In Contention

Tag: Best Director

  • Garrone on ‘Gomorrah’: “It’s not real, but it’s true.”

    Viva Italia, is all I have to say. In the past 48 hours, I’ve been lucky enough to see the two films that have widely been heralded as marking a renaissance for the Italian film industry, a world cinema titan that had been lying dormant for a couple of years. No more.

    One of them is Paolo Sorrentino’s blistering, return-to-form political thriller “Il Divo,” which I will discuss closer to its appearance at the upcoming London Film Festival. The other is Italy’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film race, “Gomorrah.” Possible masterpieces, both of them — and as solid a case as any for abolishing the silly “one film per country” rule that so plagues this problematic Oscar category.

    Walking out of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts after Sunday’s UK premiere of “Gomorrah,” which was followed by a lively Q&A with director Matteo Garrone, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might have just met one of next year’s multiple Academy Award nominees.

    Far-fetched, I know, but the film’s achievement is that staggering and far-reaching. Under the foreign-language committee’s new voting system, a nomination in that category should, by rights, be a slam-dunk, while Best Director and, particularly, Best Adapted Screenplay nominations are, to my mind, well within the realm of possibility. I will resist further gushing until I post a proper review in the next day or two, but for now, I want to share some of the thoughts Garrone offered at the Q&A.

    A modest, thoroughly disarming presence, far younger in demeanor than his 40 years suggest, Garrone himself seems a little bewildered by the film he has made and the discussion it has wrought. For those who don’t know, “Gomorrah” is a documentary-style examination of the Camorra crime syndicate that terrorizes Naples, based on the bestselling non-fiction expose by Roberto Saviano.

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  • What’s the worst Best Actor choice of all time?

    Roberto Benigni at the Academy Awards in 1999With the Bat frenzy settling down, and the Toronto Fest looming just ahead, I thought I’d get back to, well, complaining about the Academy’s more lame-brained calls over the years!

    What has been the group’s single worst choice for Best Actor in its 80 year history?  My choice: Roberto Benigni for “Life is Beautiful” in 1998.

    I remember sitting stunned when his name was called out at the Screen Actors Guild awards for his incessant, mugging in the film, possibly the most over-praised endeavor of 1998. What this meant of course was that he now had the inside track to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for this ridiculous performance.

    And he did just that, clowning around, jumping up on the seats of those around him, massacring the English language (which he speaks perfectly fine) with his acceptance speech, trying his best to be endearing and beloved.

    How and why did this performance — and this film — become so beloved by the AMPAS?

    Among the performances Benigni defeated that year were Edward Norton’s seething work in “American History X,” Tom Hanks’s superb turn in “Saving Private Ryan” and Nick Nolte’s raging performance in “Affliction.” Each performance was vastly superior to Begnini’s, and as always, some of those not nominated could have easily taken his place.  Jim Carrey in “The Truman Show” comes to mind.

    Hollywood, however, fell in love with Mr. Begnini as he cruised through cocktail party after cocktail party, dinner at Barbara Streisand’s house, the entire town entranced by a brown-eyed clown.

    His performance was little more than over the top shameless mugging for the camera — “acting” at its worst. For that he gets an Oscar, along with nominations for Best Director and a win for Best Foreign Language Film??

    There have been terrible Oscar wins in the past, of course: “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Elizabeth Taylor for “Butterfield 8,” Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman.  But has the Academy ever been so incredibly bamboozled by a film and a performer as they were in 1998?

    What about you?  What do you think is the Academy’s all time worst choice for Best Actor?  Or Best Foreign Language Film for that matter?

  • TDK, FYI

    Christian Bale in The Dark KnightMuch as I admire his spunk, I think Awards Daily contributor Ryan Adams might be getting ahead of himself with his Oscar hopes for “The Dark Knight.”

    In a recent post, he labels the categories of Best Makeup, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Supporting Actor and Best Visual Effects as “virtual certainties.” The other categories mentioned he feels are Oscar-worthy enough and have a good shot as well.

    Best Visual Effects isn’t going to happen. This branch abandoned practical effects considerations long ago. The makeup, meanwhile, could find some trouble from aging and transformative efforts later in the season, so I wouldn’t call it a sure thing either.

    We can all, I think, assume that Heath Ledger is on his way to a nod, and, indeed, the sound work in the film is top notch and worthy of serious consideration. The rest…nah. In fact, I think the most hastily over-predicted category for this film so far has been Best Art Direction, where Nathan Crowely scored at the BAFTAs in 2005 for “Batman Begins.”

    There aren’t a lot of manufactured sets here. All the stuff that looks like a creation was even, for the most part, a practical set. London’s Battersea Power Station really shows up well when used in the film, for instance, and looks like a manifestation. But it’s not.

    Lee Smith’s film editing is certainly a possibility, as he took things up a notch (to say the least) in this effort, but James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer will not be eligible for their brillaint score because of that pesky rule Rule 16b.

    (By the way, speaking of the boys, anyone else just LOVE that creepy two-note string theme for the Joker that is a clever inversion of the Batman theme?)

    I would, however, call Wally Pfister’s work behind the camera this film’s closest thing to a lock. The lensers have tons of respect for this guy (I’d say his nod in 2005 was a surprise) and given the technological steps taken here with the IMAX technology — the sheer balls of lugging those cameras around for these action sequences — I’d say he’s in.

    And of course — I’ve always felt Christopher Nolan has a play here. But I’m not willing to go there. Yet.

    Just my two cents.

  • Nolan for Best Director?

    Christopher Nolan and Aaron Eckhart on the set of The Dark KnightAlways willing to be a bit brazen with his predictions (I like that), Nathaniel Rogers is busy updating his picks over at The Film Experience.  My favorite left-field notion is his choice of Christopher Nolan in the lone director slot for “The Dark Knight,” naturally.

    I had the same idea in mind three years ago, right up until the day before the nominations, even.  I caught some email flack for thumping the fanboy drum in the process, but it really felt like a possibility.  Well, I’ve learned my lesson (somewhat) and haven’t bothered bringing it up this year, despite a nagging feeling that this critically acclaimed effort could indeed surprise us along these lines in January.

    But let’s just say I’m glad Nat’s here to help carry the burden this time around.  As he shrewdly notes, “This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.”

    Elsewhere, Rogers is hanging onto his “Miracle at St. Anna” forecast in the Best Picture arena, allowing “Australia” to join the party, while he finally finds some room for a little “Revolutionary Road” love in the lead actor and actress categories.

    Read his expanded thoughts here.  The updates are on-going this week.

    And while I’m busy tossing up pics from the set of “The Dark Knight” — I’ve always loved this shot:

    Director Christopher Nolan (hands folded leaning on rail) watches as Christian Bale prepares for a scene in The Dark Knight

  • Neck and neck

    After last week’s poll on Oscarless directors, it became clear pretty fast that two giants were way ahead of the pack: Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick.  The closest pretender to the throne of snubbed helmers was Robert Altman, but it was a VERY distant third.

    So this week it seemed only fair to suss out where everyone stands on these two alone, without the other 14 names in the mix.  So have at it in the new poll.

  • 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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  • Who joins the great Best Picture snubs this year?

    It happens every year, a great film, in some cases destined to be remembered more than the eventual Oscar winner is snubbed for a Best Picture nod, or gets nominated and loses to an inferior film that happened to capture the public’s attention at that particular point in history.

    Some of the greatest films of all time lost the top award, “Citizen Kane” among them, arguably the greatest of all time (though I disagree). “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, easily John Huston’s best work, joins the list, as does “The Searchers,” which is in my opinion the finest western ever made and contains the greatest John Wayne performance of all time.

    Remember “Rocky” winning over “All the President’s Men,” “Network” and “Taxi Driver?” Or “Kramer vs. Kramer” over “Apocalypse Now?” In the last twenty years, Oscar has pulled some howlers, some choices that left me nearly putting my foot through the television upon the announcement. The first time I remember being really, truly angry at a lame decision was in 1981 when “Chariots of Fire” bested Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” which I believe to be among the best films of the 80s.

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  • Clint Eastwood — anything he does grabs Oscar’s attention

    Let me begin with something very personal, something I prefer not to do in this column. Movies have not mattered much this past week, as my wife of 18 years, the love of my life was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. This Thursday we journey to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto to allow the finest surgeons in the country to go in and take the tumor out, with the hope she does not have to have chemotherapy or radiation. There is a chance I could lose her, and that I couldn’t bear. The past few days have been a blur, and yet it is her who urged me back to the computer, with a gentle, “You can’t let the movie writing stop because of this…please…write…” God I love that girl. She is at this moment snoozing behind me as I write this.

    Later this year we will see the release of “Changeling,” the latest from Clint Eastwood who over the last 16 years has become one of the finest directors working in movies. Now seriously, had anyone ever told me in the 70s that one day I would be celebrating the works of Eastwood the director by writing a book about him and his work, I would have laughed in their face at the thought.

    Dirty Harry, the man who acted with apes, becoming a world class director? Yet here we are in 2008 and Eastwood has won two Academy Awards for Best Director, twice been honored by the Directors Guild of America, and won countless critics prizes for his work. Revered by actors, beloved by the studios for whom he works, and respected by his colleagues, he has quietly risen to the very peak of the directing world, sitting alongside Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. His films have the lean feel and look of the best work of John Huston and Howard Hawks to whom story was paramount.

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  • Actors winning Best Director — always deserved?

    Of course not. Quite often the Academy gets behind an actor for the simple reason they pulled of the film without screwing too much up.

    How else can one explain Mel Gibson’s win for “Braveheart” but failure to be nominated for his masterpiece “The Passion of the Christ” and “Apocalypto,” easily two of the finest directed films of the last ten years? Somewhere along the road, the Academy fell in love with actors who try their hand at directing (unless your name is Sean Penn or Barbara Streisand) and began giving away Oscars, quite often over more deserving directors.

    Poor Martin Scorsese has watched actors win the Best Director prize over his work three times. In 1980, of course, Robert Redford won for his drama “Ordinary People” over Scorsese’s searing “Raging Bull,” while ten years later Kevin Costner won the Oscar for “Dances with Wolves,” besting Scorsese for “Goodfellas.” But hey — this is the Academy…right? Clint Eastwood also bested Scorsese’s “The Aviator” in 2004 with a win for “Million Dollar Baby.”

    One year after Redford won his Academy Award for Best Director, Warren Beatty took home the award, much deserved for his criminally under-appreciated epic “Reds.” But he would watch in shock as “Chariots of Fire” ran to the Best Picture award over his film. The following year, a minor British actor, Richard Attenborough directed “Gandhi,” which the Academy fell in love with, honoring the achievements of the film’s subject rather than the effort itself, which even at the time seemed old-fashioned and rather ordinary. Attenborough himself, on the way to accept the Directors Guild Award for the film, stopped to chat with Steven Spielberg to make clear what everyone in the room seemed to know: that Spielberg should have won the award for “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial!”

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