Who's Joining Jenkins & Chazelle in the Best Director Shortlist?

While working on Oscar chart updates, Best Director suddenly felt quite loose and ripe for shifting favor. While the Directors Guild Nominations will surely clarify that race to an extent those aren't until January 12th, a week after Oscar nomination voting begins. Right now though the coveted nominations for Best Director look fairly up in the air beyond the two thirtysomething wonder boys who have been showered with the most honors already: Damien Chazelle (La La Land) and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight). 

La La Land is only Chazelle's third feature (though many would mistake it for his second) and Moonlight is only Jenkins second (though many would mistake it for his first) so they're relative newbies. Oscar, however, is an octogenarian institution and they aren't always comfortable handing everything over the reigns to fresh blood. In fact the Best Director's race isn't usually that amenable to multiple fresh faces. You have to go back to 2009 to find an Oscar year with two directors nominated that were this green in their filmmaking careers (Jason Reitman's Up in the Air was his third feature and Precious was Lee Daniel's second) and they definitely weren't the frontrunners. For a long this year we were predicting a shortlist of all first-time nominees in the directing category but that hasn't happened since 1999. It's not a common occurrence.

Oscar's love of long-since proven directors suggests good news for Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge), Eastwood (Sully) or Scorsese (Silence) but the only one of those films with any noticeable precursor heat is Hacksaw Ridge and are they really going to welcome Gibson back in the year of angry white men upsetting the world with their prejudices? 

Kenneth Lonergan and Denis Villeneuve both have heat with Best Picture probables Manchester by the Sea and Arrival respectively but performance pictures like Manchester can sometimes suddenly be absent when the director's nominations are read out and critically acclaimed sci-fi pictures can also stumble come nomination morning due to genre biases. They might be in but they might not.  In a year when the buzz hasn't totally settled on a handful of auteurs, Oscar can sometimes surprise with a left field foreign or indie choice but even that seems hard to parse this year since so many different pictures have small passionate devotees but not huge mouthy legions of them. 

Are we overthinking this? Check out the New Best Director and Best Picture chart and report back. 

Best Director Chart Revisions

by Nathaniel R

This morning's update - the Best Director chart. And just as I'd finished those chart updates the Silence trailer arrived so we'll discuss that later today. So much happens all at once.

Speaking of. You don't want to see the way my doorman looks at me whenever I walk into the building - there's always a new stack of packages from the studios to sign for. Today alone there have been 4 deliveries of multiple packages. Why must campaign teams wait until the day before Thanksgiving to send everything? It's overwhelming really. It's the same as the studios waiting until the second half of December to release all movies ever. 

But back to the topic at hand - Best Director Hopefuls. We'll divvy them up into 3 categories after the jump...

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Still Blissing Out Over "La La Land"

Over the weekend I wrote up an Oscar preview for Towleroad - which you can consider a companion to our current Best Picture Chart and updated Oscar predictions. Here's what I wrote about La La Land, which I realize I didn't capsule review for you at TIFF: 

This musical from the young writer/director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) won the coveted "Audience Award" at Toronto. That prize nearly always aligns with a Best Picture nomination in January. But the nomination will be the least of it - it has "winner" written all over it. La La Land is a total bliss-out, a colorful two hour romance with song and dance numbers about an aspiring actress and her jazz musician boyfriend. This is the third movie to co-star Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling and their onscreen chemistry is even better this go around and it was tremendous to begin with in Crazy Stupid Love five years back.

Here's a shocking statistic for trivia buffs: If La La Land is nominated for Best Picture it will be the first original live-action musical to do so since All That Jazz (1979). The musical nominees inbetween them were either animated  (Beauty & The Beast), adaptations of pre-existing shows (Chicago) or used pre-existing music for their songs (Moulin Rouge!). If La La Land wins it will be the first original movie musical to win the Oscar since Gigi (1958).

In addition to these general notes here are a few slighter more specific ones...

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Tom Hanks on 'La La Land'

Over the weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, Tom Hanks was on hand to support Sully (which was received positively). At a screening Q&A he got off topic to get effusive about our most anticipated festival player La La Land. The diversion began from discussing the difficulty to in getting an adult drama with no franchise potential like Sully made and how audiences are only craving new experiences at the movies. He went on to praise the boldness of its original songs and unfamiliar characters even though he's completely unassocatied with the film. (We just knew he was a musical man at heart!)

Hanks said:

When you see something that is brand new that you can’t imagine, and you think "Well thank God this landed"... This is not a movie that falls into some sort of trend.

We all understand the business aspects of it. It’s cruel and it’s backbreaking and take-no-prisoners. But there’s always that chance where the audience sees something that is brand new that they never expected, and embraces it and celebrates it... I don’t take anything away from [the studios] and there are some good movies that come out of that. But we all go to the cinema for the same thing, that is to be transported to someplace we have never been before.

Movies stars, they're just like us sometimes. Indeed, this is high praise for the film and its potential to provide a much needed unique cinematic experience to the masses. Aside from the commentary Hanks makes here, it's a reminder that one of the tinier treasures of Oscar season is hearing what movies filmmakers are taken with (apart from their own) - whether it's the commonplace 'actors on actors' pieces or the like.

Aren't you just dying to hear Emma Stone's thoughts on Sully now?

La La Land Razzle Dazzles Venice

Classic musicals from Singing in the Rain to An American in Paris to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are being invoked to praise La La Land. There are comparisons to golden age stars like Shirley MacLaine, Grace Kelly and Gene Kelly. The Damien Chazelle film, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, has critics at Venice falling in love and believing in the magic of cinema again. La La Land just topped our most anticipated fall film list and it looks like the excited anticipation was proven correct just a day later.

Here is an assortment of what is being said...

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