Oscars 101: Best Director

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.


With the Oscars looming ever larger on the horizon, we come to our penultimate category: Best Director.  Historically, Best Director has been a litmus test for Best Picture hopefuls.  On the rare occasion that a Best Picture nominee wasn't nominated for Best Director as well, it could safely be ruled out as a serious candidate for the night's big award.  And whatever won Best Director almost invariably won Best Picture too.  With the expansion of Best Picture nominees to as many as ten, however, these trends are not necessarily true anymore.  Films that struck a chord with the directing branch could very well fall flat with the Academy as a whole, and films adored by the Academy proper might find themselves with little enough support in any one particular branch.  For instance, the last two years have seen a split between the two categories winners.  This year's nominees are:

Alejandro Gonzales Iñáritu for Birdman
Richard Linklater for Boyhood
Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher
Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel
Morten Tyldum for The Imitation Game

While everybody's exploding over Ava DuVernay's lack of a nomination for Selma, the real head-scratching exclusion for me has been Christopher Nolan for Interstellar.  To me, Interstellar is the definitive directors' movie from 2014: epically scoped, intimately shot and thoroughly entertaining.  It's 2001: A Space Odyssey for a new generation, brilliantly brought to the big screen from one of the most skilled auteurs in the business today.

Alejandro Gonzales Iñáritu for Birdman - Of all of this year's nominees, Birdman has the best chance of walking away with Best Director.  Like last year's winner - Alfonso Cuarón - he's a high profile Hispanic director with previous Oscar nominations under his belt, but no statuettes to show for it.  His film is lauded as one of the two Best Picture front runners and it is by far the showier of the two (which tends to matter more in the Director's race).

Iñáritu succeeds at so often and so skillfully transitioning between reality and fantasy in Birdman that not only do the two become virtually indistinguishable, but each actually lends increasing significance to the other as the film goes on.  It's an inventive, entertaining and well-rendered vision of one man's madness and the collective insanity of the theater.

Richard Linklater for Boyhood - I cannot come to terms with this being Linklater's first nomination for Best Director.  The man who helmed the Before trilogy has never once bee recognized by this particular branch of the Academy for the way in which he constructs a narrative and sets his actors to work.  Boyhood, however, is a film that simply demands attention.  Shot intermittently over a twelve year period of time with the same cast (allowing them to age in real-time before our eyes), Boyhood is the kind of sometimes explosive yet willfully subtle project that would earn any director - let alone one with such a high critical profile - the respect of the Academy.

It's pretty safe to say that Boyhood is firmly entrenched in second place behind Birdman in this particular race.  It's not quite as flashy, not quite as inventive and not quite as nuanced as its competitor, preferring to capture authentic moments of post-millenial childhood than crafting a story as a matter of inventive will.  The Academy may think differently, but their usual tastes lie decidedly with the competition.

Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher - In years past, Foxcatcher would have been a complete non-factor in this race: a Directing nominee that failed to win over the Academy as a whole.  But with an increasingly polarized voting body, there is no such thing as an Academy consensus.  Pet favorites can not only secure nominations in any given branch, but win them outright.

Foxcatcher plays out like a fatalistic Greek tragedy.  A pervasively ominous mood pervades every frame, unrelentingly telegraphing its foregone conclusion to anybody who cares to take note of it.  It's thoroughly unsettling to watch, because you know for a fact that something bad is going to happen and that nobody is going to stop it from happening.  Director Bennett Miller pulled the same tonal tricks in Capote, but they make far more sense here, where it is building to something more than just personal devastation.

Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel - Although I've not been a fan of Wes Anderson in the past, there is no denying that he's one of the most uniquely minded auteurs working in film today.  His body of work is eccentric, but grounded in a kind of airy realism.  They're colorful, but never cartoonish.  They are the work of high brow intellectualism that are never so far above themselves to not dabble in models and childish sound effects when that suits their goals.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson's first film to break out of the writing (and animation) branch(es) and hit a certain sweet spot across the entire Academy, and it's really no wonder why.  This is unquestionably his best film to date, featuring his greatest flair and most focused vision of a romantic, pop-up-book world that could only possibly exist inside Anderson's head.  While it still has some ground to make up to come out on top of the likes of Birdman and Boyhood, it's not all that far fetched for it to walk away with every single Oscar that it was nominated for.

Morten Tyldum for The Imitation Game - While The Imitation Game is certainly one of the premiere achievements in directing from this last year, it's probably the weakest of the five nominees - or at least the one with the least support.  It fails to be as pervasively moody as Foxcatcher, as eye-catching as The Grand Budapest Hotel, as inventive as Birdman or as realistic as Boyhood.  It is simply second best at everything Morten Tyldum does in the film, which won't serve to keep it in the running tonight.

That being said, what Tyldum does accomplish here is remarkable.  He succeeds at balancing a trio of temporally separate, tonally different narratives about the same one man, intercut them so that they serve the needs of the film as a whole, then brings them all to a head in a riveting three-part climax.

Safe Bet:  Alejandro Gonzales Iñáritu for Birdman

Long Shot:  Richard Linklater for Boyhood

Longer Shot:  Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel

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