When the first Oscars were presented, for the year 1927/28, the Best Picture was announced as Wings, a war film directed by William Wellman.
In those days there were two best direction awards, one for comedy and one for drama. This year the former went to Lewis Milestone, for Two Arabian Knights; and the latter to Frank Borzage for Seventh Heaven. William Wellman was not nominated for either.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that only once more was the director of a ‘Best Picture’ not even nominated for his contribution. That was in 1931/32 when Grand Hotel won and Edmund Goulding was completely overlooked. However, on a significant number of occasions, directors of ‘Best Picture’ have been nominated without winning
John Ford, for example, was nominated nine times, and won the award an impressive four times, but only once for a best picture, and that was How Green was my Valley, of all things.
Earlier this month IMDb conducted a poll to discover a consensus on which film to receive a Best Director award in the last two decades had most deserved to have been elected Best Picture. The films concerned were:
1989 Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone) lost to Driving Miss Daisy
1998 Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg) lost to Shakespeare in Love
2000 Traffic (Steven Soderbergh) lost to Gladiator
2002 The Pianist (Ramon Polanski) lost to Chicago
2005 Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee) lost to Crash
Why does this happen? Does it matter?
In those days there were two best direction awards, one for comedy and one for drama. This year the former went to Lewis Milestone, for Two Arabian Knights; and the latter to Frank Borzage for Seventh Heaven. William Wellman was not nominated for either.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that only once more was the director of a ‘Best Picture’ not even nominated for his contribution. That was in 1931/32 when Grand Hotel won and Edmund Goulding was completely overlooked. However, on a significant number of occasions, directors of ‘Best Picture’ have been nominated without winning
John Ford, for example, was nominated nine times, and won the award an impressive four times, but only once for a best picture, and that was How Green was my Valley, of all things.
Earlier this month IMDb conducted a poll to discover a consensus on which film to receive a Best Director award in the last two decades had most deserved to have been elected Best Picture. The films concerned were:
1989 Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone) lost to Driving Miss Daisy
1998 Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg) lost to Shakespeare in Love
2000 Traffic (Steven Soderbergh) lost to Gladiator
2002 The Pianist (Ramon Polanski) lost to Chicago
2005 Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee) lost to Crash
Why does this happen? Does it matter?
The simple reason for the discrepancy is the nomination process. The director nominations are decided by members of the directors' guild, about 200 of them; whereas the best picture choices are produced by polling the whole Academy (5000?).
I suppose it only matters if you have an auteurist approach to movies. After all, if Great Expectations is better-written than Dracula, then it’s a better book, isn’t it? So, if The Pianist is better-directed, it must be a better film than Chicago, mustn’t it?
Not necessarily. For a start, analogies are not arguments. In any case, what does ‘better-written’ mean? Are we talking about style, judicious choice of vocabulary, characterisation, plotting, philosophical depth, innovatory technique?
But I don’t want to get into this old argument. Just one or two points.
A film, unlike a book, is always a collaborative effort, no matter how dominant the director or how much creative freedom he has gained. It seems that every movie these days has the director’s name above the title, but that is usually a mere vanity. Kubricks and Von Sternbergs are rare.
It’s true that the days of the old studio hack director are over, where a director was handed a script, a crew and a roster of stars and told he’d got six weeks in which to shoot enough footage for the editor to weld into a finished movie. That was the era when Sam Goldwyn would insist that Wuthering Heights was ‘his’ film, not William Wyler’s.
I may have started by asking why directors are not honoured when ‘their’ movie is named Best Picture, but it is just as valid reverse the question. Why, for example, did Victor Fleming get the award for Gone with the Wind, when he was only one of three directors who worked on it, and when the whole project was tightly controlled by David O Selznick, the producer.
Mankiewicz won for All about Eve, and I wonder why, when all he did was competently manage an expert cast performing an excellent script.
Wyler’s direction of Ben-Hur was clunky at best, but won for overseeing an impressive and successful epic. And for having the sense to hand over the chariot race to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt.
In the sixties four musicals won best picture and their directors were handed the accolade, when all they did was supervisea series of good song and dance numbers, now doubt choreographed by someone else. These were Oliver – was this the same Carol Reed who made The Third Man. Come to think of it, did he direct The Third Man, or was it Orson Welles? George Cukor stood back and let Rex Harrison perform, Audrey Hepburn be beautiful and Lerner and Loewe’s music for My Fair Lady flow. Robert Wise won with The Sound of Music (there we are, then) and shared his Oscar with his choreographer on West Side Story.
Now here’s a thought. Why spend all this time trying to correlate Best Picture and Best Director, when we should be comparing Best Director with Best Acting Performances? That, after all, is the director’s first responsibility: ‘to direct the actors on the studio floor.’ That’s for another time, but it might be relevant in the award to Franklin Schaffner for Patton, where he coached George C Scott to a well-deserved Oscar.
Back to the original question. Here are a few possible reasons why a director might be overlooked when his film is singled out as the best.
The winning film was a big, successful entertainment, the director made no significant personal contribution. Mutiny on the Bounty, for example, in 1935. It was more of an all-round Hollywood production than The Informer, a personal, ‘arty’ film, for which Ford won Best Director in the same year.
Around the World in Eighty Days and The Greatest Show on Earth are similar cases.
In 1940 Ford won for The Grapes of Wrath but the Best Picture was Rebecca. Again a straightforward entertainment (if that description can ever be applied to Hitchcock) against a serious, rather leftish film, with ‘director’ written all over it. Or maybe, the Academy just couldn’t make up its mind between the two.
Oddly, it seems to have worked the other way round when Mankiewicz won for A Letter to Three Wives, and All the King’s Men was Best Picture.
In 1948, Hollywood congratulated itself on its artistic leanings by honouring Hamlet, but maintained a balance by naming John Huston Best Director.
Driving Miss Daisy and Chariots of Fire were small gems, efficient and cost-effective, but didn’t have the directorial flash that gained the honour for Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty in the same years. It seems to be the case that ‘good’ directing has to draw attention to itself.
The more recent mis-matches follow the same pattern. Gladiator and Shakespeare in Love and Chicago were good old-fashioned Hollywood product, always more likely to win out over the war films with which they were competing, whether realistic and patriotic (Saving Private Ryan) or cynical and bitter (Born on the Fourth of July) or harrowing (The Pianist).
And then there’s the politics, the envy and feuds, the feeling that it’s somebody’s turn. What’s the betting that Scorsese will finally win this year, while The Departed won’t? If Letters from Iwo Jima wins, it will of course counter what I said in my last paragraph.
Because there is no pattern, no sense to it at all. George C Scott was right – there’s no place for competition in the arts.
Not necessarily. For a start, analogies are not arguments. In any case, what does ‘better-written’ mean? Are we talking about style, judicious choice of vocabulary, characterisation, plotting, philosophical depth, innovatory technique?
But I don’t want to get into this old argument. Just one or two points.
A film, unlike a book, is always a collaborative effort, no matter how dominant the director or how much creative freedom he has gained. It seems that every movie these days has the director’s name above the title, but that is usually a mere vanity. Kubricks and Von Sternbergs are rare.
It’s true that the days of the old studio hack director are over, where a director was handed a script, a crew and a roster of stars and told he’d got six weeks in which to shoot enough footage for the editor to weld into a finished movie. That was the era when Sam Goldwyn would insist that Wuthering Heights was ‘his’ film, not William Wyler’s.
I may have started by asking why directors are not honoured when ‘their’ movie is named Best Picture, but it is just as valid reverse the question. Why, for example, did Victor Fleming get the award for Gone with the Wind, when he was only one of three directors who worked on it, and when the whole project was tightly controlled by David O Selznick, the producer.
Mankiewicz won for All about Eve, and I wonder why, when all he did was competently manage an expert cast performing an excellent script.
Wyler’s direction of Ben-Hur was clunky at best, but won for overseeing an impressive and successful epic. And for having the sense to hand over the chariot race to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt.
In the sixties four musicals won best picture and their directors were handed the accolade, when all they did was supervisea series of good song and dance numbers, now doubt choreographed by someone else. These were Oliver – was this the same Carol Reed who made The Third Man. Come to think of it, did he direct The Third Man, or was it Orson Welles? George Cukor stood back and let Rex Harrison perform, Audrey Hepburn be beautiful and Lerner and Loewe’s music for My Fair Lady flow. Robert Wise won with The Sound of Music (there we are, then) and shared his Oscar with his choreographer on West Side Story.
Now here’s a thought. Why spend all this time trying to correlate Best Picture and Best Director, when we should be comparing Best Director with Best Acting Performances? That, after all, is the director’s first responsibility: ‘to direct the actors on the studio floor.’ That’s for another time, but it might be relevant in the award to Franklin Schaffner for Patton, where he coached George C Scott to a well-deserved Oscar.
Back to the original question. Here are a few possible reasons why a director might be overlooked when his film is singled out as the best.
The winning film was a big, successful entertainment, the director made no significant personal contribution. Mutiny on the Bounty, for example, in 1935. It was more of an all-round Hollywood production than The Informer, a personal, ‘arty’ film, for which Ford won Best Director in the same year.
Around the World in Eighty Days and The Greatest Show on Earth are similar cases.
In 1940 Ford won for The Grapes of Wrath but the Best Picture was Rebecca. Again a straightforward entertainment (if that description can ever be applied to Hitchcock) against a serious, rather leftish film, with ‘director’ written all over it. Or maybe, the Academy just couldn’t make up its mind between the two.
Oddly, it seems to have worked the other way round when Mankiewicz won for A Letter to Three Wives, and All the King’s Men was Best Picture.
In 1948, Hollywood congratulated itself on its artistic leanings by honouring Hamlet, but maintained a balance by naming John Huston Best Director.
Driving Miss Daisy and Chariots of Fire were small gems, efficient and cost-effective, but didn’t have the directorial flash that gained the honour for Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty in the same years. It seems to be the case that ‘good’ directing has to draw attention to itself.
The more recent mis-matches follow the same pattern. Gladiator and Shakespeare in Love and Chicago were good old-fashioned Hollywood product, always more likely to win out over the war films with which they were competing, whether realistic and patriotic (Saving Private Ryan) or cynical and bitter (Born on the Fourth of July) or harrowing (The Pianist).
And then there’s the politics, the envy and feuds, the feeling that it’s somebody’s turn. What’s the betting that Scorsese will finally win this year, while The Departed won’t? If Letters from Iwo Jima wins, it will of course counter what I said in my last paragraph.
Because there is no pattern, no sense to it at all. George C Scott was right – there’s no place for competition in the arts.
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