OVP: Director (2021)

OVP: Best Director (2021)

The Nominees Were...

Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza

Kenneth Branagh, Belfast

Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car

Steven Spielberg, West Side Story

My Thoughts: We are on the penultimate contest of the 2021 race, and, in a testament to the films of 2021, I'm still not tired of these movies yet.  Usually when I write these, I get kind of exhausted.  Especially in the past 15 years (which has been the bulk of our focus for the OVP), the Academy is so repetitive with their nominees (the same 8-10 movies in every category) that it's hard not to get bored.  But in 2021, they picked such a worthy vintage, as is evidenced by this fine crew of filmmakers, that I can't really get mad even if we've been to all of these places before.

The movie we have discussed the least of the bunch is Drive My Car, which is only on its third of four nominations (I anticipate we'll hit Best Picture & My Ballot in the next 48 hours to close out this season).  I have discussed this before, but I think that the film's steady hand and some of its risks with length really work.  It takes its time, especially with our two leads' journey, and while it short-changes the side characters, that feels more a fault of the writer than the director.  Hamaguchi's work here is measured and disciplined, and worth the payoff.

Jane Campion is one of those filmmakers that you breathe a sigh of relief when they win a directing Oscar, as you know she'd join Hitchcock, Kubrick, & Altman on the list of "embarrassing misses" for AMPAS.  That she won for such a wonderfully-controlled western is icing on the cake.  Power of the Dog is very much a product of its director.  She has to incorporate the vast wilderness (admittedly, not the American frontier it's implied to be, and it shows) of this world that swallows many of its characters without making the audience get too distracted.  It helps that she remains disciplined & focused on the four primary characters, her camera rarely moving off of them.  It's a triptych told as a quartet, and the direction is appropriately calculated.

Kenneth Branagh's Belfast is also quite controlled, and briefer than you'd expect for a biopic about a filmmaker who is not known for his brevity.  That choice to bounce & quickly give us snippets of his young life rather than drawn out treatises is so wise-the best asset Branagh has as a director is his cast, wonderfully brimming with chemistry.  I do feel like this film, more than any other cited by Oscar, is borrowing from previous films (you can't help but think the phrase "Cinema Paradiso" on repeat throughout this movie), and the way the film occasionally crosses into the present time feels unnecessary.  But I don't mind that too much, nor am I really torn up that the movie isn't darker (not all coming-of-age films need to be insanely depressing, even when they're about tough historical eras).

Steven Spielberg at once had the most difficult task of the five directors here, bringing to life the greatest musical score of the 20th Century (easy) while living in the shadow of one of the most beloved Best Picture winners of all-time (hard).  He almost completely succeeds, doing so by adding in just a little bit extra around side characters the first movie short-shifted (namely Riff & Valentina), and giving us inspired restaging of a number of the musical numbers.  Not all of them work ("America," in particular, feels like it's not up to the original, and the Jets choreography in the beginning is too repetitive), but when it dazzles (like the scene at the dance), you almost forget the Wise & Robbins outing.

Paul Thomas Anderson is (kind of) the only one of these five without an Oscar (it's so stupid they don't give the International Feature Film Oscar to a person instead of a country).  You know he'll get one eventually, though, and hopefully it'll be for a movie as good as Licorice Pizza, his most autobiographical film to date.  The decisions of the film are so smart-giving us a dreamy world largely in the perspective of Cooper Hoffman's charming leading man, the sort of story that plays not as reality but instead as a memory you think back upon as an adult.  The staging of some of the scenes (especially those with Bradley Cooper) are done for maximum comic effect-a really well-designed movie.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes went with Campion, here atop Branagh, Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve (Dune), & Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter...HFPA loves their celebrities!), while DGA picked a near carbon copy (including winner) of Oscar's lineup except they subbed out Hamaguchi in favor of Villeneuve.  BAFTA was doing its own thing in 2021, and that didn't stop with directing, with Campion winning against Anderson, Hamaguchi, Audrey Diwan (Happening), Julia Ducournau (Titane), & Aleem Khan (After Love).  In terms of sixth place, it was clearly Denis Villeneuve...this category was basically invented for big-scale epics like Dune, and it's wild he didn't get a nomination for it given Oscar has liked him in the past (and no, future Oscar historians, it wasn't CODA-all that buzz happened later).

Directors I Would Have Nominated: Yeah, I don't get the Villeneuve snub either-he'll make my ballot when I do it this weekend.
Oscar's Choice: You can always wonder whether Sian Heder might've taken this if she'd been cited, but without her, this was the one trophy that Power of the Dog took, and likely won in a landslide.

My Choice: Campion-she's on a different level, and makes the fewest mistakes.  There are no duds here, though, and I'd follow her with a solid Spielberg, Anderson, Hamaguchi, & Branagh.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Are we all kind of on the same page that this was the right time to give an Oscar to Jane Campion?  Do we think the moment has passed for Spielberg to get a third directing trophy, or could it still happen?  And would Sian Heder have been a real threat here had she snuck in through the Hamaguchi slot?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 2021: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, International Feature Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound, Original Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2021

Past Best Director Contests: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020