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BEST DIRECTOR
by JOHN HARKNESS
Robert Altman, Gosford Park
Winner, Golden Globe
Here is the most serious challenger to upend Ron Howard. Soderbergh didn't win the Directors Guild Award last year, but Traffic won the ensemble acting prize from the Screen Actors Guild, which Gosford Park won this year. Actors are the largest section of the Academy, and they adore Altman. With more than three decades of pictures behind him, Altman has worked with a lot of actors over the years. He's also one of the greatest living directors. How often does the Academy membership have the chance to honour a living legend and a septuagenarian without resorting to the honorary Oscar?
Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind
Winner, Directors Guild Award
Ron Howard has won his second Directors Guild Award. The last was for Apollo 13, for which he didn't receive an Oscar nomination. Always worth mentioning since, historically, the DGA winner usually wins the Oscar. But not last year, when the Academy got its back up over the idea of making Ang Lee the first non-white best director in their history. One can hardly complain, though, about giving a directing Oscar to Steven Soderbergh. As for Howard, he's the boy scout of film directors - honest, decent, brave, trustworthy, and nobody holds The Grinch against him. He's also a pedestrian director who turned away from an early flair for comedy - check Night Shift and Splash - for serious, if not downright sober dramas like Backdraft, Apollo 13 and this sanitized biography of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash. From a handicapping standpoint, he's a lifelong Hollywood person, and you never meet anyone who says a bad thing about him.
Peter Jackson, The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring
And the biggest cheque goes to... LOTR: FOTR, with a worldwide gross that has passed $700 million and put the entire trilogy, with its projected final budget of $300 million, into profit. This was a visionary gamble for a studio (New Line) and a director who'd never made a film that grossed $50 million, let alone cost $50 million. The first miracle, of course, is that it doesn't suck. The second miracle is that Jackson turns it into a triumphant exercise in epic filmmaking. It seems increasingly likely that the least interesting filmmaker will win the award - after the epic size of LOTR, the visionary mishegas of Mulholland Dr., the monumental violence of Black Hawk Down and the elegant mise-en-scène of Gosford Park, the Academy's going to give the Oscar to a director who's never shot a film as interesting as, say, any single frame of Mulholland Dr.
David Lynch, Mulholland Dr.
The nomination is the award, the nomination is the award.
Driven by critical support, Lynch managed to get a nomination from the directors' branch of the Academy. This is astonishing, since Mulholland Dr. is, by a considerable margin, the weirdest piece of celluloid to get a major-category nomination. Perhaps Lynch's colleagues recognized the astounding dedication and effort that went into turning a failed television pilot into a movie that engenders endless arguments about which part qualifies as the dream sequence. (I'm inclined to think almost all of it.) The smart money is on Goliath. If this David picks up an Oscar, I'll give up the Oscar prognostication biz and take up something with less variance - like luge.
Ridley Scott, Black Hawk Down
At last year's ceremony, it was kind of sick fun watching the close-ups of Ridley Scott every time his name was spoken at the podium by one of the Gladiator winners, only to see him grimace when Soderbergh's name was announced for best director. He won't win this year - the failure of Black Hawk Down to get a best-picture nomination almost guarantees it - though, ironically, he's actually more deserving this year.
Black Hawk Down is the most exhausting war film ever made. It's a piece of pure directorial construction and execution that doesn't demand a lot of philosophical consideration. Scott's commentary tracks on his DVDs reveal him to be a supremely practical, nuts-and-bolts director, which makes Black Hawk Down a perfect Ridley Scott project. He always knows how but he never asks why.
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