Night of Oscar firsts for directors
Amongst the glittering array of nominees for this year’s 90th Academy Awards, one category stands out, writes Jack Coyle.
There’s not an Academy Awards category this year that doesn’t feature some element of exciting new talent, captivating backstories or the possibility of an Oscar landmark victory.
But, oh, that Best Director category. In even the glittering array of nominees for this year’s 90th Academy Awards, the best director category stands out. Want history-making diversity? Check. First-time nominees? Check. Overdue veterans? Check.
Just about the only thing missing from this year’s directing nominees (that is, not counting The Post director Steven Spielberg and The Florida Project filmmaker Sean Baker) is cut-throat competition. The five nominees – Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), Jordan Peele (Get Out), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread) – have effusively praised one another as they’ve navigated their way along the awards-season campaign trail.
They have, like everyone else, seemingly come to the conclusion that this is one heck of a good bunch of film-makers.
‘‘Everybody is my opinion, for different reasons, had one of their best moments,’' says del Toro. ‘‘Paul Thomas Anderson making a movie that is faithful to his obsessions, exacting and deep in a way he always his. Chris Nolan creating a symphonic work of cinema. Greta Gerwig, first movie off the bat, is a movie that’s in appearance simple but is incredibly complex, wellcalibrated audio-visually, incredibly intimate.’'
And Peele, del Toro says, has a shared love of horror – a genre that seldom reaches the highest honours of the Oscars.
‘‘We’ve been brothers in arms in a way because we took a genre that’s normally not in the conversation and through each of our personal alchemies we transformed it with other genres,’' he says. ‘‘In my case, musical theatre, comedy. In his case, he makes it into a social parable of enormous potency.’'
Del Toro, a meticulous maestro of dark Gothic fantasies, is considered the favourite of the five for his sumptuously made period monster romance, the Oscarsleader with 13 nods. He won the highly predictive top honour from the Directors Guild. But whoever wins, it will be their first directing Academy Award – or, provided none win best screenplay earlier in the ceremony, their first Oscar, period.
That personal history will be made is for certain. But larger milestones could be set, too.
Gerwig, whose coming-of-age drama artfully turns on a motherdaughter axis, is just the fifth woman nominated for directing in the nine-decade history of the Oscars, a distinction she has been proud to celebrate, while remaining vocal about the disgrace of that statistic as an emblem of the movie industry’s wider gender imbalances. But in a Hollywood that has lagged behind in inclusiveness, she and Peele – both making their solo directorial debuts, both in their 30s – represent the future.
‘‘I feel connected to him because we’re part of the group to come up,’ ' says Gerwig. ‘‘We’ve been on this journey together, in a way.‘’
If Gerwig were to win, she would be only the second woman to be awarded best director, after Kathryn Bigelow (2008’s The Hurt Locker). If Peele were to win, he would be the first black film-maker to take the honour.
Peele set out to make a riproaring thriller propelled by a powerful social critique of latent racism. That Get Out, released early last year, has made it all the way to the Oscars has been an unexpected affirmation.
‘‘It comes with a really important lesson and realisation for me which is that it’s bigger than me. It’s an important thing for a lot of people and the people who supported the film and the people out there who have the same dream but feel like they can’t do it for whatever reason,’' says Peele
Del Toro is, himself, the third Mexican-born film-maker nominated for best director, a mark all the more meaningful at a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric courses through US politics. With a nomination, del Toro joins his close friends and countrymen: Alfonso Cuaron (who won for 2013’s Gravity) and Alejandro Inarritu (a nominee for
2006’s Babel and a winner for both
2014’s Birdman and 2015’s The Revenant). The trio were dubbed ‘‘the three Amigos’’ when they stormed Hollywood more than a decade ago.
‘‘When we came onto the landscape, it was a very different landscape when you’re talking about Latin American directors in the industry,’' says del Toro. ‘‘It was a lot of effort to change it and to get here.’'
And then there’s Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan – both among the most revered and most ambitious film-makers of the last two decades, both 47-year-old and in their prime. And yet neither has taken home an Academy Award. (This is Nolan’s first best director selection and Anderson’s second, following one for 2007’s There Will Be Blood.) They have navigated far different paths – Anderson, a thoroughly independent film-maker who eludes classification; Nolan, a bigscreen maximalist drawn to IMAX-sized spectacles – but both are slavish devotees to celluloid who have in recent years banded together to help preserve film in an increasingly digital industry.
In praising each of his fellow nominees’ films at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival last month, Nolan noted that since taking his children to see Phantom Thread, they have taken to calling him Mr Woodcock, after the film’s demanding, egotistical protagonist.
It’s entertaining to imagine other cross-pollinations. What if Peele directed The Shape of Water? What if Gerwig directed Phantom Thread? But the impossibility of those hypotheticals only reinforces how no one else could have made any of these five films except those who did. All either wrote or co-wrote their movies. All are carried forward by the expansive and idiosyncratic imaginations of their creators. There isn’t a bad choice in the bunch. – AP
❚ The 90th Academy Awards will be broadcast live on Monday afternoon on Sky Movies Premiere. Stuff will be live blogging the event, including red carpet coverage, from late Monday morning.