Previously on Herrington & Akers on the Oscars:
Day 1: Supporting Performances
Day 2: Screenplays
Day 3: Lead Performances
Best Director
Nominees: Michael Haneke (Amour), Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Ang Lee (Life of Pi), Steven Spielberg (Lincoln), David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook).
Chris Herrington :
Will Win: With Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow surprisingly left off the short list, I have a hard time seeing anyone but Steven Spielberg winning here. If I had to pick a spoiler: David O. Russell, only because I suspect Silver Linings Playbook might steal the night.
Should Win: I love Lincoln, but I think it might be the least director-driven good film of Spielberg’s career, with screenwriter Tony Kushner and lead Daniel Day-Lewis vying for authorship. (Not to mention the casting director.) So I’ll vote here for Michael Haneke, whose precise framing and bold rejection of sentimentality elevate Amour.
Got Robbed: My picks for the two best directing jobs of the year were left out. That would be Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master and Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty. Anderson reminds us — at a time in the (d)evolution of the medium when we really needed to be reminded — what real film can look like in the hands of a real director, especially with an opening section that stands as the best stretch of filmmaking I saw last year. But Bigelow’s absence here is a joke. I admire Bigelow’s unsettling bookends, the intentionally hum-drum precision of the (anti-)climactic raid, the way she carries the narrative through-line across a decade and nearly three-hours of run time, and the subtle way the film tells a personal story of a woman trying to launch a pet project in a male industry. It seemed like every end-of-year prestige picture pushed three hours, but none was as worthy of its length as Zero Dark Thirty.
