Since 1967 when Mike Nichols won Best Director for
The Graduate but
In the Heat of the Night was named Best Picture, there have been fourteen instances where the two big awards split. Fourteen times in fifty-four years is not a lot, only 26%.
However, eight of those mismatches were from 1967-2011 and just in the last ten Oscars it has happened SIX more times. Eight times over four decades then six times in the last ten. That is a huge change. Whether it is tied directly to the run-off or preferential ballot system that was employed starting in 2009 or is simply some dissolution of the auteur theory over time, it is no longer a given that the Best Picture of the year will have the Best Director.
An even stranger trend is that, discounting the first few Oscar ceremonies before the number of nominees and the format of the awards took shape, there have only been
four times that a film won Best Picture without its director even being nominated…and three of them are also during this last decade.
Argo won Picture while Affleck went unnominated (Ang Lee won for
Life of Pi),
Green Book won Picture while Peter Farrelly went unnominated (Alfonso Cuarón won for
Roma), and just last year
CODA won Picture while Jane Campion picked up Best Director for
Power of the Dog.
Driving Miss Daisy/Oliver Stone for
Born on the Fourth of July is the only other instance in the modern history of the Oscars. The other three recent mismatches where the director
was nominated but lost were
12 Years a Slave (Alfonso Cuarón won for
Gravity),
Spotlight (Alejandro González Iñárritu won for
The Revenant), and
Moonlight (Damien Chazelle won for
La La Land).
So…how to handicap this year’s Best Picture? The five nominees who do not have a correlating Best Director nomination are
Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, All Quiet on the Western Front, Women Talking, and
Top Gun: Maverick. Is one of them poised to join
Driving Miss Daisy, Argo, Green Book, and
CODA? It doesn’t seem as if any of those five has the momentum to do so.
Elvis seems to have nearly as many detractors as admirers, hardly anybody has seen
Women Talking, and
All Quiet on the Western Front would seem to have Best International Feature Film sewn up but will not join
Parasite as the second foreign film to win.
Avatar: The Way of Water seems a polite nod to James Cameron and justification for their having nominated the original
Avatar over a decade ago (which lost to
The Hurt Locker).
Top Gun: Maverick is getting a lot of credit in the industry for saving movie theatres, or at least staying their execution a bit longer. And despite being a pretty silly story on paper it was surely a crowd pleaser that worked much better than it probably had any right to. But is that enough to award it Best Picture? There have been a handful of movies to win without any acting nominations, most recently
Parasite and before that
Slumdog Millionaire and
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King but all three did win Best Director and
Maverick’s is not even nominated. Seems unlikely, a lot of history to overcome, though of the five movies without Director nominations it may have the best chance (as slim as that chance may be).
Triangle of Sadness did win the Palm d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and three Palm d’Or winners have gone on to win the Oscar for Best Picture:
The Lost Weekend (1945),
Marty (1955), and
Parasite (2019). It ain’t gonna happen for Ruben Östlund this year, but it is always encouraging to see the Cannes champ in the mix (
Amour and
The Tree of Life were the previous most recent entries in the Best Picture pool before
Parasite).
Todd Field is three-for-three as a director, certainly judging by how much the Oscar voters like nominating his films, including his latest
Tár which got five other nominations to go with Best Picture. Bradley Cooper’s upcoming Leonard Bernstein biopic may have a better chance of actually winning next year than the tale of Fields’ fictional protegee this year, but he has very quietly become kind of a big deal.
Martin McDonagh’s rise to filmmaking stardom has been a little quicker than Todd Fields’, and with
The Banshees of Inisherin he is once again within a breath of winning Best Picture. His previous flick,
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, lost out to
The Shape of Water. That one seemed to be an early favorite and then fade come Oscar night. Will
Banshees do the inverse, seem to be an also-ran at most of the other awards shows but finish with a surprise Best Picture win?
Steven Spielberg is no stranger to the Best Picture race. Although only one of his movies has actually won Best Picture –
Schindler’s List – eleven others have been nominated before this year:
Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, War Horse, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The Post, and
West Side Story. And
The Fabelmans now makes a baker’s dozen. It is Spielberg’s most obviously autobiographical and personal film, and that subject matter could be the one that finally nets him a second Best Picture win after so very many nominations and films that have already been informally awarded titles like modern classics.
As detailed in the Best Director and 2023 Hollywood Guild Award threads, The Daniels are heavy favorites to win Best Director having won the Directors Guild of America’s top award over Spielberg and McDonagh. If they DO win that category, will
Everything Everywhere All At Once win Best Picture, too, or will it be yet another of the recent and increasingly common splits?
EEAAO also did win the PGA Award, yet another point in its column and why it is the favorite heading into Oscar night.
