We now start our journey through the 50th Academy Awards, celebrating the films of 1997. Next week we'll do Best Picture, this week we'll do the Acting categories, but today: Best Director.
Now, if you recall, it was a director who set me on this path of 1990, 1997, and 2003: Kevin Costner. Readers voted the years in which he directed a film as the project to follow my The Winner Is John Ford series. Sadly, as we noted yesterday, The Postman was little appreciated in its time, though Costner did "win" Worst Director at the Razzies and its overseas equivalent, Spain's Yoga Awards. Unfair and unjust.
Two directors who missed the Oscar lineup: James L. Brooks for Best Picture nominee As Good As It Gets and Steven Spielberg for Amistad, both nominated at the Directors Guild of America Awards and at the Golden Globes. The Boxer's Jim Sheridan was also nominated at the Golden Globes while missing out at the Academy Awards. And then there's Baz Luhrmann, whose 1996 Romeo + Juliet was no awards favorite in the States but qualified for the next year's BAFTAs, where he was nominated for Best Director against Curtis Hanson, Peter Cattaneo, and James Cameron...and won.
But there can be only one King of the World at the Oscars:
Here's how I'd rank 'em:
5. Peter Cattaneo for The Full Monty
only nomination in this category; BAFTA Awards nominee for Best Direction
Also named the Best New Filmmaker by the MTV Movie Awards, Cattaneo made his feature debut with The Full Monty, having previously been nominated in Best Live Action Short Film for 1990's "Dear Rosie." No bells and whistles, but surefooted. He understands exactly how to maintain its light tone even through serious and surprising plot turns.
4. Curtis Hanson for L.A. Confidential
only nomination in this category; LAFCA Awards winner for Best Director, National Board of Review's Best Director of 1997, NYFCC Awards winner for Best Director; BAFTA Awards nominee for Best Direction, DGA Awards nominee for Best Director, Golden Globe nominee for Best Director
He evokes Old Hollywood not just in the period detail of his team of set designers, costumers, makeup artists, and hair stylists, but in the performances, the shot design, the score, the imagery and rhythms of the montages. It's neither a pastiche nor a modern "spin" but rather a continuation of a tradition.
3. Gus Van Sant for Good Will Hunting
first of two nominations; DGA Awards nominee for Best Director
One is tempted to say he gets out of the way and lets the actors do the material, but he is bringing out performances from great actors who nevertheless have not quite hit this level before or since. He manages a naturalism while still maintaining the look of cinema, you know what I mean? Everything looks beautiful without being inauthentic. Knows just when to push in and when to step back.
2. Atom Egoyan for The Sweet Hereafter
only nomination in this category; LAFCA Awards runner-up for Best Director, NYFCC Awards runner-up for Best Director
Beautiful work here, you can feel his empathy for everyone he introduces us to; we feel their anger, their grief, their loss of self, and we also feel their joys, their lusts, their pride, their hopes. He handles one reveal in an almost dreamlike fashion, it's all the more haunting because it feels so out-of-body, out-of-time. He seamlessly rolls between timelines and points of view. This is a director, it seems to me, who genuinely cares for these people.
1. James Cameron for Titanic
first of two nominations in this category; DGA Awards winner for Best Director, Golden Globe winner for Best Director; BAFTA Awards nominee for Best Direction
It is funny that he is very clearly making The Movie He's Gonna Win The Oscar For, everything is colossal, from the indulgent sweeping shots of the ship at sea to the details down to the furniture - down to the menus - both when they're so fresh you can still "smell the paint" and when they've rusted and rotted at the bottom of the sea. Like Hanson, he too tips his hat at old-school performance styles, though Cameron's actors are much more stylized, Winslet and Bates hearkening back to Stanwyck and Ritter in the '53 version...in cadence, anyway. Every damn penny is up on screen and is gorgeous, the film is a monument to cinema as art, as commerce, as entertainment. He really did it!
Next time, the nominees for Best Supporting Actor: Robert Forster (Jackie Brown), Anthony Hopkins (Amistad), Greg Kinnear (As Good As It Gets), Burt Reynolds (Boogie Nights), and Robin Williams (Good Will Hunting).
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