Best Director: An American Born Director Might Break the Streak

It probably sounds xenophobic to even point it out, I know for many of our readers it seems that way, but a pattern is a pattern and it’s been highly unusual, historic even. It’s been six years since an American-born filmmaker won Best Director.  This year we’re looking at Damien Chazelle, Kenneth Lonergan, Barry Jenkins, Denzel Washington, and one of them might break the streak. Then again, they might not. Before you get all jumpy, I make this observation because I look at the past and I see patterns. That’s how I think. So I tend to look at the Oscar race, and all of history really, in terms of what patterns are set, what patterns are broken and why. Sure, you could probably come up with a few over-reaching statements to try to explain why no American-born director has won since Kathryn Bigelow – but I suspect that it could be quite simple. It might have something to do with the way the very best Americans directors often make darker films than Academy voters usually like. But I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions there.

As I was watching one of my favorite films, No Country for Old Men, I started to wonder again about the value of the preferential ballot.  Could No Country for Old Men win with the preferential ballot today, or would there be an inclination to split it, given its dark subject matter, to hand Best Director over to the Coens but award Best Picture to something more palatable across the board?  That year, Juno was the big crowd-pleaser and even won the PGA. Might it have taken Picture?

The reason I bring this up is that Best Director seems to go to the more visionary director when it splits, while Picture goes to the more palatable crowd-pleaser in the years of the preferential ballot. Why does it sometimes split and sometimes not split? That’s a little more difficult to figure out. For instance, David Fincher should have easily won Best Director over Tom Hooper in 2010. There is no question about it. But that didn’t happen. The palatable movie took the palatable director with it.

Picture/Director matches prior to the preferential ballot, with splits in bold:

1990 – Dances with Wolves/Costner
1991 – Silence of the Lambs/Demme
1992 – Unforgiven/Eastwood
1993 – Schindler’s List/Spielberg
1994 – Forrest Gump/Zemeckis
1995 – Braveheart/Gibson
1996 – The English Patient/Manghella
1997 – Titanic/Cameron
1998 – Shakespeare in Love / Best Director: Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan
1999 – American Beauty/Mendes
2000 – Gladiator/Best Director: Soderbergh for Traffic
2001 – A Beautiful Mind/Howard
2002 – Chicago / Best Director: Roman Polanski for the Pianist
2003 – Return of the King/Jackson
2004 – Million Dollar Baby/Eastwood
2005 – Crash/Best Director: Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain
2006 – The Departed/Scorsese
2007 – No Country for Old Men/Coen brothers
2008 – Slumdog Millionaire/Boyle

Since the preferential ballot came into play:

2009 – The Hurt Locker/Bigelow
2010 – The King’s Speech/Hooper
2011 – The Artist/Hazanavicius
2012 – Argo/Best Director Ang Lee for Life of Pi
2013 – 12 Years a Slave / Best Director Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity
2014 – Birdman/Inarritu
2015-Spotlight / Best Director Inarritu for The Revenant

Notice how the frequency of splits has spiked in recent years? We had the same number of splits in the past seven years as we had the previous 20. That indicates that splits are likely more common under the current voting system. Picture and Director seem to be judged as separate categories rather than extensions of each other, which had always mostly been the tradition.

The exciting thing about this year’s Best Director category – before we get into why there aren’t any women in contention – is that there could be two black directors up for the prize, which would obviously make Oscar history in a very big way. That would be Barry Jenkins for Moonlight and Denzel Washington for Fences. Now, I would not put it past the Best Director branch to keep it all white, all dude 5 for 5. That’s pretty much how they roll. But hope springs eternal that things might change.

Fences is an actors movie and it should easily earn a Best Picture nomination, not just because it’s one of the best films of year by a long way, but because actors like movies where actors drive the plot, as opposed to visual effects, or even showy directors. Moonlight is probably more a director’s movie and so perhaps that could give a slight advantage to Jenkins for the 400 some odd members in the directors branch.

How it should play out and how it will play out are two different things. First, we have the Directors Guild who pick five nominees and then we have the Oscar voters who pick five. Sometimes they’re the same. Sometimes they aren’t. The DGA has around 14,500 members.  That usually means they go for the bigger directing stars or the popular films.

Last year, Ridley Scott got in the DGA but was replaced by Lenny Abrahamson for Room. The year before, Clint Eastwood got into the DGA where Bennett Miller got an Oscar nod.

There is just one day’s lag time between the DGA announcing their five and the Oscar ballot deadline. That doesn’t give much time to build a consensus so the consensus already has to have been built.

These are the top contenders as I see them now:

1. Damien Chazelle, La La Land – A colorful, vibrant love letter to cinema but perhaps more than that, a love letter to youth, to making the wrong choices, regret, and love itself. La La Land is a very good movie throughout. The dance numbers, the stories, the acting but it becomes a great movie in its last ten minutes. Chazelle leads you down one road and you think you know how that road is going to go, but then he swerves and takes you down a completely different road.  Why does he do that? He’s playing with the convention of the musical, which almost always gives you the ending you expect just not in the way you expect it. The message is that we could have that happy ending, perhaps, if we did not do stupid things.  But La La Land is also about Emma Stone, it must be said. It’s just that magic something when a match strikes that makes this movie really exceptional among the year’s offerings.
2. Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea – One of the things about Lonergan the person and the director is that he’s funny. You don’t go into Manchester by the Sea thinking it’s going to be funny. You have heard it’s about grief and so you imagine it’s this dark and moody piece of depressed people living in the ice by the sea talking about death but it really isn’t that. It’s full of humor and basic human foibles that makes it a joy to sit through. There’s no getting around the core story, it’s true, but life is a flipside of comedy and tragedy and this tragedy is unthinkable. Lonergan has made his best film here, and it’s about time he was recognized for his body of work on top of that. If there is a picture/director split it’s possible Lonergan could be the one who wins there, or vice versa.  The film is anchored by a very moving portrait of a man stuck in a place he can’t get out of and we know Best Picture is often tied to that one central performance. So if Casey Affleck is going to win Best Actor, that could be a signal that Manchester is headed for the top prize too.
3. Barry Jenkins, Moonlight – Jenkins has made probably the breakthrough film of the year with Moonlight. His career will never be the same after this honest, poetic portrait of a young gay black man coming of age. The three vignettes of this portrait are memorable in their own different ways but the final one packs such an emotional punch you really don’t see it coming. Moonlight is so accomplished, so beautifully rendered it’s hard to not see it being remembered for Jenkins’ assured hand.
4. Denzel Washington, Fences – With his third feature film, Washington made a conscious choice to showcase the actors and the writing. He did this out of respect for August Wilson, and because Fences is a play that must be listened to. The language demands it. It was written specifically to take place in an enclosed area because the metaphor of a fence is that it either keeps people in or keeps them out. You can’t really make a movie with that as the central theme and then have it not feel like an enclosed space, to not feel like a trap — either a made one or one of one’s own making. Of all of the films I’ve seen this year, only this one woke me up in the middle of the night, and stayed with me on through the morning, it cut so deeply. When are we ever treated to writing this good anymore in film? Never. I’d forgotten what powerful writing can do and I’m sure that’s mostly what kept me awake. I was haunted by these characters, each of them, and the way they are stitched together to form a patchwork of family. The history of slavery howls through the bones of Fences, as these characters find themselves still held back even in a place that calls itself the land of opportunity. So yeah, I don’t think there are enough awards you can throw at this movie — it is just one of those films that comes along and isn’t like anything else you’ll see all year. And of course, it looks like it has a great shot at winning at least two acting Oscars and for that, it has to be among the strongest contenders in the race.
5. Pablo Larrain, Jackie – I had been told that Jackie was really just a showcase for Natalie Portman’s performance. And it is that. But it is much more than that. It is a haunting re-creation of a time most of us remember as a myth rather than a reality. Jackie isn’t really all that concerned with revealing an ugly side of the Kennedy myth – but it does examine more closely the idea of why we need the myth, what we remember about the day Kennedy was shot and the way Jackie wrested control of his legacy. The best scenes in the film are the flashbacks, especially to the shooting itself. We get up close and personal in a way we never really have because no one ever tells the story from Jackie’s point of view and she was the one who was there, holding her husband’s shattered skull together, blood splattered all over her pink dress. She was there so why did no one ever really see the day from her point of view? This film does that. Aside from being beautifully shot and dreamlike, Jackie is among the only films in the race that is anchored by a singular female performance. The other one is Arrival and even now there are many who think it might not make it in. But Jackie likely will, and much of that is due to Pablo Larrain being so well respected as and up and comer. One could make the argument that foreign born directors are raised with a different skill set than Americans. They don’t really come out carbon copies of Spielberg or Scorsese or Tarantino but instead seem to become originals. And Larrain certain is that.  I don’t know if this is DGA material but it probably is Oscar material for the directors branch.
6. David Mackenzie, Hell or High Water – MacKenzie’s style is so distinctive here but mainly because he seems to have made one of those tightly-directed films we used to see a lot of in the 1970s and 1980s. You would think that his style is distinctly American, but in fact, he’s British. He clearly has an appreciation for American cinema genres, like film noir and the western, both of which are evoked here.  There are some films this year that express the fading power of White America, specifically the middle class and this is absolutely one of those. A.O. Scott made a good case for Manchester by the Sea to be another. I suspect that in ten years we’ll be able to see whatever forces created the mess we’re in expressed in our films more clearly.
7. Denis Villeneuve, Arrival – There are few films that have as many breathtaking shots as Arrival. Although, really, all of the films mentioned here do.   But this one is so easy on the eye because of Villeneuve’s sense of things. It’s hard to really imagine what it is like to raise a kid and to have yourself changed because of that. The surprising thing about Arrival is that it’s partly the macro — the way Villeneuve depicts the aliens and contact with them is — but it’s also the micro, as we travel into the mysterious internal world of love and human bonds. I’ve never seen a film capture what it feels like to be a mother like this one does. It is just the throw-away things that become magnified in retrospect.  You might not even really notice them as you move through them but they become permanent fixtures in the mind and the heart.  In our branded culture of movie going how refreshing to see something wholly original like Arrival.
8. Jeff Nichols, Loving – Nichols’ approach to this, like his other brilliant film this year, Midnight Special, is to unearth the extraordinary from the ordinary. In some sense it feels like you’re watching just an ordinary couple in love, marrying and raising a family until it becomes apparent that these are two people who have been forbidden by law to marry. Joel Edgerton, in yet another nearly unrecognizable portrayal keeps everything in, while Ruth Negga as Mildred Loving is the one tasked with fighting the rules and changing history. By the end of the film its full emotional impact can be felt — and for Nichols, that shows tremendous restraint. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted, Loving is one of the best films of the year and Nichols among the most promising directors.
9. Clint Eastwood, Sully — It’s remarkable that Eastwood made such a good film at his age, and interestingly what makes it good isn’t just its central performance by Tom Hanks. It’s more the way he shoots the flight simulations and the airline crash that illustrates what a great director Eastwood has always been and still is.  Sully is one of the strongest films about heroes in the race, and there is always a place for that in the industry, at the theaters and in the Oscar race.
10. Mel Gibson, Hacksaw Ridge – It’s funny that people always say Gibson is into graphic violence, even when he makes a film that specifically intends to be a commentary on violence. The truth about human beings, unfortunately, is that you can’t tell our story without including violence. We are a violent species, whether we want to face up to it or not. Violence is everywhere, whether we see it or not.  It’s everywhere, all of the time. On the streets here in America, in homes here in America, in Syria, in Iraq, in India. Hacksaw Ridge is a film that makes us face up to it and to acknowledge how hard it is to consciously avoid something that is so prevalent.  Is it a tough sell? Yeah, maybe. It is one of the most daring films of the year? Without a doubt.
11. Ben Affleck, Live by Night – Affleck doesn’t appear to be reaching for the Oscars with this but from a filmmaking perspective, if you’re being honest about it, you can’t help but notice what a great director Affleck is. This is true of all of his films but it’s especially true here. Live by Night is one of those films that captures the mood of the day here in America as it is about the immigrants who were (and are) mistreated as they came to America to make a better life. While watching Live by Night I just kept thinking, man this guy can direct. Perhaps it’s a long shot indeed, but it’s worth noting, for the record.
12. Mike Mills, 20th Century Women – Mike Mills gift is working with actors to draw unique and thorough portraits of them. He plays around with mixed media here, speeding things up, inserting vintage filters and really following these actors around while they do odd things with their lives and with one another. All through, though, he has such a reverence for his subject matter without it ever seeming cloying. I suspect there will be many who just want to sink into this film like a warm bath.

Of course, there are many other films that could be up for this prize – sadly, none of them female. We might be a long ways off from that sort of evolution.

And Martin Scorsese still has to screen Silence.  Room must be made, or is usually made, for Marty, so someone in the top five may well be bumped.

The trick is going to be to figure out which ones are the solid five frontrunners because right now it looks like there are a great many of them competing for those five slots.

But I suppose my final list might look something like:

Chazelle
Lonergan
Jenkins
Scorsese
Larrain or MacKenzie or Villeneuve

It’s tough narrowing it down to five. Every year it’s tough.