In Contention

Tag: Alan J. Pakula

  • Great Oscarless directors

    Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick, Preston Sturges, Ernest Lubitsch, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula, Sidney Lumet, Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson.

    Collectively they represent some of the greatest directors in the history of the cinema, and together they share one rather unbelievable fact…not one of them is a Academy Award winner for Best Director.

    Each has the distinction of nominee, of course.  But to think that filmmakers such as James Cameron (The King of the World, remember?), Richard Attenborough, Ron Howard, Sir Carol Reed (for “Oliver,” man?), John G. Avilden, Michael Cimino, Robert Benton, Robert Redford, Robert Wise (for “The Sound of Music??”) and George Roy Hill, to name a few, have Oscars on their mantles and the giants above do not is simply insane to me.

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  • 1976: a great year and Oscar blew it

    Continuing the conversation on great years for movies (1974 being my pick for the best), I thought I’d dig into a season rich with material that slipped through Oscar’s fingers.

    The American bicentennial year was loaded with wonderful films — ground-breaking works that stunned both audiences and critics with their mastery. Three of them were nominated for Best Picture, some of the others were not, yet the eventual winner was a low budget love story about a boxer that wanted to prove he wasn’t just another bum from the neighborhood.

    The true greats of 1976:

    “All the President’s Men”

    Alan J. Pakula’s superb adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about their investigation of the Watergate burglary was born out of an astonishing script by William Goldman. Making sense of the politics within a dense book, incredibly detailed, Goldman’s work had the good sense to make the film a detective-like thriller with well-defined characters.

    This could have been a dull, political film made to exploit the happenings in the United States at the time, but Pakula instead made one of the great films about journalism in the days before the Internet and e-mail. Robert Redford bought the rights to the book and produced the film, starring as Woodward, with Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, both giving exceptional performances, but it was Jason Robards who blew them off the screen with his excellent performance as the crusty, wise, and ultimately loyal Washing Post editor Ben Bradlee.

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