When Alfonso Cuaron and Damien Chazelle both dominated the Telluride Film Festival this week with films that could be nominated for (and potentially win) Best Picture, it was a reminder of how strange the Oscars have been of late. Cuaron won Best Director for Gravity, a movie that scored a whole bunch of other Oscars. Chazelle won Best Director for La La Land, a movie that scored a whole bunch of other Oscars.
Flip it around and coming up at Toronto you have Steve McQueen, whose 12 Years a Slave beat Gravity and won Best Picture but not Best Director, and Barry Jenkins, whose Moonlight beat La La Land for Best Picture but not Best Director.
If Cuaron or Chazelle wins a second directing Oscar without also winning Best Picture, each will join a small list of directors who have won two directing Oscars without winning Best Picture: Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi), George Stevens (A Place in the Sun and Giant), and Frank Borzage (7th Heaven and Bad Girl).
What is it about these directors and their films that split the vote with the Academy? Why could they not also win Best Picture? Well, it largely comes down to the preferential ballot. Votes for Best Director and Best Picture are not counted the same way. In a competitive year it doesn’t just matter if a movie come in at number one. It matters where else on the ballot the movie turns up. So, if there are five nominees for Best Picture, it’s easy — plurality rules (simply put: the film with the most support after one round of voting wins). Plurality wins brought home the Best Director wins for the movie that was most popular. BUT when you factor in the preferential ballot in the Best Picture category where voting takes place over multiple rounds, things get complicated. The surge that helps a Best Director win might not work as well with in a preferential system because you need to be #1 on many ballots, as well as place high at #2 and #3 and #4 and, in some cases, #5 or #6 on a large share of the other Best Picture ballots in order to hit the majority (50% + 1) level of support needed to win.
Another interesting thing to note (and this is neither here nor there): Damien Chazelle is the only American-born director to win the Oscar for directing since Kathryn Bigelow won it in 2009, almost ten years ago. Weird, right?
2009 — Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
2010 — Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech
2011 — Michel Hazanavicious, The Artist
2012 — Ang Lee, Life of Pi (he is now an American citizen but was not born here)
2013 — Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
2014 — Alejandro G. Iñarritu, Birdman
2015 — Alejandro G. Iñarritu, The Revenant
2016 — Damien Chazelle, La La Land
2017 — Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water
It’s an unprecedented streak of foreign-born winners that Chazelle briefly interrupted. It’s not important in the grand scheme of things, but it is interesting.
By the way, I have never done the flip-side research to find out how many directors have made two Best Picture winners without winning Best Director at least once. It’s relatively rare to win Best Picture without winning a companion director Oscar (though not as rare as it used to be). I suspect it’s never happened. If you’ve ever heard of it, let me know.
2016 — Moonlight/Damien Chazelle for La La Land
2015 — Spotlight/Alejandro G. Inarritu for The Revenant
2013 — 12 Years a Slave/Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity
2012 — Argo/Ang Lee for Life of Pi
2005 — Crash/Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain
2002 — Chicago/Roman Polanski for The Pianist
2000 — Gladiator/Steven Soderbergh for Traffic
1998 — Shakespeare in Love/Steven Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan
1989 — Driving Miss Daisy/Oliver Stone for Born on the Fourth of July
1981 — Chariots of Fire/Warren Beatty for Reds
1972 — The Godfather/Bob Fosse for Cabaret
1967 — In the Heat of the Night/Mike Nichols for The Graduate
1956 — Around the World in 80 Days/George Steven for Giant
1952 — The Greatest Show on Earth/John Ford for The Quiet Man
1951 — An American in Paris/George Stevens for A Place in the Sun
1949 — All the King’s Men/Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives
1948 — Hamlet/John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1940 — Rebecca/John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath
1937 — The Life of Emile Zola/Leo McCarey for The Awful Truth
1936 — The Great Ziegfeld/Frank Capra for Mr. Deed Goes to Town
1935 — Mutiny on the Bounty/John Ford for The Informer
1930/31 — Cimarron/Norman Taurog for Skippy
1928/29 — The Broadway Melody/Frank Lloyd for The Divine Lady
1927/28 — Wings/Frank Borzage, 7th Heaven and Lewis Milestone, Two Arabian Knights (comedy category)
