The Oscars Review Board - 1) Directors
The filmmakers who were fortunate, the geniuses that were jipped...
Robert Redford, Ordinary People - Ordinary People's a pretty decent film. The story of - you guessed it - ordinary people coming to terms with a family tragedy, the picture did well at the box office, received good reviews and won plaudits for its first-time director Robert Redford. That the Sundance Kid should have received such kudos is only fair given the picture's many merits - Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore are incredible as the grieving parents while Timothy Hutton and Judd Hirsch are utterly convincing as the surviving child and his therapist respectively. But when Redford started winning awards for his efforts, it required someone to get to their feet and point out that, while Ordinary People was good, it wasn't that good. It certainly wasn't on a par with Martin Scorsese's incendiary Raging Bull - nor, for that matter, was it superior to David Lynch's The Elephant Man or Richard Rush's The Stunt Man. Redford it was, however, who came away from the Academy Awards with the Best Director Oscar. If you're in search of an even bigger surprise, look no further than the fact it'd be another 30 years before Scorsese won the same prize.
Carol Reed, Oliver! - There's a lot to like about Sir Carol Reed's adaptation of Lionel Bart's smash-hit musical. From his nephew Oliver's brooding turn as Bill Sykes to Jack Wild's delightful Artful Dodger, you could argue that the film was the last of the great old skool musicals. The only problem is that, the same year Mark Lester was learning how to pick a pocket or two, Stanley Kubrick had taken cinema to an entirely new level with 2001: A Space Odyssey. The picture that opened minds the way it opened up possibilities, 2001 ought to have secured Kubrick a Nobel Prize let alone a Best Director Oscar. Nor was the celebrated recluse the only person overlooked; Roman Polanski wasn't even nominated for Rosemary's Baby. As for why exactly Reed won, it probably had more to do with his awesome body of work than Oliver! itself. With a filmography that includes such classics as The Fallen Idol, The Third Man and Odd Man Out, the veteran thoroughly deserved his recognition. But for neither the first or the last time, the Academy decided to honour the right man for the wrong film.
John G Avildsen, Rocky - You need a hard heart not to like the original Rocky. The story of an underdog written by an underdog, Sylvester Stallone, after watching another underdog, Chuck Wepner, take Muhammad Ali, to the limit, it might not be sophisticated but it's well told and sincerely performed. Having hit on a successful formula, directed John G Avildsen would repeat the dose with the Karate Kid movies. It was Rocky, though, that won him the Oscar, a prize few people thought he deserved given that the very same year, the brilliant Alan J Pakula was nominated for All The President's Men, the great Sidney Lumet (who'd never win an Academy Award) was up for Network, and the legendary Ingmar Bergman (who's also died sans Oscar) had been given the nod for Face To Face. It's also worth baring in mind that Rocky came out the same year as another underdog story, one about a traumatised Vietnam War veteran who rescues a child prostitute from her vicious pimp. The film was Taxi Driver and, no, its director Martin Scorsese wasn't even nominated.
Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump - It often takes the Academy a few years to catch up with the rest of us. By 1994, most moviegoers had already cottoned on to the fact that Pulp Fiction's Quentin Tarantino was a director with rare gifts, and while it would take slightly longer for its brilliance to be universally recognised, the smart crowd had figured out that Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption was epic in every sense of the word. As Oscar had no time for either of these filmmakers (Darabont went unnominated), so it couldn't do enough to shower praise upon one of its own. As a member of the Spielberg-Lucas crowd, Robert Zemeckis was as much a part of LA as the Hollywood sign. His previous films had, alas, been too lightweight (read: effortlessly entertaining) to be acknowledged. So it came to pass that he won his Best Director award not for Back To The Future or Who Framed Roger Rabbit but the king of all Marmite movies, Forrest Gump. And who should it fall upon to present Zemeckis with his golden boy but his best friend Steven Spielberg. Yep, you can still smell the sentiment today.
Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby - Plenty of movie stars have been undeserving recipients of Best Director Oscars. Redford for Ordinary People, Warren Beatty for Reds, Kevin Costner for Dances With Wolves, Mel Gibson for Braveheart - all would seem to have won the big prize because, as writer William Goldman said, "people are surprised when good looking folk prove they have any talent beyond looking good". Of course, as well as being a damn fine leading man, Clint Eastwood is a superb director, and if the Academy wasn't so sniffy about westerns he might have won his first Best Director gong long before 1992's Unforgiven. Clint's second Oscar for directing, however, was for a picture that's as different as it is disappointing. Based on a short story by FX Toole, Million Dollar Baby is less a feature film than a TV movie, and a decidedly average one at that. Morgan Freeman's blind trainer, Hilary Swank's trailer park underdog, Clint's coach with a terrible secret - these aren't characters, they're caricatures. That Eastwood picked up his second award for this is all the proof you need that 2004 was a very weak year for film.