DGA: How Auteurs Helped Shape Oscar History

When was the last time a masterpiece won the Best Picture Oscar? It is perhaps not possible anymore, not with Twitter and more awards shows than there are people in Hollywood.  Voters can’t align around one so they choose never to align around any.

As the DGA prepares their awards show for tomorrow night, and 14,500 of them are voting, it seems very likely it will go Argo’s way, throwing the race into Apollo 13/Color Purple territory. Or not.  But the DGA has been around a very long, long time.  Many of the Oscar voters have likewise been around a very long, long time. They’ve seen the so-called “snubs” come and go, they’ve seen the wunderkind’s come and go.  In looking over history you might be astonished to learn that Alfred Hitchcock was nominated by the DGA for Vertigo but the film only received two Oscar nominations — for Art Direction and Sound.

Scenarios like the one we’re about to live through, and Apollo 13 and The Color Purple just don’t really happen that often and didn’t happen for decade after decade.  The DGA changed when films changed.  The 1960s and 1970s ushered in some of the most daring, brilliant, outside the box directors film history has ever known — and continues to struggle to get back to.   As more auteurs began to win Oscars for directing, the more the Oscar race itself changed: the directors branch continued to “correct” the DGA throughout their history, in interesting ways.  As more auteurs flooded the Directors Branch, so too did the landscape of the Oscars change.

But something odd happened in the 1980s and 1990s — perhaps it was the advent of the blockbuster, which might explain the Academy’s notorious rejection of Spielberg and his ilk, or perhaps it was just economics, or perhaps they just got old.  Either way, you would never see an occasion like you saw this year, with Benh Zeitlin and Michael Haneke taking the place of the more popular, award winning, consensus getting directors the DGA adhered to this year, namely Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow, but you can throw Tom Hooper in there too.

But rather than celebrate this dramatic change, the kind of thing critics have been complaining about for years — how the choices are always the same on the march to Oscar, they have instead cried foul, choosing to side instead with the directors who got left out. That proves that people really don’t want change. They always want the routine, even if they say they don’t.  Though I admire both films, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, a part of me is astonished that the Academy could be that ballsy.  I truly did not think they had it in them anymore.

But you can look over DGA/Oscar history and see how much a part of their DNA the Director + Picture relationship is.  The rarity of Apollo 13 and The Color Purple, and perhaps now Argo, is in the kind of thing that makes the Academy look like the parent and the DGA like the child — the Academy guides the DGA, not the other way around, at least if you think of the Oscars as the end result.

Early on in the Oscar race, right before they changed from 10 to five Best Picture nominees, the directors weren’t much of anything. And in fact, when Casablanca won the Oscar that year it was because the majority voting were “extras.” This is how things looked all the way back in 1946, from Inside Oscar (Damien Bona, Mason Wiley):

A few days after the ceremony, the Screen Directors Guild announced that its members were seriously considering quitting the Academy.  The guild’s president, Mark Sandrich, fumed: “Our complaint is based on the fact that the directorial Award was relegated to the first part of the evening’s broadcast.”  With time, however, bruised egos healed – Mark Sandrich agreed to produce the next year’s show.

It’s funny to think that there was a ever a time when the director wasn’t the most important player in the Best Picture race.  But over the years, that is the way they evolved and much of that had to do with the auteur.  Even now, there is always a war within the Academy between the forces of the auteurs, the veterans, the epics, and now, the affable crowdpleaser, which is mostly how you win Oscar’s Best Picture.

Here is a long list of DGA/Oscar nominees and wins. You will see that the last time Oscar left three contenders off the DGA’s list was all the way back in 1966.

At any rate, at the end of the day, I’ll always be the person who listens to Bob Dylan even though he never wins Grammys.  And as Dylan would say, “stick with me baby, anyhow, things are about to get interesting right about now.”

FEATURE FILM AWARD DGA’S Site

DGA | Oscar

 *film nominated/+ won Best Picture at the Oscars

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989
Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984

1983

1982

1981

1980

1979

1978

1977

1976

1975

1974

1973

1972

1971

1970

1969

1968

1967

1966

1965

1964

1963

1962

1961

1960

1959

1958

1957

1956

1955

1954

1953

1953

1952

1951

1950

1949

+also won Best Picture

(best picture that didn’t match director)