I should start this entry with the
proviso that with the notable exception of one of the directors who is
essentially retired, the remainder on this list are still active and may very
well someday have a film that earns a Best Picture win. Whether they will have
a corresponding directing win to go with it is another matter. Combined these
five directors represent seven times so far this century that a film has
won Best Picture without a corresponding Best Director win and that's not
counting both Alexander Gonzalez Irratu's second director win for The
Revenant in which Best Picture went to Spotlight and the notorious
night that La La Land joined that list went Moonlight won Best
Picture.
Steven Soderbergh
In the 21st century few
directors have had a more brilliant year than Soderbergh did in 2000. In
February Erin Brockovich became a critical success and box office hit
and at the end of the year his second film Traffic managed to do both. Soderbergh
won the Best Director prize for both films at all four of the major critics'
awards that year because groups like the New York and LA Critics Associations
give prizes for bodies of work as much as a single performance. (To use one
example that year the same year Soderbergh was winning Best Director in LA,
Frances McDormand was awarded Best Supporting Actress for her performances in
both Almost Famous and Wonder Boys. She would be nominated only
for the latter.)
Soderbergh would be nominated for
directing both films at the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild Awards and in
both cases he would lose to Ang Lee for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. (We'll
be getting him further down.) Soderbergh was nominated for both films by the
Oscars the first director to be nominated against himself since Michael Curtiz in
1939 for Angels With Dirty Faces and The Adventures of Robin Hood. The
general consensus was Soderbergh would cancel himself out on Oscar night.
But on Oscar night of 2001 (one of
the rare times the Oscars as a body more or less gave all the awards to the
appropriate winners) Tom Cruise revealed to the audience that in fact
Soderbergh hadn't canceled himself out after all and that he'd won Best
Director for Traffic. It was night when three of the major nominees Tiger
and Gladiator had been breaking even with each film winning four
Oscars. However when Traffic won both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best
Director, putting it into a three-way tie, the natural assumption was it would
win Best Picture. Instead it turned out to be Gladiator, the first movie
since Around the World in 80 Days to win Best Picture without winning
either for directing or writing (though Gladiator is a far superior film
then that one.)
Soderbergh has never been back to
the Oscars since despite retiring and unretiring multiple times.
Roman Polanski
If one can separate the artist
from the art – which in 2002 was easier then it is today – Roman Polanski
remains one of the greatest directors in the history of the medium as well as
one of the most ill-fated. His personal history is one of the most recounted in
Hollywood lore so let's move on to 2002.
Few had realistically given a
chance for The Pianist to be a major contender on the day of the Oscar
nominations: 2002 represented by far the level of peak proliferation by Miramax
with three Best Picture nominees – The Hours, Chicago and Gangs of
New York - dominated the
nominations. They did so to such a degree that many promising contenders in the
early stages such as Far from Heaven and About Schmidt were
shutout of the majority of the awards when the nominations came out and The
Two Towers became the sole film in The Lord of the Rings where Peter
Jackson was ignored for Best Director. So when The Pianist managed to
get seven Oscar nomination, few insiders if any, expected it to have a presence
at Oscar night. Polanski hadn't even been nominated for a Golden Globe even
though he had been nominated for a Directors Guild Awards. He lost to Rob
Marshall for Chicago.
But then Adrien Brody stunned
everybody when he won Best Actor over such powerhouses as Jack Nicholson and
Daniel Day Lewis. Then the film won Best Adapted Screenplay. Then Harrison Ford
announced that the Best Director went to Roman Polanski. You could hear the
shock in the theater in TV.
Chicago did win Best Picture after all
this, of course, and the Oscars had to deal with the fact they'd given Best
director to a fugitive from the law. But then considering how good a night Miramax
had…
Ang Lee
Few directors in their long and storied
history have had such a peculiar record with the Oscars as Ang Lee.
After years of working in international
movies he made his American film debut in collaboration with Emma Thompson in Sense
& Sensibility. He would get quite a few directors prizes from various
critics groups in the lead up to that year's Oscars but when the nominations
came out Sensibility wasn't nominated for Best Director even though he
was nominated for Best Picture. That whole year had a strange vibe. Ron Howard
went through the same thing with Apollo 13 and Leaving Las Vegas and
Dead Men Walking would both be nominated for Best Director, Actor,
Actress and Screenplay but not Best Picture. Braveheart's win on
Oscar night seemed to make as much sense as anything.
I went over what happened with Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon so let's go to 2005 and Brokeback Mountain. The
movie dominated all the major awards leading up to the Oscars and Lee won
basically every director's award imaginable. He won the Golden Globe, the DGA
award and the Independent Spirit Award for directing the night before the
Oscars. And he did win Best Director and the film won Best Adapted Screenplay.
But in what is now clearly one of the worst choices the Oscars ever made – and one
that has to be based in some form of homophobia - Crash took Best Picture. (I don't
hate that film as much as many other critics so it did win a lot of other awards
in the weeks leading up to the Oscars. But the fact it wasn't nominated by the
Golden Globes for Best Picture and still won is a big sign that the Oscars really
wasn't willing to be that open to the LGBTQ+ community in 2005-2006.)
If that was weird enough I'm
completely baffled by what happened in 2012. As I've written in previous
articles there were a lot of excellent movies made that year and that is true
of the majority of the films nominated for Best Picture. But for the life of
me, I can't comprehend what the people who voted in the directing branch were
thinking. It's not just that they chose to ignore Ben Affleck for Argo for
Best Director, it's that they seemed to go out of their way to ignore the
low-hanging and other great nominees such as Quentin Tarantino for Django
Unchained and Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty. I'm not saying that Lee's nomination for Best
Director is the poorest of the five who were chosen – that one goes to Benh Zeitlin
for Beasts of the Southern Wild, in my opinion - but he certainly wouldn't have been in my top
five either. I acknowledge Life of Pi is a superb film but even among those
directors who were present it's not close to the work of Steven Spielberg for Lincoln
or even David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook. Even Lee
seemed surprised when he won that night.
Lee's only made two films since Life
of Pi, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Gemini Man in 2019. Each
film was poorly received both by critics and the box office. He hasn't made a
film since that last one. He was the first director since George Stevens to have
won 2 Oscars for films that didn't win Best Picture and seven years later that
club got another member.
Alfonso Cuaron
Cuaron worked in Mexican cinema for
ten years before making his American film debut for such intriguing
experimental remakes of A Little Princess and Great Expectations. He
went back to Mexico for his first genuine classic Y Tu Mama Tambien a
film that won many Best Foreign language films but wasn't nominated in that
category. Cuaron received his first Oscar nomination for the screenplay.
By the end of the 2000s Cuaron was
considered part of the vanguard of 'New Mexican Cinema, along with his comrades
Guillermo Del Toro and Alexander Gonzalez Irratu. Between 2014 and 2019 the
three men dominated the Oscars winning five of the six potential awards for
Directing and eight other awards between them.
In 2013 Cuaron directed the
masterpiece Gravity a film set in outer space that looked like it was done
in a single shot. Co written with his brother Jonas it was one of the biggest
box office hits of 2013, grossing over $274 million domestically and over $723
million worldwide. However because it was one of those films that had the
qualification of 'technical achievement' rather than the kind of artistic one
the Oscars love to celebrate while
Cuaron won multiple directing awards, including the Golden Globe and eventually
the DGA's award it won almost no major critics prizes for Best Picture. And
despite being the biggest overall winner on Oscar night – with seven prizes
including two for Cuaron for both Directing and editing – sure enough Best
Picture went to Twelve Years A Slave, which is the definition of the
kind of film the Oscars give Best Picture to: a film that is 'significant'
rather than entertaining.
During the next four years Irratu picked
up four Oscars for directing and writing and in 2017 Guillermo Del Toro won
three Oscars for The Shape of Water. In 2018 returned, this time in
collaboration with Netflix. Roma told the story of an upper-middle-class
family's maid in Mexico city during the 1970s. Made in conjunction with Mexico,
it was one of the first international movies since Amour that had a
genuine possibility of crossing over into the category for Best Picture.
Considering it was winning every major award from every major critics group for
Picture, Director and Foreign Language film this seemed like a very real
possibility. Which you have to figured
alarmed the mostly American membership of the Academy. For all their talk of
saying that film is the Universal language, they've been pretty clear that
their awards for Best Picture should go to American films.
So Roma won Best Motion
Picture Foreign language film at the Golden Globes but Cuaron won Best
Director. Then on nominations day it became only the fifth film in history to
be nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language film along with eight
other nominations, including directing, screenplay and two acting nominations.
You can feel the Academy sweating.
The film did win Best Foreign
Language film and Cuaron got two more Oscars, for directing and
cinematography. But when Green Book (which
had won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy that year) ended up winning Best
Picture, African-Americans might have been irked but the Academy breathed a sigh
of relief. The foreign infidels had been
stopped.
Until, of course, the following year.
Jane Campion
My heart breaks for Jane Campion.
It really does. More than 28 years after Hollywood got itself in a tether
because a woman looked like she was going to stop Steven Spielberg from
winning his first Oscar, the Oscars finally seemed ready to honor her. In 2021
she made her biggest critical success since The Piano with The Power
of The Dog. She was winning every Best Director prize in the book from the
Critics Awards. And then in the final months everything turned against.
First her triumph at the Golden Globes
happened the year that NBC chose not to broadcast it and many celebrities
didn't attend.
Then came the Critics Choice
Awards. The movie won four awards and Campion won Best Director. I've written
about this before:
Understandably giddy and perhaps a little
buzzed (the Critics' Choice does provide a fair amount of liquor to everybody)
Campion expressed amazement that she was in the same room with Venus and Serena
Williams, who were there as producers for King Richard, which has earlier taken
the Best Actor prize for Will Smith. Campion joked about taking up tennis and
then in that spirit of good humor said: “Venus and Serena don’t have to play
against the boys. I only have to play against the boys.” I have a
recording of the entire room laughing hysterically and applauding, including
Venus Williams. Serena looked a little shocked. I appreciated the joke because
of the larger statement it made not just about Campion’s life in Hollywood, but
of any female director trying to have a career in Hollywood.
…Campion’s
struggles over the past three decades, which mirror every female creative force
in Hollywood, the fact that she’d said she was in awe of the two of them
seconds earlier, the fact that she was no doubt giddy for triumph (maybe even a
little buzzed), the fact that she was joking – was relevant to social media.
All the internet cared about was that somehow Campion had diminished everything
the Williams’ sisters had accomplished. The fact that her struggle for
appreciation has no doubt gone on as long as the Williams sisters – hell, the
fact that they were even there for a movie about their lives illustrates what
they had to go through – wasn’t relevant.
And
as anyone who remembers the Oscars that year the Williams sisters, indirectly, overshadowed
Campion's triumph and the entire night. Will Smith famously slapped Chris Rock
and that is all the 2022 Oscars will ever be known for, certainly not the triumph
of Campion.
It
almost seems irrelevant that Power of the Dog ended up losing Best
Picture that year to CODA which for all the power of the film seems the
same kind of slap in the face that giving Best Picture to Crash sixteen
year earlier did. I'm fully aware that it is also directed by a woman Sian
Heder but the fact is Campion was nominated for Best Director, Heder
wasn't. Power of the Dog got ten nominations. CODA got three. Power
of The Dog won twelve Best Picture prizes in the lead-up to the Oscars and
Campion had won the Best Director prize; CODA won the PGA and the SAG
awards. Power of the Dog was a cinematic achievement. CODA is the
kind of film the Oscars give Best Picture to in order to make themselves look
inclusive in order to balance their often problematic history.
I
may be pontificating a bit here but the fact is Campion was twenty years older
than Heder on Oscar night 2022 and has not made a film since. I don't deny that
Heder deserved her moment in the sun and this may be yet another occasion of
Hollywood forcing one deserving woman to win over another. But Campion isn't
going to get many more chances and Heder will. In that sense I think it's
unfair to a director that she now has the dubious distinction of being one of a
handful of directors whose trophy for Best Director was the only Oscar
for their film. (Then again that club does include George Stevens and Mike
Nichols so its not such a bad group to be a part of.)
Looking
forward to Oscar night when it is possible the membership of this club will
grow by one more.
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