The legion of Christopher Nolan fanboys can officially stop whining that he has never been Oscar nominated for directing (he had two previous noms for his screenplays) and focus more crucially that he is not an Oscar winner. His first director nomination comes not for
Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, or
Interstellar, but for his WWII piece
Dunkirk. No, he won't win, but if he ever gets the right combo of box office and inventiveness and visuals and timing, he'll have better chances of actually winning.
Dunkirk looks great, especially if you saw it in 70mm IMAX. It does have general similarities with other classic wartime battle tales, giving an overview of some of the mammoth undertaking of blood and treasure and equipment in the fateful few days where the British ground forces were pushed back to the sea in France by the advancing Nazi horde, with no way to transfer the men back across the English Channel, sitting ducks for the strafing Luftwaffe above and the lurking U-Boats below.
Not too surprisingly Nolan favors an approach more similar to Terrence Malick's
The Thin Red Line with sparse dialogue and vignettes following a handful of characters as they try to survive in the chaos and carnage, with survival the only real plot. What is slightly surprising is how short its running time is. Nolan's films had been getting longer and longer, with
The Dark Knight and
Inception clocking in at about two and a half hours and
Dark Knight Rises and
Interstellar two hours and forty-five minutes. World War II battle epics like
The Thin Red Line (1998),
Saving Private Ryan (1998),
A Bridge Too Far (1977), and
The Longest Day (1962) are all close to three hours long. So when you heard Nolan is making a wartime piece it would have been natural to expect we may get a four or five hour epic. Instead....it isn’t even two hours long. Fourteen minutes short of two hours!
His relative filmmaking restraint I think is welcome, giving plenty of time for his impressionistic take on the horrors and triumphs of battle, but not overdoing it and lingering with three hours of the same note over and over again. It is a mature step to focus his vision rather than extend it just for the sake of extending it, and he is rewarded with his first and probably overdue Oscar nomination.
Paul Thomas Anderson fans are waiting for his first win, but his second nomination here for
Phantom Thread will not be the project that does it. PTA has six Oscar noms: two for directing (
There Will Be Blood &
Phantom Thread) and four for writing (
Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice), plus
There Will Be Blood and
Phantom Thread both got Best Picture nods, too. His artistry is certainly appreciated by The Academy, even if he hasn't won a statue yet.
As far as who is winning Best Director Oscar these days, it seems to be those filmmakers whose fingerprints and style you can very much see and identify on the screen, like Ang Lee, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Damien Chazelle, rather than those who make solid movies with no real visual signature. Which definitely bodes well for Anderson, who has developed a style that is surely identifiable, whether you are a fan or not. However, his pretty but intentionally emotionally cold tale this time is not going to be the one that makes him a winner. He may turn out to be like one of his biggest idols, Robert Altman, who was honored with many nominations over his brilliant career but never won. And Paul Thomas Anderson is probably just fine with that.
Jordan Peele was known to be bright and talented from the successes in front of and behind the camera on Comedy Central's
"Key & Peele". His and Keegan-Michael Key's sketch show was a hit and started penetrating the pop culture zeitgeist for a few years. Their first film together,
Keanu (21016), was pretty damn funny and showcased the same brand of humor as their shorter form TV pieces. Working apart from each other they had become in demand actors in projects they didn't originate, especially Keegan-Michael who seems to be absolutely everywhere. So when the first trailers and information about Peele's directorial debut
Get Out began to surface, it was natural to assume it was some sort of Horror movie spoof. Instead what was unleashed was a thriller with Sci-Fi and Horror elements that also has some laughs and social commentary. Despite having all of those aspects mixed together it works like gangbusters. Satirical, tense, scary, and triumphant.
Movies released earlier in the calendar year have a tougher time getting awards consideration, but
Get Out became one of those rare cases like
The Silence of the Lambs twenty-six years ago that made it to the glory of Oscar nominations: Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture.
Silence of the Lambs got seven nominations, and won six of them, including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Picture. The odds of
Get Out winning three or four of its awards are slim, the best shot probably being Peele's script, for which he already won the WGA Award.
Jordan is only the fifth Black man to be nominated as Best Director. The others are the Americans John Singleton (
Boyz in the Hood), Lee Daniels (
Precious), and Barry Jenkins (last year's Best Picture winner
Moonlight), and the Brit Steve McQueen (
12 Years a Slave). It would be a pretty big upset for Peele to win as Best Director, but after the incredible success
Get Out has had it's difficult to completely rule it out, either.
If a director with a strong, identifiable visual style and recurrent themes that seem to exist in cinematic universes all their own is what is floating the votership's collective boat these days, there are few filmmakers that fit that description more than
Guillermo del Toro. He gained a feverish following with the singularly creepy thrillers
Cronos and
The Devil's Backbone and for punctuating the super hero genre with some of that sensibility with
Blade 2 and
Hellboy. But it was
Pan's Labyrinth, a weird and dark fantasy set in Franco's Spain, that got him real attention, including by the Oscars, who gave the movie six nominations including del Toro's Original Screenplay and as Best Foreign Language Feature. It won three (Best Cinematography, Makeup, and Art Direction) and the Mexican auteur had his big coming out party. His output since then was nestled firmly in genre with the
Hellboy sequel,
Pacific Rim, and
Crimson Peak. Nothing there the Oscars are going to jump at.
But with
The Shape of Water he has another combination of genre elements and his affectionate predilection for grotesque monsters wrapped in a rather old fashioned romantic fantasy for grownups that hit the right notes. On paper the tale of a Red Scare era mute outsider falling in love with a monster, and not just romantic love but sexual attraction, would be a tough sell. But the tone of this fairy tale for adults plus the performances, especially of Sally Hawkins, made it resonate.
Del Toro has already won the Directors Guild of America Award. Out of all the professional guilds in town that give out yearly prizes, the DGA is definitely the most reliable as a predictor of what will win the corresponding Oscar. As I detail every awards season, since 1950 there have only been seven deviations between the DGA and Oscar for Best Director...though it has happened three times in this 21st Century: 2001 when Ang Lee won the DGA for
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Steven Soderbergh won the Oscar for
Traffic, in 2004 when Rob Marshall won the DGA for
Chicago but Roman Polanski got the Oscar for
The Pianist, and five years ago when Ben Affleck won the DGA for
Argo while Ang Lee the Academy Award again for
The Life of Pi. In three of those only seven deviations between the two awards, the DGA winner was not even nominated for the Oscar: in 1986 when Spielberg won the DGA for
The Color Purple (Sydney Pollack won the Oscar for
Out of Africa), in 1996 when Ron Howard won the DGA for
Apollo 13 (Mel Gibson the Oscar for
Braveheart), and Affleck for
Argo. Which means when the DGA winner
has been nominated for the Oscar, in nearly sixty years the two awards have not matched only four times.
Four.
With Del Toro’s DGA win and four of the five nominees being the same (Paul Thomas Anderson takes the place of
Three Billboard’s Martin McDonagh from the DGA roster), if you bet against Guillermo winning Best Director at the Academy Awards you are going for a longshot. If he does win it will be the fifth non-English-speaking-born winner in recent years, joining Michel Hazanavicius (
The Artist), Ang Lee (
Life of Pi and
Brokeback Mountain), Alfonso Cuarón (
Gravity), and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (
Birdman and
The Revenant). Tom Hooper (
The King’s Speech) is British, leaving Ben Affleck (
Argo) and Damien Chazelle (
La La Land) as the only American to have won in the past seven years. For all the discussion in recent years of lack of diversity at the Oscars, the Best Director field has been mixing it up nicely (and Katherine Bigelow won the year before Hooper).
If you want to put a few bucks on an upset here,
Greta Gerwig may be where you want to move a few of your chips.
Lady Bird was a critical darling to say the least, remaining at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes for weeks after its release. It has dropped all the way down to 99% now, 237 positive versus only 2 negative professional reviews. Not surprisingly the Academy followed suit with its praise. “Only” five nominations, but they are all biggies: Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Picture. Like Jordan Peele, this is Gerwig’s directorial debut. Her semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story is a charmer, with terrific performances and a tone and sensibility that is her own inside a familiar framework.
Besides just the quality of the film itself and the affection it generates from fans, even Academy voters, at the end of a turbulent year in Hollywood from Harvey Weinstein on down the long list, there is a very palpable move toward elevating female voices and points of view in counterpoint to the too long culture of abuse and sexism that has come to light. Is that enough to give Greta and upset win as Best Director or
Lady Bird for Best Picture? Jordan Peele is the fifth Black director to get a nomination, and Gerwig is the fifth woman nominated. The others were Lina Wertmüller for
Swept Away… (1977), Jane Campion for
The Piano (1994), Sofia Coppola for
Lost in Translation (2004), and Kathryn Bigelow who won for
The Hurt Locker (2009). Bigelow’s win was historic, but Gerwig winning partially on the tide of #metoo would be historic in its own way.
Not to say that if Gerwig wins it will be
just because she is a woman. There is no better reviewed movie this year, and her being named Best Director for her personal film would be a counterpoint to Del Toro’s movie which is personal in its signature and themes but very much a fantasy, obviously. Del Toro did win the DGA Award and he is definitely the favorite, but it would not be a shock to see Greta Gerwig go to the stage instead.
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