The Best Director Race in the First Half of the Year – There’s Spielberg and Everyone else

If the Best Directior category this year is to fill up with big names, many of them won’t appear until the second half, after the AFI Film festival and the winter releases have screened. The four films that seem to have the most heat heading into the season, at least from a director’s standpoint, would be Steven Spielberg for Bridge of Spies, Ridley Scott for The Martian, Tom McCarthy for Spotlight, and Danny Boyle for Steve Jobs. Hovering next to those names, or on the fringe, would be Todd Haynes for Carol, Lenny Abramson for Room, Cary Fukunaga for Beasts of No Nation, Scott Cooper for Black Mass, Paolo Sorrentino for Youth, John Crowley for Brooklyn, Tom Hooper for The Danish Girl, and Adam McKay for The Big Short. The men currently claiming the four frontrunner slots will either maintain their position or else someone could be bumped by year’s end to make room for David O. Russell for Joy, or Alejandro G. Inarritu for The Revenant most likely. It’s still a wide open field because the story is only half told.

To say the race is about Steven Spielberg and everyone else is not to say Spielberg is headed for what would be another record with his third Best Director Oscar win. It isn’t even to say he’s a slam dunk to be nominated. It’s just to say that he’s a giant among directors right now, not slowing down or repeating himself, always working hard and challenging himself with each new film he delivers. His last two films were nominated for Best Picture and if Bridge of Spies becomes the next one he will become the only living filmmaker with that many Best Picture nominations. Does Bridge of Spies deserve to be nominated for Best Picture? You’re damn straight it does.

Spielberg is still a director whose name alone is a great indication of what audiences can expect to see. A Spielberg film is a specific world. That world is an accessible one. It’s an emotionally moving one. It’s a world that won’t leave many behind, except those who are uncomfortable with occasional shadings of sentimentality, a hallmark which has lessened over time to be replaced by more quiet, thoughtful ruminations on the human condition. He doesn’t get near enough the credit he deserves for being a builder of worlds, a maker of dreams.

Kenneth Turan put it best in his recent review of Bridge of Spies:

The professional would be Steven Spielberg, a director with more than 40 years of experience whose superior filmmaking skills have been with us for so long it’s tempting to take them for granted, which would be a mistake. Storytelling this proficient is never something we see every day.

In his brilliantly written essay examining Spielberg’s evolution from popcorn director to political director, Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri says of Spielberg:

“Even as Spielberg branched out into more difficult material, the criticism of his work as facile and childlike remained. Never mind that, with his 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Spielberg took a fairly daring novel about lesbianism, domestic violence, and race relations in the early 20th century, cast it with mostly unknown African-American leads (including Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in their feature acting debuts), and turned it into a huge financial and critical hit. To many, he had scrubbed the novel of its more risqué, subversive elements to create another Spielbergian tale of innocence lost, families reunited and returned, patriarchies redeemed.

Such criticism, of course, largely ignored the humanism of Spielberg’s films, and the generosity they demonstrated toward even the most debased characters. It also ignored the ways in which the director had started to break free of his comfort zone. Jim (Christian Bale), the young expat hero of Empire of the Sun (1987), is a Spielberg protagonist par excellence. As the Japanese invade China, and Jim is separated from his parents and winds up in a detention camp, the film becomes, yes, another tale of innocence lost. But along the way, Spielberg shows a willingness to consciously undermine his own, by-then-patented cinematic flights of fancy. There are even two “bright white light” scenes near the end: The first is a sharp lens flare that repeatedly overwhelms the screen as Jim tries (and fails) to revive a young, dead Japanese soldier accidentally killed by Americans; the second is what turns out to be the distant flash of an atom bomb, which Jim thinks is God.

Empire of the Sun wasn’t a big hit – one of Spielberg’s few financial disappointments – and the director didn’t attempt a more serious “prestige” film for some years. In the 1990s, however, he directed a series of historical dramas that surprised many of his earlier critics. When looked at together, something fascinating emerges from Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1998): They’re movies in which human lives are reduced to the level of what amounts to business negotiations.”

In a year when so many big names enter the race this early, it might be hard to figure out where this Spielberg/Bridge of Spies thing is going. If it wasn’t such a good movie, if it had not earned a solid A from Cinemascore, if it didn’t have such great performances throughout, and masterful execution from each branch of its building: cinematography, editing, costume, and yes, score – even without John Williams. If it didn’t hit the perfect sweet spot for the dominant generation of Academy voters, I might be more inclined to go with the naysayers who think Spielberg is played out with the Academy. Fact is, nobody knows. Some voters might figure “he’s been rewarded enough – let Hooper have another turn.”

Right behind Spielberg this year is another rebel graduate of the 1970s — Ridley Scott, who gets to be called the Comeback Kid this year with The Martian. Back in the 1970s and 1980s we had already been given starkly different visions of outer space on the big screen, from Kubrick to Lucas to Spielberg – and then came Ridley Scott. He was really the first to de-shine and cyberpunk the shit out of outer space, to make it look functional, industrial, gritty, and not so unlike the increasingly blighted planet we inhabit. As the two directors move into their 40th year in the business we see Ridley Scott turn carefree with The Martian while Spielberg becomes more somber, which is almost a flipflop from their beginnings. You don’t get much more brooding than Blade Runner, after all.

Bridge of Spies and the Martian might both be headed to the Oscars, although the story on this year is not yet completely told. The truth is, we don’t know where it’s going yet. We do know that these two are towering giants in the field of Best Director and to ignore that possibility might be a mistake.

The breakthrough directors this year are led by Cary Fukunaga’s astonishing Beasts of No Nation, a film that barely got made, was passed over by every major studio until Netflix picked it up, a film that now needs to be championed by actors because promoting it through standard channels has proven so difficult. It is a provocative work of art, of the kind that just doesn’t get made anymore. Though it would be great to see the directors acknowledge Fukunaga it’s such a crowded year that it might not happen. On the other hand, that the film is on Netflix makes it much, much easier for millions of people to see.

Tom McCarthy should also hit the big time with Spotlight, a carefully and meticulously directed film that shone so brightly after Telluride it was proclaimed the frontrunner to win Best Picture by Kyle Buchanan, among others. It’s hard to imagine the director race without McCarthy at this point – and perhaps one could say he’s the only “lock.”

There is an old school of thought that tells us that the big names almost always lead, especially when the DGA weigh in with their nominations. It isn’t just that they are revered the most. It’s also that their names carry cred that puts their screening, or screener, at the top of the list. Their films become those most likely to get seen by the majority. That means they have first dibs at a spot in the lineup. Who they are now is as important as the films they’ve made before, particularly when voters seek to fit their current work into the larger context over the span of their careers.

Predicting the DGA and Oscar

Since we know the nomination ballots for Oscar’s Best Director (numbering around 400) will be turned in before the DGA announces their five nominees, and we know this is shaping up to be a wide open year, there could be some disconnect between the two groups, as there was in 2012.

I’m not prepared at this juncture to underestimate the great and esteemed Mr. Spielberg, nor am I prepared like so many of my pundit pals to underestimate Ridley Scott for his assured mastery on The Martian, which will go down as the most purely enjoyable and across-the-board hit of the year. I’m going to put the two 1970s giants in the lineup, which might end up looking like this:

The names in the game

Alejandro G. Inarritu, The Revenant
Tom McCarthy, Spotlight
Danny Boyle, Steve Jobs
Ridley Scott, The Martian
Steven Spielberg, Bridge of Spies
David O. Russell, Joy
Cary Fukunaga, Beasts of No Nation
Lenny Abramson, Room
Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight
Todd Haynes, Carol
John Crowley, Brooklyn
Tom Hooper, The Danish Girl
Scott Cooper, Black Mass
Ryan Coogler, Creed
Paolo Sorrentino, Youth
Adam McKay, The Big Short
Ron Howard, In the Heart of the Sea
Angelina Jolie, By the Sea
László Nemes, Son of Saul
George Miller, Max Max: Fury Road
Bill Pohlad, Love & Mercy
Sarah Gavron, Suffragette
Alex Garland, Ex Machina

But Oscar is going to be different. It could go any which way and is bound to look very different from the five the DGA honors. Names might break through that no one is expecting, like Cary Fukunaga for Beasts of No Nation, or Ryan Coogler for Creed. They might catch a wave from films from earlier in the year, because their ballots have to be in so early, like László Nemes, for Son of Saul.

One way to maybe figure it out is to look at timing. While the Best Picture slate is more likely to take films that open later that the October cut-off, Best Director doesn’t. In fact, the directors who get chosen there have often come from films with earlier release dates.

Oscar Best Director Last year:

Birdman (Venice/Telluride)
Boyhood (Sundance)
Foxcatcher (Cannes)
Grand Budapest Hotel (released much earlier in the year)
The Imitation Game (Telluride)

DGA Best Director Last Year:
Birdman (Venice/Telluride)
Boyhood (Sundance)
American Sniper (late release)
Grand Budapest Hotel (released in March)
The Imitation Game (Telluride)

2014

Oscar Best Director

Gravity (Venice/Telluride)
Nebraska (Cannes)
12 Years a Slave (Telluride)
American Hustle (late release)
The Wolf of Wall Street (late release)

DGA Best Director

Gravity (Venice/Telluride)
Captain Phillips (October)
12 Years a Slave (Telluride)
American Hustle (late release)
The Wolf of Wall Street (late release)

2013
Oscar Best Director
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Sundance)
Lincoln (New York Film Fest)
Life of Pi (New York Film Fest)
Amour (Cannes)
Silver Linings Playbook (Toronto)

DGA Best Director
Lincoln (New York Film Fest)
Life of Pi (New York Film Fest)
Zero Dark Thirty (late release)
Argo (Telluride)
Les Miserables (late release)

So what I’m getting from this crude eyeball research is that late-breaking films do better with the DGA than they do for Oscar. That makes sense since the Oscar deadline is so short. That means it’s better to get your film seen as early possible to build the consensus for the Oscar race. Most importantly, if you plan to be a late breaker it’s good to be a big name, like Quentin Tarantino, Alejandro G. Inarritu, or David O. Russell.

For DGA, right now, I’d go with:

The Revenant (late release)
The Martian (Toronto)
Spotlight (Telluride)
Bridge of Spies (New York Film Festival)
Steve Jobs (Telluride)

For Oscar, I might go:
The Revenant
Spotlight
The Martian
Bridge of Spies
Son of Saul

Something like that. I would probably mix them up and not predict them the same way. I suspect Son of Saul could crack the Best Directors at the Academy, or Lenny Abramson for Room. There is wiggle room and remember, only half of the story has yet been told!