OVP: Director (2013)

OVP: Best Director (2013)

The Nominees Were...

Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity

Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave

Alexander Payne, Nebraska

David O. Russell, American Hustle

Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

My Thoughts: Frequently, you have to wonder what drives someone to split their ballot between Picture and Director in the Academy.  In so many people’s minds, these are essentially the same thing.  The director helms the picture, is involved (and many times, responsible) for where it heads and almost every aspect of the film’s ultimate product.  It seems smart that they are synonymous in the minds of voters.  And yet, on occasion, even when they have the option not to, they end up splitting the vote, which was the case with 2013, when the Best Picture winner beat the Best Director winner and vice versa.

It’s hard to argue with the results, at least when it comes to Best Director, however.  Gravity is clearly a director’s achievement.  It takes a visionary to conceive of something so vast and yet so clearly rendered.  It isn’t that we haven’t gone into space before as a cinematic audience: Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas have ensured that we have ventured there countless times before.  But Alfonso Cuaron managed to do something we haven’t felt in a long-time: he made it real and within our reach.  Though of course Sandra Bullock is floating around in some earthbound feat of technology, you can feel the sheer grandeur of the heavens, the enormity of the earth, and even more daunting and petrifying, the stunning infinity of what goes beyond our atmosphere.  Cuaron’s direction uses that pressure, the way that we cling to the world we know, as vast and expansive and insanely large as it may be to an effect I’ve never seen before in a movie.

Steve McQueen also knows how to play a bit with the world beyond our own, though he does it in a far more controlled environment.  Set in the American South, 12 Years a Slave, the best choices that McQueen makes as a director aren’t the wide expanses of the humid South, but instead by showing us the moments just beyond our hero Solomon’s reach-McQueen gives us just enough side moments, with hints of future atrocities that are taking place on neighboring farms or indications of the thousands of other men and women put into slavery.  The actual central story occasionally veers too closely to a traditional narrative (mostly because it’s based on a true story), and I wasn’t wild about the framing of the ending, but there are so many distinct touches in this film that you can easily forgive the occasional tangent into the expected.

The Wolf of Wall Street was Marty’s eighth nomination for Best Director (and his twelfth overall-the man will be discussed quite a bit in our OVP write-ups).  Therefore, it’s not unexpected for Marty to be in this lineup.  What is unexpected is the way that Marty can continue to create controversy.  I know that one of the conversation pieces about Wolf of Wall Street was regarding Marty’s alleged glamorization of Jordan Belfort’s life, but let’s take a step back and wonder what this actually meant.  Unlike, say, Nebraska (oh, we’re getting there), Wolf is a film that can pull multiple different angles and viewpoints into its web.  Certain people defended Scorsese’s opulent, oftentimes garish look into the world of wealth-at-all-costs, others lambasted him for turning Belfort into a humane victim-of-circumstance.  Personally, I was in the middle, but the fact that Scorsese can still create a movie that is epic in scope and be the most rightfully controversial of the bunch is a testament to his continued care toward his filmography.  The Wolf of Wall Street is occasionally overlong, but it’s always fascinating to watch, and Scorsese continues to have something fascinating to say to the audience.

That’s less than I can say for Alexander Payne in Nebraska (see, we got there).  Payne’s lack of a directorial vision is clear, or at least it’s clear and far too convoluted to be celebrated.  The movie is essentially supposed to be about the debilitating way that Alzheimer’s rips apart the moments we expected to have as we got older, and the way that only a few family members know you through your life and get to be there for the good, and more so, the bad.  However, through Payne’s lens these interesting thoughts that the script occasionally has are bounded down by trying for too many “let’s-show-how-simple-the-flyover-states-are” comic moments and too little unearned payoff, particularly with the two sons and their journey.  Payne rarely has anything interesting to say with where his camera is pointing, frequently just catching reaction shots and not lingering in a way that made Election far more interesting than expected.  If his filmography is going to continue to be a downward slide, my hope is that the Academy at least realizes this so I don’t have to continue to watch his increasingly tepid and boring pictures.

The final nominee is another director who has traded the more interesting for the conventional.  There’s more to like in American Hustle than Nebraska, mainly thanks to the occasionally interesting performances and the outlandish but fairly accurate makeup work (I think this will probably be my last gripe in this direction, but what was AMPAS thinking skipping American Hustle for that trophy?).  However, Russell’s work itself is a total letdown.  This film is too all-over-the-place in where it takes its characters and frequently takes tangents (like the entire Robert de Niro extended-cameo thing) that go nowhere and has the characters so constantly second guess themselves that you leave not knowing who they were, and not in a good way (the only way that the ending pays off is if we care enough about Bale and Adams’ characters to actually feel that the wool has been pulled over our eyes, and we don’t know them as their true selves enough for that to payoff).  All-in-all, a step down from the interesting places he took The Fighter a few years back, and like Payne, a continual lack of payoff in his work.

Other Precursor Contenders: Best Director is one of those rare fields where the Globes, Guilds, and BAFTA awards all have the same number of nominees (aside from the supporting actor races, this is the only OVP category where this is the case).  Therefore, we should expect uniformity, and for the most part that's what we received.  The Globes gave their top trophy to Cuaron, but skipped Scorsese in favor of Paul Greengrass for Captain Phillips.  The DGA Awards also honored Cuaron, and also found room for Greengrass, but in this case it was at the expense of Alexander Payne.  The BAFTA Awards also honored Cuaron (sensing a trend here?), also honored Greengrass, and once again we saw a miss for Mr. Payne.  All-in-all, Greengrass was clearly the sixth place and one of the odder misses considering that Payne's picture is even if you throw out your opinions of the film, less of a director's achievement on paper.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: I certainly would have found room for Sofia Coppola, who created something mesmerizing and a uniquely true vision in The Bling Ring (her films, unlike Payne's, continue to get more interesting and add to her overall filmography, even if less people and critics are seeing them).  I also would have found room for Spike Jonze's Her, a monumental look at the ways we learn to love and use technology to replace humanity in our lives.  And I'd finally like some sort of recognition for Richard Linklater's continued brilliance with the Jesse-and-Celine trilogy, all three of which were wonderful, with Before Midnight being the most bitter and perhaps the most "directorial" of the films.

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar continued the trend of honoring Cuaron, with McQueen and Russell falling behind.

My Choice: I'm going to go with the consensus here-Cuaron's work in creating a unique filmic achievement in Gravity is too difficult to ignore, and why would you want to?  McQueen follows, with Marty, Russell, and Payne coming behind.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Did you also find Cuaron to be the perfect choice for the winner, or were you hoping for McQueen?  Does anyone else feel that Payne and Russell continue to have less interesting things to say the more celebrated they become?  And why is Marty immune from this trend?  Share your thoughts, as well as your choice for Best Director of 2013, in the comments!

Also in 2013: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score,  Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2013

Past Best Director Contests: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012