Oscar's Director Hierachy 2024 Edition

by Nathaniel

Spielberg & Scorsese just keep moving up Oscar's hall of fame

Since we did this with the Actresses and Actors, why not the Directors? Martin Scorsese added to his incredible record this season and Steven Spielberg did the same just last year, nudging Billy Wilder into fourth place. The Most Hallowed Directors Quartet is far more "current" than the Actor or Actress throne rooms as a result...

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Doc Corner: John Ford and the 'Midnight Cowboys'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

“When in doubt, make a western.” – John Ford.

This quote stuck out to me in the opening of The Taking, the latest film about film from Swiss director Alexandre O. Philippe. Like ford, director John Schlesinger made a western himself after an early-career stumble. The films of John Ford and Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy aren’t linked too much; at least not on the surface. But with two new documentaries, they are given visual deep-dives that tie them together as logical ends of a spectrum that used images to sell America as a hard land or hard men.

Both Philippe’s The Taking and Nancy Buirski’s Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy err on the side of cinematic essays than traditional behind-the-scenes making-of documentaries. Each offer their subjects’ take on the (quote unquote) western as both of their time and in many ways timeless. I enjoyed them both.

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Showbiz History: An Unmarried Woman, Oscar Balloting, and Hula Hoops

7 random things that happened on this day, March 5th, in showbiz history...

Best Actor and Best Actress, Victor McLaglen & Bette Davis

1936 The 8th Academy Awards are held honoring the best of 1935. Victor McLaglen (The Informer) and Bette Davis (Dangerous) take the acting Oscars. Mutiny on the Bounty wins Best Picture (and nothing else). That happened three times in the first eight years of Oscar history and has literally never happened since. That same night John Ford wins the first of his four Best Director prizes (the all time record) for The Informer. Curiously only one of his Best Director wins, How Green Was My Valley, came with a companion Best Picture win. (So he's like if you combined Alfonso Cuaron and Ang Lee's records, both of whom have won twice without a companion Best Picture win, and rewrote history -- which we'd sure like to *cough Brokeback* -- to add in 1 random Best Picture win.) The four wins without much help from Best Picture frontrunner status is such a crazy record if you think on it for even half a second. It's hard to imagine that it will ever be broken...

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Doc Corner: Is 'Five Came Back' Netflix's Oscar Moment?

by Glenn Dunks

It can sometimes feel like we’ve seen WWII from so many perspectives that there can’t possibly be new ways to convey the weight of its tragedy. That Five Came Back, a new three-part mini-docu-series on Netflix, manages to succeed at doing this is just one of its many virtues. Adapted from Mark Harris’ book of the same name by Harris himself and directed by Laurent Bouzereau, this is a three-hour documentary about the work of five of Hollywood’s biggest directorial names of the 1930s who enlisted to support the American war effort the only way that they knew how: through film, and the personal battles they fought in order to do so.

They were Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, William Wyler and John Ford – the latter of whom gets the biggest laugh labelling documentaries in the 1930s as “silly things that rich kooks made” – each of whom left behind successful careers without the promise of anything when they came back.

If they came back at all. The series charts their early efforts before America’s entering the war after Pearl Harbour in 1941 before digging more deeply in the works that they produced from the front lines on the ground and in the skies....

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The Furniture: Designing Dignity in "How Green Was My Valley"

"The Furniture" our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber

Filmmaking is often an art borne of flexibility. Tim Burton built Sleepy Hollow from scratch when he couldn’t find just the right town in the real world. Vincente Minnelli was forced to make Brigadoon indoors in Hollywood, because the studio wouldn’t pay for an expensive production in Scotland. Both films are likely better for it, too.

The same is perhaps true for How Green Was My Valley, which premiered 75 years ago this week. John Ford wanted to make shoot it on location in Wales, but World War II intervened. Instead, the production team built an entire mining town in the Santa Monica Mountains. This condensed and idealized version of the setting of Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel is among the most emotionally resonant sets of its era.

The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Art Direction.

The design team consisted of Richard Day, Nathan H. Juran and Thomas Little, no stranger to Oscar success. They based their village on Gilfach Goch, a quintessential Welsh mining town, but they dramatically reduced the size and jammed the houses much closer to the colliery...

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