OVP: Best Director
The Nominees Were...
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
My Thoughts: With just one category left until the top prize, you don't want to hear any of my pre-writeup banter, you just want to dive in, so let's get started.
Michel Hazanavicius is one of those come-out-of-nowhere directors that got Oscar's attention after relatively insignificant filmic achievements. This could bode well for him-Orson Welles and Mike Nichols both got nominated very early on in their careers...then again, so did Michael Cimino. Hazanavicius is at his best, directorially, when he has an obvious vision for his film. The suicide scene, the tightest and best directed of the scenes in the film, is clearly something he had exactly in mind when he filmed it-similarly the coatrack and staircase scenes. It's obvious that he's a man of ideas onscreen, and someone that has specific visual goals for his film. You want that in a director. Unfortunately, Hazanavicius's film gets lost when he doesn't have some great piece of symbolism or cuteness to display. When the film simply seems to be paying homage to silent films, rather than trying to say something new through the format, it gets repetitive and a bit tired.
After all of these writeups, I'm of the mind that Marty Scorsese and not Alexander Payne was the chief competition for Hazanavicius. I say this not just because Hugo did stunningly well in the techs, but because Scorsese is doing something that he clearly loves behind the camera in Hugo, and I suspect the Academy would have responded well to that. Scorsese's loving look at a subject he is so passionate about (the celebration of films past and present) resonates in the audience, and when he's at his best, like the scenes of Melies making his movies or when they first see some of Melies films, you get that sense of stark wonder that Scorsese is trying to make-this is what he's hoping will be his Wizard of Oz, his E.T., and in those rare scenes, he comes darn close to achieving that sort of childlike magic that can only permeate from being stunned by the big and exciting in a darkened theater. Those moments are not the full film, though, and for every moment of magic there's a scene featuring groanworthiness like the ones with Sacha Baron Cohen's mugging Station Inspector. Scorsese cannot seem to sustain his brilliance for the entire movie (a feat he has pulled off before, obviously), and for that, the film suffers.
Alexander Payne, who I assume the Academy gave third place, has made great films in the past. Sideways certainly springs to mind, and even better, there's Election, which gave us the single best performance of Reese Witherspoon's career (side note-don't you desperately wish Witherspoon would try something a little out there again? Just because you get your Oscar doesn't mean you don't have to try-we will forgive you wanting to spend six months making out with Tom Hardy and Chris Pine, but come on dear-you can balance it with a visionary director). Which makes the fact that he waited seven years before making a movie after his first Best Picture nomination all the more disappointing when you realize that the film is the plodding, directionless The Descendants. I've gone there before, but George Clooney's character is so adrift and without direction that any sorts of character revelations later in the film come across as convenient and unearned. The film's relationships all ring hollow, as if they're just being discovered for the first time when they clearly have existed for years. This seems particularly odd considering that Payne was so damn good at this sort of fractured family drama in About Schmidt. At the end of the day, despite its many Oscar nominations, I suspect that this will be a footnote sort of film in Payne's otherwise excellent career.
It seems a bit tongue-in-cheek to move now into Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, since directionless is a criticism that has been thrown at Malick in the past. This is, of course, untrue, but it's a criticism that should be mentioned before I start the Malick lovefest to at least acknowledge that there are people out there who don't agree on this front. That said, they are wrong, and Malick's direction is sublime. There's nothing better than ambition realized for a director, and Malick's film, which hopes to tell the creation story through one boy's stern childhood and through, well, the actual creation (aka the Big Bang), and succeeds on both levels. First, there's the tale of the O'Briens, and though the metaphor is a little hitting it on the head, the metaphors of Nature and Grace are perfectly encapsulated by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. And the child performances are so naturalistic, it's as if Malick has simply found a butterfly able to carry a camera to follow around the children on their journey through pre-adolescence. I want to save a little for the Best Picture conversation, but I will just say of Malick's Big Bang scenes that they deliver a beauty and intelligent daring that no one on-screen has attempted since Kubrick's 2001.
Our final nominee is of course, Woody Allen. Woody, who, despite some strong films in recent years (Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona), had not been nominated for directing in seventeen years. What brought him back was both a clever concept, which he executes marvelously, and a complete intoxication with a city, though in this case it's a look at the City of Lights rather than the City that Never Sleeps. Woody has been better, that's for certain (nothing really will top Annie Hall/Manhattan), but that doesn't demean the impressive tale that Allen is bringing to life here-I love the side characters so very much, particularly those played by Corey Stoll and Marion Cotillard, who may be of a different century but still exist in that Allen world of constant reflection and repetitive mistakes. Allen's continual pull into the modern world and the way that he has the audience constantly hoping for a return to the 1920's proves his point that we are all like Owen Wilson-we are always hoping for what isn't real, what isn't our current life. It's a sharp metaphor, and it takes Allen's sharp eye to keep it in focus.
Michel Hazanavicius is one of those come-out-of-nowhere directors that got Oscar's attention after relatively insignificant filmic achievements. This could bode well for him-Orson Welles and Mike Nichols both got nominated very early on in their careers...then again, so did Michael Cimino. Hazanavicius is at his best, directorially, when he has an obvious vision for his film. The suicide scene, the tightest and best directed of the scenes in the film, is clearly something he had exactly in mind when he filmed it-similarly the coatrack and staircase scenes. It's obvious that he's a man of ideas onscreen, and someone that has specific visual goals for his film. You want that in a director. Unfortunately, Hazanavicius's film gets lost when he doesn't have some great piece of symbolism or cuteness to display. When the film simply seems to be paying homage to silent films, rather than trying to say something new through the format, it gets repetitive and a bit tired.
After all of these writeups, I'm of the mind that Marty Scorsese and not Alexander Payne was the chief competition for Hazanavicius. I say this not just because Hugo did stunningly well in the techs, but because Scorsese is doing something that he clearly loves behind the camera in Hugo, and I suspect the Academy would have responded well to that. Scorsese's loving look at a subject he is so passionate about (the celebration of films past and present) resonates in the audience, and when he's at his best, like the scenes of Melies making his movies or when they first see some of Melies films, you get that sense of stark wonder that Scorsese is trying to make-this is what he's hoping will be his Wizard of Oz, his E.T., and in those rare scenes, he comes darn close to achieving that sort of childlike magic that can only permeate from being stunned by the big and exciting in a darkened theater. Those moments are not the full film, though, and for every moment of magic there's a scene featuring groanworthiness like the ones with Sacha Baron Cohen's mugging Station Inspector. Scorsese cannot seem to sustain his brilliance for the entire movie (a feat he has pulled off before, obviously), and for that, the film suffers.
Alexander Payne, who I assume the Academy gave third place, has made great films in the past. Sideways certainly springs to mind, and even better, there's Election, which gave us the single best performance of Reese Witherspoon's career (side note-don't you desperately wish Witherspoon would try something a little out there again? Just because you get your Oscar doesn't mean you don't have to try-we will forgive you wanting to spend six months making out with Tom Hardy and Chris Pine, but come on dear-you can balance it with a visionary director). Which makes the fact that he waited seven years before making a movie after his first Best Picture nomination all the more disappointing when you realize that the film is the plodding, directionless The Descendants. I've gone there before, but George Clooney's character is so adrift and without direction that any sorts of character revelations later in the film come across as convenient and unearned. The film's relationships all ring hollow, as if they're just being discovered for the first time when they clearly have existed for years. This seems particularly odd considering that Payne was so damn good at this sort of fractured family drama in About Schmidt. At the end of the day, despite its many Oscar nominations, I suspect that this will be a footnote sort of film in Payne's otherwise excellent career.
It seems a bit tongue-in-cheek to move now into Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, since directionless is a criticism that has been thrown at Malick in the past. This is, of course, untrue, but it's a criticism that should be mentioned before I start the Malick lovefest to at least acknowledge that there are people out there who don't agree on this front. That said, they are wrong, and Malick's direction is sublime. There's nothing better than ambition realized for a director, and Malick's film, which hopes to tell the creation story through one boy's stern childhood and through, well, the actual creation (aka the Big Bang), and succeeds on both levels. First, there's the tale of the O'Briens, and though the metaphor is a little hitting it on the head, the metaphors of Nature and Grace are perfectly encapsulated by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. And the child performances are so naturalistic, it's as if Malick has simply found a butterfly able to carry a camera to follow around the children on their journey through pre-adolescence. I want to save a little for the Best Picture conversation, but I will just say of Malick's Big Bang scenes that they deliver a beauty and intelligent daring that no one on-screen has attempted since Kubrick's 2001.
Our final nominee is of course, Woody Allen. Woody, who, despite some strong films in recent years (Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona), had not been nominated for directing in seventeen years. What brought him back was both a clever concept, which he executes marvelously, and a complete intoxication with a city, though in this case it's a look at the City of Lights rather than the City that Never Sleeps. Woody has been better, that's for certain (nothing really will top Annie Hall/Manhattan), but that doesn't demean the impressive tale that Allen is bringing to life here-I love the side characters so very much, particularly those played by Corey Stoll and Marion Cotillard, who may be of a different century but still exist in that Allen world of constant reflection and repetitive mistakes. Allen's continual pull into the modern world and the way that he has the audience constantly hoping for a return to the 1920's proves his point that we are all like Owen Wilson-we are always hoping for what isn't real, what isn't our current life. It's a sharp metaphor, and it takes Allen's sharp eye to keep it in focus.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Golden Globes, always a sucker for a celebrity, replaced Malick with George Clooney for his directorial work in The Ides of March (with four nominations, a film they clearly responded to more than Oscar); Martin Scorsese took the statue. The BAFTA Awards may have gone with the more traditional Hazanavicius for its winner, but Payne, Malick, and Woody Allen were all replaced by some seemingly out-of-the-blue nominees like Nicolas Winding Refn for Drive, Lynne Ramsay for We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Toms Alfredson for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Finally, the DGA, which most often lines up with Oscar, gave its top trophy to Hazanavicius as well, leaving out only Malick amongst its nominees to keep in David Fincher for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Performances I Would Have Nominated: As has been recently mentioned, I loved Melancholia, and though he spent most of 2011 as persona non grata, Lars von Trier is a huge part of that. It seems stunning that in a year that brought us The Tree of Life there was a director hoping to find that same ambition. He didn't quite succeed (The Tree of Life is considerably better), but von Trier's film, with its suffocating sense of doom, is so superb, and a darker, more demonic yang to Malick's opus.
Oscar's Choice: Oscar (and Harvey) were not going to be denied their old Hollywood glamour, and The Artist wins another one.
My Choice: It's quite clear I'm going to say Malick, isn't it? There's just no comparison-I will say that he wins out of all of the potential nominees, not just the actual nominees, for me. In second place I put Allen, followed by Scorsese, Hazanavicius, and Payne.
Oscar's Choice: Oscar (and Harvey) were not going to be denied their old Hollywood glamour, and The Artist wins another one.
My Choice: It's quite clear I'm going to say Malick, isn't it? There's just no comparison-I will say that he wins out of all of the potential nominees, not just the actual nominees, for me. In second place I put Allen, followed by Scorsese, Hazanavicius, and Payne.
And now, I'll turn it over to you-which of these five men deserved to win Best Director? Who was wrongfully snubbed in the category? Of all of the performances of the year, who most deserved Best Director of 2011? And are you ready for Best Picture?
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