Alright, we wrap up our week of movie talk with the two big awards, Best Director and Best Picture.
Best Director
The Nominees: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, James Cameron for Avatar, Lee Daniels for Precious, Jason Reitman for Up in the Air, and Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds.
- Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow: A good bet to become the first female Best Director Oscar winner.
CHRIS HERRINGTON: Okay, I’m not going to spend much time with this category as it dovetails too much with the Best Picture race, but there are three legit contenders: Bigelow and Cameron at the forefront, with Tarantino as a sleeper. Bigelow and Cameron are former spouses and it’s certainly interesting to see them competing here with Bigelow helming a low-budget, modest box-office underdog against Cameron’s mega-budget all-time box-office champ. This storyline would be juicier if there was bad blood between the two, which there doesn’t seem to be. So I think the more interesting and more meaningful storyline here is that Bigelow has a shot to become the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar. Unless I’m missing something, only three women have previously been nominated: Sofia Coppola in 2003 (Lost in Translation), Jane Campion in 1993 (The Piano), and Lina Wertmuller in 1973 (Seven Beauties). Is it meaningful that in an awards ceremony that is overwhelmingly American, half of the meager four female best director nominees are non-American? You bet it is. This is an enormous indictment of the American film industry generally and the Oscars specifically. (Lee Daniels, as an African-American filmmaker, is in even sparser company, but has no chance of winning. Did you know Spike Lee has never gotten a Best Director nomination? Screw you, Academy Awards.) Anyway, Will Win: Kathryn Bigelow. YES WE CAN.
Should Win: I care much more about the filmmaking basics of shot placement, duration, and editing than I do about CGI and 3-D breakthroughs or marshaling mega-budget movies that double as marketing plans, so this is easy — Kathryn Bigelow. Tarantino would be my second choice, but as much as I like Inglourious Basterds, I think it’s his least successful film since Reservoir Dogs.
