for it, which they probably will. You never hear pundits talk about their “Nolan problem,” though. Either they aren’t interested or they aren’t paying attention.
Even with Nolan’s collection of box office hits, only Inception has cracked the Best Picture lineup and it did it with ten nomination slots, not nine. Voters now have only five slots. They will pick their five favorites of the year. Right now, we have no idea what those will be because of so many late breaking movies that many of us have not seen. Still, money has a way of deciding things, at least where Best Picture is concerned. But it matters for Best Director now, too, after the past two years have given Best Director to an effects driven blockbuster.
Here is how Best Picture breaks down over ten years, from cost to domestic take. Split vote years are bolded.
2013 – 12 Years a Slave – cost $20 million/Domestic take $56 million
2012 – Argo – cost $44 million | Domestic take $136 million
2011 – The Artist – cost $15 million | Domestic take $44 million
2010 – The King’s Speech – cost $15 million | Domestic take $135 million
2009 – The Hurt Locker – cost $15 million | Domestic take $17 million
2008 – Slumdog Millionaire – cost $15 million | Domestic take $141 million
2007 – No Country for Old Men – cost $25 million | Domestic take $74 million
2006 – The Departed – cost $90 million | Domestic take $132 million
2005 – Crash – cost $6.5 million | Domestic take $56 million
(Ang Lee, BM’s box office take: $83 million)
2004 MDB – cost cost $30 million | Domestic take $100 million
2003 – ROTK cost $94 million | Domestic take $377 million
And this year?
Boyhood – cost $4 million | Domestic take so far $23 million and counting
Gone Girl – cost $61 million | Domestic take so far $111 million and counting
The Grand Budapest Hotel cost $30 million | Domestic take $59 million
Birdman – cost $18 million | Domestic take so far in limited release $538 thou and counting
Whiplash – cost $3.3 million | Domestic take so far in limited release $401 thou and counting
In the end, Best Director and Best Picture continue to be up in the air, with a few choice names leading the pack. Though it feels at once like we’re waging war against superheroes, it also feels like there’s more opportunity than ever before. It’s nearly impossible to do what David Fincher has done with Gone Girl, it must be repeated: create a studio movie starring an adult woman that is aimed at adults with an ambiguous ending and dark subject matter that can earn $100 million in three weeks? Maybe he’ll pry open a door that’s been closed for far too long. Open doors, open windows, new life, new light.