Oscars get director category right
Diverse cast of nominees ensures awards program will break new ground
NEW YORK — 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 the glittering array of nominees to the 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 is cutthroat 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 along the way.
They have, like everyone else, seemingly come to the conclusion this is one heck of a good bunch of filmmakers.
“Everybody has, in my opinion, for different reasons, had one of their best moments,” del Toro said in a recent interview. “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, well-calibrated audio-visually, incredibly intimate.”
And Peele, del Toro said, 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 said. “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 Oscars leader 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.
Gerwig, whose coming-of-age drama artfully turns on a mother-daughter 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.
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. On the morning of Oscar nominations, Peele was one of Gerwig’s first calls.
“I feel connected to him because we’re part of the group to come up,” Gerwig said in a recent interview. “We’ve been on this journey together, in a way. It’s both of our first films. I love his film so much. It’s so groundbreaking, it’s so wonderful. It deserves everything.”
If Gerwig were to win, she would be only the second woman to be awarded best director, after Kathryn Bigelow (for 2008’s The Hurt Locker). If Peele were to win, he would be the first black filmmaker to take the honour. (Previously nominated were John Singleton, Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen and Barry Jenkins.)
Peele set out to make a rip-roaring thriller propelled by a powerful social critique of latent racism. That Get Out has made it all the way to the Oscars has been an unexpected affirmation.
“I’ve been dreaming about this moment since I was 13. And to be honest I’ve gone through times where I believed in it and times when I didn’t believe in it,” Peele said. “It comes with a really important lesson and realization 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.”
Del Toro is the third Mexican-born filmmaker nominated for best director, a mark all the more meaningful at a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric courses through U.S. politics. Del Toro joins his close friends and countrymen Alfonso Cuaron (who won for 2013’s Gravity) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (a nominee for 2006’s Babel and a winner for both 2014’s Birdman and 2015’s The Revenant).
Then there’s Anderson and Nolan — both among the most revered and most ambitious filmmakers of the past two decades, both 47-yearolds in their prime. And yet neither has taken home an Academy Award. (This is Nolan’s first best director selection and Anderson’s second, after 2007’s There Will Be Blood.) They have navigated far different paths — Anderson a thoroughly independent filmmaker who eludes classification; Nolan a big-screen maximalist drawn to IMAX-sized spectacles — but both are slavish devotees to celluloid who have banded together to help preserve film in an increasingly digital industry.
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.