2013 Oscar Best Director

Directing is more than just controlling the actors.

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Oh, I like 'em fine. Just really couldn't get into this one. I was ready to like it. It just never happened. All of the over-the-top off key singing of the dialogue just left me cold and frankly a little irritated. I wished the picture were shorter, to say the least.

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

Steven Spielberg.

My two votes for this didn't even get nominated (Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino) and I've still yet to see The Master and Zero Dark Thirty. I think both the aforementioned directors have a better body of work than everyone else nominated.

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~ I am tired of ze same old faces! Ze same old things!

True but if you don't get good performances out of the actors, it doesn't matter how nicely you pick your shots.

The filmmakers couldn't have cut down the musical as it's sung through so they would be cutting out narrative.

Not all the singing was off-key. Jackman was on-key apart from the high notes that he couldn't get. Russell Crowe was a little off-key but the main problem was that his voice was too weak.

Yes but I didn't think the actors' performances were all that good. Maybe Anne Hathaway.

And a case could also be made that if a director doesn't pick the shots properly it doesn't matter how good the performances are. You see the circle here?

My vote goes to Ang Lee. The storm sequence was absolutely brilliant and the whole film was simply magical. I also thought that the film had the best combination of CGI with live-action I've ever seen. If I chose the nominations, I would throw in Tarantino for Django, PTA for the Master, and Affleck for Argo in addition to Ang Lee and David O Russell.

I'm predicting Spielberg wins, though some of those dialogue scenes really dragged for me. Haven't seen Amour or Beasts.

I really wish Zeitlin wasn't on here for giving me one of the most massive headaches at the movies I've had in a while. Shaky camerawork does nothing for me. I don't understand why people like it, or find it "gritty" or "realistic," it's just shaky, and it's not at all how any of us perceive the world. It destroys most possibilities for thoughtful compositions as well. As much as I thought The Master was weak and hollow, I thought PTA's direction was a cut above most American filmmakers, I'd have put him in way ahead of Zeitlin.

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Mubi

Alright, so I haven't seen Zeitlin (and not sure that I will before this is decided), but this is how I have it thus far:

1. Russell
2. Lee
3. Haneke
4. Spielberg

I do realize that Spielberg probably wins, and I am a huge Spielberg fan, but Lincoln is honestly Spielberg going through the motions, and he had made and directed many a better films than this. Lee was really good, and I do regret saying it was a joke he made the list before I had even seen the film. But Russell is the tops for me in this category.

Behn Zeitlin was a nice surprise but who will win will be Steven Spielberg.

It's really pretty unfortunate that Ben Affleck and Wes Anderson weren't nominated. I haven't seen all the films here, but I'm a big fan of David O. Russell and I hope he takes it.

I hope David O. Russell wins this and I can see the Academy pulling the surprise pick with this one. Russell did a brilliant job of balancing SLP between seriousness and light-heartedness, and of course got his actors to follow suit accordingly.
Overall, this crop is an absolute joke. Can one person please give me a convincing argument as to why Benh Zeitlin deserves a nom over Quentin Tarantino, Katheryn Bigelow, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ben Affleck, AND Tom Hooper???

It was a packed field overall, but I say these are the 5 best thus far (haven't seen Bigelow or Zeitlin):

Russell
Tarantino
Lee
Zemeckis
Bayona

and if not Zemeckis and Bayona then for sure Hooper and Affleck.

David russell