Oscars 2010: Prepare For A World Of Hurt

Ok, now is where things get really interesting. Best Director and Best Picture. These 2 categories have historically been very closely linked. If you think about it rationally, it makes sense: how could the year’s Best Picture not also contain the best work by a Director? Well in the 81 times that a Best Picture has been awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the director of the Best Picture has also won the directing Oscar 59 times. There have been years where the absence of a nomination for the director of a Best Picture nominee has caused huge controversy (Spielberg’s lack of nomination as director for The Color Purple is oft-cited). And only 3 times in Academy Award history, has a film won the Best Picture prize without its director at least being nominated [Wings (1927/28), Grand Hotel (1931/32), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989)]. Yes, if you look at that closely, only one film since the 1930s has achieved that feat. I would say that would qualify as an important statistic.

Such statistics can prove to be especially significant this year, as the Best Picture race has now expanded to include 10 nominations, whereas the Best Director nominee pool stands at 5. On that rationale alone it’s pretty safe to say goodbye right now to the Best Picture chances for Up, District 9, The Blind Side, An Education, and A Serious Man. So that leaves us with the following films chasing Oscar in the 2 top categories: Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, The Hurt Locker, and Up in the Air. This year’s battle gets a little more spice thanks to the prior marriage of Best Director nominees Kathryn Bigelow (Locker) and James Cameron (Avatar). By all outward appearances they appear to be quite happy ex-es (though to be fair the majority of what any of us get to see of their interactions are their polite clapping responses when the other’s name is announced at award ceremonies), and Cameron has even made public statements that he is rooting for Bigelow to take home the Best Director award. Not to sound skeptical of Cameron’s genuineness, but he may be publicly voicing those sentiments because at this point it appears that most of Hollywood is rooting for Bigelow to become the first female director ever to win the Best Director Oscar. So Cameron may as well hop on that bandwagon and save his campaigning for the award that probably means the most to him at this point, Best Picture.

Speaking of Best Picture campaigning, Harvey Weinstein has executed another textbook campaign this year in his attempt to yield the top prize for Inglourious Basterds. The fact that The Weinstein Company landed 13 nominations this year for their films (8 alone for Basterds) is a testament to the campaigning wizardry of Weinstein. There is a lot of buzz going around that because of the expanded Best Picture category and the new voting procedures of ranking the nominated films from 1 to 10, that a film that might not have the most #1 votes, but a majority of #2 or #3 votes, can sneak in and win Best Picture. The Weinstein Company’s campaign for Basterds is strategically aiming to take advantage of these new voting rules, with Best Picture as its ultimate prize. There is certainly a chance this can happen, and at the least there will be some suspense Sunday night when it comes to the awarding of the night’s final prize.

That said, and despite the fact that there is a great deal of admiration for the directing work that Quentin Tarantino (Basterds), Lee Daniels (Precious) and Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) did with their respective films, it really does seem to boil down to a race between Bigelow and Cameron in both the Best Director and Best Picture categories this year. The historic nature of what a Bigelow win represents to all aspiring female directors probably puts Bigelow over the top in the Director category when it comes to the mindset of Oscar voters. But the reason her win would truly be special is because of the nature of her work in The Hurt Locker – as intense and raw a film as was released in 2009 – Bigelow’s effort puts to rest any antiquated notions that a woman cannot direct a kick-ass and powerful war film. Speaking of kick-ass war films, Avatar is another such film depicting a war of another time and place than Locker, and in doing so it employs mind-blowing state of the art technology in a manner that no one else on the planet other than Cameron would have the chutzpah or clout to dare attempt. And boy did Cameron pull it off. I have a feeling, though, that the members of the Academy may feel that Cameron has already been awarded with a billion plus at the box office for his work on Avatar, not to mention his well-deserved Oscars for his last ground-breaking effort Titanic, which again tilts the balance Bigelow’s and The Hurt Locker’s way in the top categories.

Avatar rightly deserves every technical award ever invented – it is that special and ground-breaking of a cinematic achievement. Because of what it represents going forward to the industry as it heralds a new world of big event 3D movies, it would certainly be a worthy and memorable Best Picture honoree. But strip away the 3D glitz and the mind-blowing CGI and Avatar tells a tale that we have seen time and time again throughout the history of cinema (and to be fair many such earlier incarnations of this tale, such as Dances with Wolves, have also been awarded the Oscars’ highest honor). The Hurt Locker is ground-breaking in a much different way, in its sense of immediacy and reality. It was an unforgettable experience for me and it gets my vote Sunday night. Oh yeah, I don’t get a vote (at least not yet…), but I think it will get the majority of the Academy’s vote Sunday night too.

Reach Jonathan Fuhrman on Twitter (@smarthollywood), or via email at smarthollywood@gmail.com. He’s also available for consultations for your Oscar pools, with his commission negotiable.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.