I was going to write a full reaction to all of the Oscar nominees, but since the nominees were announced some time ago and the Golden Globes have just passed, I feel that the only category I have anything else to say about at this point is the Best Director nominees. Don't be sad, because I'll be breaking down the other categories in the Oscar predictions post, which will come closer to the actual award show.
The reason I chose the Best Director category for this post is because it is a pretty accurate summarization of the year in movies, and gives us evidence of how strong criticism from outside parties have already affected the Oscar race. Best Director is also an extremely subjective award, and this year, more than any other year in recent memory, we have a shift from including five strong nominees to excluding fantastic films based on pre-conceived ideas about them. In addition, there are only five slots for a Best Director nomination, as opposed to a maximum of ten for Best Picture, which creates a maddening paradox.
Why is this so? Just take a look at history. Over the past 26 years, 21 films have won both the Best Director Oscar and the Best Picture Oscar. Since 1999, only three Best Director winners have failed to see their film win Best Picture. The recent exceptions were ones I agreed with. In 1999 Steven Spielberg won the directing award for Saving Private Ryan, arguably his finest film outside of Schindler's List, but lost Best Picture when Harvey Weinstein bribed the Academy to vote for Shakespeare in Love. The other exceptions include Roman Polanski's 2003 victory for The Pianist (Chicago won BP) and Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain in 2006 (Crash won BP).
Why does this matter? Because outside of five exceptions, the seeming definition of a Best Director winner is the person who directed the best film of the year (the Best Picture winner). They don't nominate the finest direction of a film, but rather the merit of the film itself. This is drastically unfair, especially in the past few years, when there have been more Best Picture nominees than Best Director nominees. We can basically cancel out the chances of an Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, or Les Miserables Best Picture victory because the Academy has already chosen their five best films for the Best Director nomination. The other three are included in the Best Picture category for entertainment purposes for the awards show itself, not because they stand any chance of winning.
The Best Director award is thus a severely flawed one for this reason. As I said, the films are not nominated for being finely directed, but for being good movies. Best Director should literally mean "Best Director", not "Person who's name comes last in the opening credits for the Best Picture winner". Let's look at Les Miserables. The movie had its problems, yes. It's been rightly criticized for bland in-your-face cinematography. But lest we forget, Best Cinematography is also an Academy Award. Best Director is an entirely different award. Tom Hooper took the risk of letting his actors sing live (which, in my opinion, paid off very well), and adapted the stage musical into a powerful, riveting film version. He directed this extremely difficult adaptation, something an ordinary director could not do. His ability to do so should have earned him a nomination.
The two most maddening and perplexing exclusions from the category, however, are those of Django Unchained's Quentin Tarantino and Zero Dark Thirty's Kathryn Bigelow. These exclusions did not happen because of concrete, technical issues like Les Miserables, but because of pressure put on the Academy based on the films' content. Tarantino's choices in Django Unchained (outside of letting Jamie Foxx play the lead) were all fantastic. Every element of the movie was absolutely sublime. He utilized the little things (soundtrack, staging, costumes, his own personal style) better than anybody in film this year. If not for the direction of Tarantino, Django Unchained would not have been as good of a movie as it was. However, it seems that the older, white voters of the Academy (average age in the mid-60s) didn't feel comfortable allowing Tarantino to be nominated for a movie about a slave killing slave owners. Tarantino is white, and made a movie that uses the N-word 109 times, and so he must be punished for it, plain and simple.
Last but not least, there's Kathryn Bigelow. My thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty and its exclusion have been made, but no words can really express how big of a travesty it is that she wasn't nominated (sealing the movie's fate for Best Picture, but that's beside the point). The movie was stunningly directed. I know there's a raging debate about the film's depiction of torture, but that doesn't matter. Frankly, a movie could contain nothing but a woman making grilled cheese sandwiches for an hour and a half, but if it's the best directed movie of the year, it should be nominated. And regardless of the subject matter, ZDT was brilliant. Federal lawmakers such as John McCain and Dianne Feinstein are taking the floor in Congress not to solve our fiscal cliff issue, but to criticize the finest film in a long while about it's torture scenes, which they HAVE NOT EVEN SEEN. And the Academy members are reading the "Does Zero Dark Thirty Promote Torturing Prisoners?" articles and have made the decision that they'd rather reward Lincoln, a three-hour self-congratulations for white people saving black people from slavery, than start a national controversy by nominating Kathryn Bigelow for the Oscar.
You suck, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and you should be ashamed of your cowardice.
No comments:
Post a Comment