Best Director – How a Split with Best Picture is More Likely with Expanded Ballot (POLL)

For years now, here at Awards Daily and formerly on Oscarwatch, we’ve ruminated on the marriage between Best Picture and Best Director. For the most part (roughly 75% of the time) they have formed a perfect union, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer. That percentage was even higher in the years that followed Andrew Sarris and his influential auteur theory. But over the past decade, the correlation has dropped to around 50%. With an expanded ballot, both during the earliest days of the Oscar race and again now (since 2009), Best Picture and Best Director no longer seem to need each other. Theirs is no longer a monogamous relationship. Best Director has seen fit to hook up with other movies a lot more frequently now than the one that wins Best Picture.

It makes sense because the way the ballots are marked and tabulated to choose Best Director and every other category is different from the way Best Picture is chosen — because Best Picture takes the average, more or less, of general likability, while Best Director and every other category takes just the most votes instead of requiring a majority (in fact it’s often a plurality). So since 2009 we’ve had:

2009 – The Hurt Locker/Kathryn Bigelow
2010 – The King’s Speech/Tom Hooper
2011 – The Artist/Michel Hazanavicius
2012 – Argo/Ang Lee, Life of Pi (Ben Affleck not nominated)
2013 – 12 Years a Slave/Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
2014 – Birdman/Alejandro G. Inarritu
2015 – Spotlight/Alejandro G. Inarritu, The Revenant
2016 – Moonlight/Damien Chazelle, La La Land

Looking over the list, you see that it’s pretty much an even split between films that won both and films that didn’t. But you really have to stretch it back to see what it was like before the ballot expanded to get why it happens more frequently than it used to and why. Let’s go back 20 years:

1989-Driving Miss Daisy/Oliver Stone Born on the 4th of July (Bruce Beresford not nominated)
1990 – Dances With Wolves/Kevin Costner
1991 – The Silence of the Lambs/Jonathan Demme
1992 – Unforgiven/Clint Eastwood
1993 – Schindler’s List/Steven Spielberg
1994 – Forrest Gump/Robert Zemeckis
1995 – Braveheart/Mel Gibson
1996 – The English Patient/Anthony Minghella
1997 – Titanic/Jim Cameron
1998 – Shakespeare in Love/Steven Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan
1999 – American Beauty/Sam Mendes
2000 – Gladiator/Steven Soderbergh, Traffic
2001 – A Beautiful Mind/Ron Howard
2002 – Chicago/Roman Polanski, The Pianist
2003 – Return of the King/Peter Jackson
2004 – Million Dollar Baby/Clint Eastwood
2005 – Crash/Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
2006 – The Departed/Martin Scorsese
2007 – No Country for Old Men/The Coens
2008 – Slumdog Millionaire/Danny Boyle

That’s five times in 20 years vs. four times in eight years. 20% vs. 50%. In each of the instances where the votes split in the past there was a strange reason for it, an odd kind of upset that no one really could have predicted, like Crash and Brokeback Mountain. Shakespeare in Love was also a big and famous upset.

The SAG Ensemble award tended to play a part in many of these somehow. Crash and Shakespeare in Love and Chicago all won the ensemble award and then won Best Picture. Traffic won the Ensemble award against Gladiator. With Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Beresford was never nominated at all: not for DGA, not for Oscar.

Those examples aren’t all that different from the way we can sort of predict a split now: if the big guilds do not align 100% behind one movie, a split may be in the making. It’s just that now the division is much more readily expected and not really a surprise. There is no longer an expectation that Best Picture and Best Director will be united, and this too may affect the way voters are willing to break apart the two categories. In the old days, the director was indisputable king. Now, not so much. Voters can award a director whose work they admire while feeling comfortable about picking a different film for Best Picture. The times have really changed in that way.

Since we don’t yet know what kind of year we’re in, whether it’s a split year or a unified year, here are some facts to get the party started:

1. If Jordan Peele, who has never been nominated, wins he will be the first black director to win in all of Oscar history.
2. If Dee Rees is nominated, she will be the first black woman ever nominated for Best Director.
3. Dunkirk’s Christopher Nolan has never been nominated for Best Director.
4. The Shape of Water’s Guillermo Del Toro has never been nominated for Best Director.
5. Darkest Hour’s Joe Wright has never been nominated for Best Director.
6. Three Billboards’ Martin McDonagh has never been nominated for Best Director.
7. The Florida Project’s Sean Baker has never been nominated for Best Director.
8. Battles of the Sexes’ Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have never been nominated for Best Director.
9. Lady Bird’s Greta Gerwig has never been nominated for Best Director.

And on and on it goes. For any of these to be nominated they have to just past these Academy favorites:

Alexander Payne, Downsizing
Steven Spielberg, The Post
Ridley Scott, All the Money in the World
Kathryn Bigelow, Detroit

But it’s very likely that Best Director could very well be populated with first timers 5/5. And with that, here are those that I believe are the frontrunners for the Best Director and their “Oscar stories.”

1. Christopher Nolan for Dunkirk — for a man who changed the game for filmmakers with pioneering efforts in visual effects and storytelling, whose films have a lifetime gross of $2,004,312,766, who has remained devoted to actual film over digital throughout his entire career, and who has embraced the IMAX format with gusto, Nolan is primed and ready at last to collect on the promise of his status in the film industry. Dunkirk is his most personal film. Nearly wordless, difficult to film, and heartstopping every minute, it’s a high achievement and easily one of the best films of the year. To many he seems unbeatable.
2. Guillermo Del Toro for The Shape of Water — What a burst of genius and creativity Del Toro is. His pure imagination has birthed art, language, poetic imagery on film from the horrifying to the sublime. There is no more romantic and beautiful film this year than this unlikely love story between an odd duck of a woman, nearly invisible to everyone else, and a water creature pulled from his habitat to be studied and perhaps weaponized. This film unlike no other also serves as a sly referendum on the Trump administration and all of the fear and oppression it represents. Del Toro takes us into the world of water and uses it as a metaphor for female sexuality in all of its fluidity and power. Del Toro has never been nominated, even for Pan’s Labyrinth. He too could win if the voters love the film.
3. Joe Wright for Darkest Hour — For a guy who resisted making a standard PBS-like historical drama of the Downton Abbey variety, and instead turns his portrait of Churchill into an internal debate, an intimate study of an outsider to convince many of those who doubted him, and to take on the challenge standing up to Hitler, and to inspire a nation to believe they could beat the Nazis even though they were down for the count. Wright’s film is a visual feast of interesting shots and cuts, never resting, never boring. Anchored by Gary Oldman’s brilliant performance, we are brought inside Churchill’s relentlessness, intelligence, and acerbic wit in a way we’ve never been before.
4. Martin McDonagh for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — To go into McDonaugh’s world is to open yourself up to the crude, bare, raw language of this writer and filmmaker who has endeavored to bring his singular point of view to the American South rather than remain in his native Ireland. His work is always filled with moments of absurdity mixed with tragedy so that you never really know what’s coming next. One minute it’s funny, the next it’s deeply moving. Working with a tight, brilliant ensemble, McDanagh’s film stands out from the rest as unique — not to mention that his film just won the audience award in Toronto.
5. Jordan Peele for Get Out — Peele’s film does what no other horror film has ever done. It turns American racism into a kind of surreal dark comedy from the perspective of an outsider who is forever wary while everyone around him is pretending he is an insider. In the world of Get Out, to even mention racism would be an unforgivable sin. Everyone is supposed to smile and pretend everything is all right, and for most of the people on screen they seem convinced that it is. Except that we’re brought into the world of gas lighting when you can see what seems plainly obvious and everyone else is telling you it isn’t there. Get Out is unpredictable, vicious, hilarious and absolutely brilliant.

And those who may challenge these five:

1. Sean Baker for The Florida Project — A second film from the guy who made a movie on an iPhone and is already the favorite of many who have seen it (which I have not yet).
2. Dee Rees, Mudbound — A movie that is one of the few epics about race and war.
3. Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird — A stunning debut by Gerwig about a complicated teenager fighting her way of the normal life that’s been planned out for her as she heads off to college.
4. Patty Jenkins, Wonder Woman — the longest of long shots, but you never know.

And then, you know, there’s always Steven Spielberg, whose film The Post could become one of the top five.

Either way, its an exciting year for Best Director. Full predictions coming later today.

Here’s a poll for our readers to weigh in with your expectations: