2) You need to understand what it would mean if sam mendes won the oscar and 1917 won best picture. It would put him in the same ranks as spielberg/innaritu/ang lee/curon. All those directors have never been sell outs. Yes, ang lee made hulk/gemini man but those are experimental failures. Whereas mendes was a sell out when he made the bond movies. So in that respect academy voters are acutely aware of whom they are giving their vote to and what that means for that person.
Isn't Spielberg the prime example of a sell-out director? Think about his career prior to his first Best Director win - his breakthrough film invented the modern blockbuster and most of his subsequent films were similarly successful (we're talking three
Indiana Jones movies,
E.T., and
Jurassic Park - the latter even came out the same year as
Schindler's List!) and even then he had to prove himself again and again with serious fare like
The Color Purple or
Empire of the Sun. Even after that win, he still turned out a
Jurassic Park sequel, so it's not like he suddenly became too good for blockbusters after one win (and that didn't stop the Academy awarding him for
Saving Private Ryan anyway). Likewise, Cuaron did smaller Mexican productions and only broke through to an international audience when he directed the third
Harry Potter so he had to sell out a little to get to make his subsequent work (and he won his directing Oscars for films that also relied quite heavily on long takes). Hell, it was only two years ago that they gave it to the guy who made
Blade II and a couple of
Hellboy movies, so what I'm getting that is that maybe selling out isn't the issue here.
3) Its a bloody competitive year. Period.
Isn't this the same as #5?
4) The cruel but inevitable fate of auteur culture. The reason why mendes didn't win director is exactly the same reason why Scorsese and Tarantino has loads of fans and it is the exactly the same reason why Tarantino probably will never win director Oscar. Mendes doesn't exactly have a directorial style. He is a competent director but you don't see any correlation between jar-head and american beauty or even with sky-fall. Skyfall feels very much inspired by the dark knight and 1917 by dukirk. I am not saying they are the same but there is some strong correlation. So when academy voters sees 1917, the world war aspect of it feels like inspired by dunkirk. And the "immersive" experience in 1917 is very much inspired by birdman/revenant. You could say they are inspired by work of terrence malick but that is not true. Malick's work is much more small in scale in terms of production. Where as these movies are huge in scale especially revenant and 1917. They will notice that. Tarantino is sort of locked into his style that he can't, wont and shouldnt get out of. If his magnum opus didnt win him a single Oscar then I am not sure if he will ever win. But the moment he breaks from it he will fail with critics and industry. When your entire style is pro-populist and not artistic enough for the majority of the academy then you will have a very tough time breaking through.
Wait, so Mendes isn't liable to win another Oscar because he's not enough of an auteur but Tarantino won't win one at all because he's too much of an auteur? I'm not sure how much difference the idea of a director's auteur status really makes to the Academy based on some of their recent choices, especially since a lot of the so-called auteurs moved between genres about as much as Mendes did in the past 20 years.
Anyway, I would actually argue that the closer point of comparison for
1917 would be
Gravity and its primary focus on two people's journey through empty yet hostile territory being rendered through elaborate technical means. Like
1917, it also got criticised because of the slightness of its underlying plot and characterisation. That might be the reason why I think the Academy has gotten a bit wary in recent years over giving Best Picture and/or Director to the most technically impressive movie - sure, it takes a good director to pull it all together, but maybe that just makes the Academy look like they're easily impressed by a glossy surface with little underneath.
5) But the big baddy of all is competition, it is the greatest enemy when it comes to Oscars. No matter anything else if there is someone with a better narrative than you then there is a very strong possibility they will win. Narrative should be natural not forced unlike Greta gerwig or people of color representation.
I mean,
Birdman kind of undermined the "movie done in one take" narrative when a) it won, b) got backlash over it, and c) stopped anyone else from being able to use it. Still, arguing over which narratives count as "natural" or "forced" sounds like it's besides the point, especially when I could just as easily argue that films like
Ford v Ferrari or
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or
The Irishman or
1917 are forced into the conversation by the old out-of-touch white guys who still make up a significant chunk of the awards voting bodies. That's not a judgment of the films themselves, more a judgment of the whole conversation about what's "forced" or not.