The parallel track traveled by the Oscars and the DGA Awards is well chronicled and quite remarkable. The DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film has traditionally been one of the industry’s most accurate barometers for who will win the Best Director Academy Award; only six times since the DGA Awards began in 1948 has the Feature Film winner not gone on to win the corresponding Oscar.
While that could happen again this year, there’s more of a chance now–at least numerically–that it won’t. This year the DGA and the Oscars share only two nominees–Ang Lee for Life of Pi, and Steven Spielberg for Lincoln. The balance of Academy Award director nominees this year are: Michael Haneke for Amour; Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild; and David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook. By contrast the other three DGA Award nominees are: Ben Affleck for Argo; Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty; and Tom Hooper for Les Miserables.
While the nominee slates for the two award competitions have had some discrepancies in the past, none have gone as deeply as this year’s. For example, four of the past five years, four of the five director nominees were the same between the DGA and the Academy Awards. The other year, all five nominees were the same in both competitions.
Perhaps this year’s two out of five corresponding nominees is merely an aberration. But still there’s conjecture as to why this time around is so different, some of which includes the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ decision to move up its nominations deadline. This resulted in Oscar nomination ballots being turned in prior to the DGA announcing its nominees this week. That, some contend, negated any possible influence the DGA nominations might have had over Academy voters.
Whatever the reason or reasons, both Spielberg and Lee have been nominated for films that have considerable momentum. Lincoln tops the Oscar nominations derby with a dozen, followed closely by Life of Pi with 11. Les Miserables was next with nine, with Argo registering seven nominations.
Nine films were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: Lincoln, Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty.
Cinematography
Meanwhile, quite different than the comparsion between the DGA and Academy Award director noms, the Oscar nominations for Achievement in Cinematography are much more in sync with the field of ASC Award nominees this year. Robert Richardson, ASC, is the one Oscar nominee who didn’t make the final cut for the ASC competition. He received his Academy Award nom this year for Django Unchained.
On the flip side, the one ASC Award nominee who didn’t register an Oscar nomination this year was Danny Cohen, ASC, for Les Miserables.
The rest of the field for both Oscar and ASC is the same: Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC, for Anna Karenina; Claudio Miranda, ASC, for Life of Pi; Janusz Kaminski for Lincoln; and Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, for Skyfall.
Commercialmaking ties
The aforementioned Kaminski and Richardson, both accomplished cinematographers, are also represented as commercial directors–by iM (Independent Media) and Tool of North America, respectively. Indeed there are several artists with spotmaking ties among this year’s Academy Award nominees.
Director Bryan Buckley of Hungry Man saw his film Asad earn a nomination for Best Live Action Short film. Asad was first screened for the advertising/commercialmaking industry at large during the SHOOT Directors/Producers Forum in May 2012 at the DGA Theatre in New York. Asad centers on the title character, a 12-year-old lad in a war-torn fishing village in Somalia who must decide between falling into the pirate life or rising above it to choose the path of an honest fisherman.
The project was sparked in part by a United Nations short documentary, No Autographs, which brought Buckley and his Hungry Man producer Mino Jarjoura to refugee camps in Kenya and Sudan a couple of years ago. Buckley and Jarjoura encountered Somalian refugees in Kakuma, Kenya. “Their stories and their outlook on life haven’t been fully told and haven’t gained the exposure they deserve,” related Buckley at the SHOOT Forum. He noted that media have a fascination with the Somalian pirates and to a lesser extent with the Al-Shabaab [terrorist] group in the Southern territory of Somalia but as a result the spirit of the everyday people themselves gets overlooked.
Buckley wrote a script in an attempt to do justice to the humanity of the Somalian people. In that lensing in Somalia would have been too dangerous a prospect, the short was shot entirely in South Africa, spoken in Somalian (with English subtitles). The cast consisted entirely of real people, including two refugee boys, the title character and a younger sidekick. Neither spoke English and both were illiterate so Buckley had to deploy a translator and the youngsters had to memorize their Somalian lines sans a script or written point of reference.
Kon-Tiki–directed by Norwegian-born filmmakers Espen Sandberg and Joachim Roenning, known to the ad industry as the helming duo Roenberg–received a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination. The feature from Norway centers on legendary explorer Thor Heyerdahl, delving into him as a person in addition to capturing his and five crew members’ remarkable journey 4,300 miles across the Pacific on the fragile Kon-Tiki raft. Roenberg directs spots via Sandwick Media. Incidentally, their KonTiki story has an Academy Award lineage. Some 60 years ago, another film titled Kon-Tiki, which was about and directed by Heyerdahl himself, won the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary.
Also nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category is No, an entry from Chile. This film’s storyline has an ad industry connection, relating how a Chilean ad agency helped to oust dictator Augusto Pinochet through an adroit marketing campaign centered on a 1988 referendum.
Meanwhile, three of the five nominated films for the Best Documentary Short Subject Academy Award involved directors with commercialmaking affiliations. The nominated short documentaries are Inocente directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine; Open Heart directed by Kief Davidson; and Redemption helmed by Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill.
The husband-and-wife directing team of Sean and Andrea Fine go by The Fines monicker as spotmakers at production house Rabbit. Their Inocente introduces us to a homeless teenager in California who’s an artist.
Alpert and O’Neill are repped as a directorial team for commercials and branded content by Rascal Films. Their Redemption tells the stories of unemployed people who are left to make a living by collecting cans and bottles off the streets of New York–at a redemption rate of five cents per can. Redemption introduces us to Nuve, a young mother who is supporting not only her two kids but helping her sister and nephews. Then there’s Susan, a senior citizen who has to supplement her Social Security income to keep her head above water. There’s Walter, a 60-year-old Vietnam War vet and former short order cook whose canning helps keep him afloat. Lily is a Chinese women who shares a one-bedroom apartment with six other people. In the street, she befriends others. In one scene, she passes by people eating at an outdoor cafe and observes that it must be “amazing to enjoy food at a restaurant.”
Director Davidson’s Open Heart focuses on eight Rwandan children who embark on a life-or-death journey to Sudan in order to have high-risk heart surgery performed at The Salam Centre, Africa’s only hospital offering free cardiac procedures for families in need. Open Heart was sparked by an open mind when Davidson said he “stumbled upon” the story while in Rwanda on a feature documentary about the medical organization Partners In Health. Originally he was set to chronicle an Australian cardiac team that visited Rwanda annually to perform a dozen heart surgeries. “They canceled that year and that’s when I was told about this hospital in Sudan which selected for surgery the most at-risk youngsters with rheumatic heart conditions. Initially I was trying to find a way to make that story somehow work within the broader context of the feature documentary. But ultimately this new story felt like its own film. Once I determined this, I went back to my feature film funders and they supported the idea of making a separate short film.”
Those backers providing the additional funding were Sundance Institute, The Skoal Foundation, and the Tribeca Film Institute. Open Heart was produced by Davidson’s company Urban Landscapes in concert with Whitewater Films and Believe Media. The latter also reps Davidson for commercials and branded content.
Moving to another short category, Fresh Guacamole earned a Best Animated Short Film Oscar nomination. The film was directed by PES who is on the roster of Reset for representation to the advertising/branding community. Reset was founded last year by two of PES’ former colleagues at Anonymous Content, veteran exec Dave Morrison and director David Fincher.
In Fresh Guacamole, a pair of hands deftly manipulates an antique butcher knife to prepare guacamole from a most unconventional recipe. For example, a grenade is sliced open to yield the essential ingredient, avocado. A red pin cushion is a tomato to which an old press-like tool–a product of PES’ imagination–is applied, yielding small dice which are mixed in along with varied other ingredients to create a lovingly hand-made guacamole.
Fresh Guacamole is the first “sequel” in PES’ extensive filmography, the original installment coming with Western Spaghetti–with the pasta being multi-colored pick-up sticks that are boiled to a tender consistency. Among the other ingredients is a dollar bill picked off a plant and neatly sliced to double as basil. Like Western Spaghetti, Fresh Guacamole deploys painstaking stop motion animation as well as a subset of that discipline, pixilation, which applies puppet animation to human bodies, in this case specifically the chef’s hands.
“My mother is an Italian cook. I grew up with cooking,” said PES. “In 2008 I made Western Spaghetti which turned out to be successful online [named a top viral video of the year by Time magazine, garnering honorable mention at Sundance and an Audience Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 2009]. For the first time I found myself thinking that I wanted to do a second iteration of a cooking film. I’ve had ideas for sequels to films but never done them before. I always chose to move onto a totally new film. But I like the way the cooking film template matched up with my substituting objects for different ingredients. This coupled with another idea I couldn’t shake ultimately resulted in Fresh Guacamole.”
That other idea was triggered by the sight of avocados in a supermarket. “Every time I saw one of those piles, I would always think grenades and envision myself grabbing one and throwing it across the store. It would have created mayhem in the produce aisle. When thinking of a grenade as an avocado, you start asking what dish can be made primarily with avocado, which of course led to guacamole so I began exploring different recipes and those that lent themselves to certain other objects as ingredients.”
Fresh Guacamole played on SHORT Stories, a series that Trevor Noren, creative director of digital content at Showtime, said was inspired by the short filmmaking talents of PES as well as Don Hertzfeldt. For the first year of SHORT Stories in 2010, PES created and directed The Deep, an imaginary and imaginative nature documentary. His return engagement to the Showtime series was this year’s Fresh Guacamole. PES is in talks to create something even bigger and more ambitious for the upcoming season. To qualify for Oscar consideration, Fresh Guacamole was shown in a paid movie theater in Los Angeles. The North Hollywood branch of the Laemmle Theaters chain ran the short prior to showings of The Artist back in March 2012.
Nominations rundown
Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2012 will be presented on Sunday, February 24, 2013, at the Dolby Theatre® at Hollywood & Highland Center�, and televised live on the ABC Television Network. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries worldwide.
Here’s a full rundown of nominations for the 85th Academy Awards
Performance by an actor in a leading role
* Bradley Cooper in “Silver Linings Playbook”
* Daniel Day-Lewis in “Lincoln”
* Hugh Jackman in “Les Mis�rables”
* Joaquin Phoenix in “The Master”
* Denzel Washington in “Flight”
Performance by an actor in a supporting role
* Alan Arkin in “Argo”
* Robert De Niro in “Silver Linings Playbook”
* Philip Seymour Hoffman in “The Master”
* Tommy Lee Jones in “Lincoln”
* Christoph Waltz in “Django Unchained”
Performance by an actress in a leading role
* Jessica Chastain in “Zero Dark Thirty”
* Jennifer Lawrence in “Silver Linings Playbook”
* Emmanuelle Riva in “Amour”
* Quvenzhan� Wallis in “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
* Naomi Watts in “The Impossible”
Performance by an actress in a supporting role
* Amy Adams in “The Master”
* Sally Field in “Lincoln”
* Anne Hathaway in “Les Mis�rables”
* Helen Hunt in “The Sessions”
* Jacki Weaver in “Silver Linings Playbook”
Best animated feature film of the year
* “Brave” Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman
* “Frankenweenie” Tim Burton
* “ParaNorman” Sam Fell and Chris Butler
* “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” Peter Lord
* “Wreck-It Ralph” Rich Moore
Achievement in cinematography
* “Anna Karenina” Seamus McGarvey
* “Django Unchained” Robert Richardson
* “Life of Pi” Claudio Miranda
* “Lincoln” Janusz Kaminski
* “Skyfall” Roger Deakins
Achievement in costume design
* “Anna Karenina” Jacqueline Durran
* “Les Mis�rables” Paco Delgado
* “Lincoln” Joanna Johnston
* “Mirror Mirror” Eiko Ishioka
* “Snow White and the Huntsman” Colleen Atwood
Achievement in directing
* “Amour” Michael Haneke
* “Beasts of the Southern Wild” Benh Zeitlin
* “Life of Pi” Ang Lee
* “Lincoln” Steven Spielberg
* “Silver Linings Playbook” David O. Russell
Best documentary feature
* “5 Broken Cameras”
Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi
* “The Gatekeepers”
Nominees to be determined
* “How to Survive a Plague”
Nominees to be determined
* “The Invisible War”
Nominees to be determined
* “Searching for Sugar Man”
Nominees to be determined
Best documentary short subject
* “Inocente”
Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine
* “Kings Point”
Sari Gilman and Jedd Wider
* “Mondays at Racine”
Cynthia Wade and Robin Honan
* “Open Heart”
Kief Davidson and Cori Shepherd Stern
* “Redemption”
Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill
Achievement in film editing
* “Argo” William Goldenberg
* “Life of Pi” Tim Squyres
* “Lincoln” Michael Kahn
* “Silver Linings Playbook” Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers
* “Zero Dark Thirty” Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg
Best foreign language film of the year
* “Amour” Austria
* “Kon-Tiki” Norway
* “No” Chile
* “A Royal Affair” Denmark
* “War Witch” Canada
Achievement in makeup and hairstyling
* “Hitchcock”
Howard Berger, Peter Montagna and Martin Samuel
* “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”
Peter Swords King, Rick Findlater and Tami Lane
* “Les Mis�rables”
Lisa Westcott and Julie Dartnell
Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)
* “Anna Karenina” Dario Marianelli
* “Argo” Alexandre Desplat
* “Life of Pi” Mychael Danna
* “Lincoln” John Williams
* “Skyfall” Thomas Newman
Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)
* “Before My Time” from “Chasing Ice”
Music and Lyric by J. Ralph
* “Everybody Needs A Best Friend” from “Ted”
Music by Walter Murphy; Lyric by Seth MacFarlane
* “Pi’s Lullaby” from “Life of Pi”
Music by Mychael Danna; Lyric by Bombay Jayashri
* “Skyfall” from “Skyfall”
Music and Lyric by Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth
* “Suddenly” from “Les Mis�rables”
Music by Claude-Michel Sch�nberg; Lyric by Herbert Kretzmer and Alain Boublil
Best motion picture of the year
* “Amour” Nominees to be determined
* “Argo” Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck and George Clooney, Producers
* “Beasts of the Southern Wild” Dan Janvey, Josh Penn and Michael Gottwald, Producers
* “Django Unchained” Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin and Pilar Savone, Producers
* “Les Mis�rables” Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward and Cameron Mackintosh, Producers
* “Life of Pi” Gil Netter, Ang Lee and David Womark, Producers
* “Lincoln” Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers
* “Silver Linings Playbook” Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen and Jonathan Gordon, Producers
* “Zero Dark Thirty” Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow and Megan Ellison, Producers
Achievement in production design
* “Anna Karenina”
Production Design: Sarah Greenwood; Set Decoration: Katie Spencer
* “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”
Production Design: Dan Hennah; Set Decoration: Ra Vincent and Simon Bright
* “Les Mis�rables”
Production Design: Eve Stewart; Set Decoration: Anna Lynch-Robinson
* “Life of Pi”
Production Design: David Gropman; Set Decoration: Anna Pinnock
* “Lincoln”
Production Design: Rick Carter; Set Decoration: Jim Erickson
Best animated short film
* “Adam and Dog” Minkyu Lee
* “Fresh Guacamole” PES
* “Head over Heels” Timothy Reckart and Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly
* “Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare”” David Silverman
* “Paperman” John Kahrs
Best live action short film
* “Asad” Bryan Buckley and Mino Jarjoura
* “Buzkashi Boys” Sam French and Ariel Nasr
* “Curfew” Shawn Christensen
* “Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw)” Tom Van Avermaet and Ellen De Waele
* “Henry” Yan England
Achievement in sound editing
* “Argo” Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn
* “Django Unchained” Wylie Stateman
* “Life of Pi” Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton
* “Skyfall” Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers
* “Zero Dark Thirty” Paul N.J. Ottosson
Achievement in sound mixing
* “Argo”
John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff and Jose Antonio Garcia
* “Les Mis�rables”
Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson and Simon Hayes
* “Life of Pi”
Ron Bartlett, D.M. Hemphill and Drew Kunin
* “Lincoln”
Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Ronald Judkins
* “Skyfall”
Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell and Stuart Wilson
Achievement in visual effects
* “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”
Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and R. Christopher White
* “Life of Pi”
Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott
* “Marvel’s The Avengers”
Janek Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams and Dan Sudick
* “Prometheus”
Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley and Martin Hill
* “Snow White and the Huntsman”
Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Philip Brennan, Neil Corbould and Michael Dawson
Adapted screenplay
* “Argo” Screenplay by Chris Terrio
* “Beasts of the Southern Wild” Screenplay by Lucy Alibar & Benh Zeitlin
* “Life of Pi” Screenplay by David Magee
* “Lincoln” Screenplay by Tony Kushner
* “Silver Linings Playbook” Screenplay by David O. Russell
Original screenplay
* “Amour” Written by Michael Haneke
* “Django Unchained” Written by Quentin Tarantino
* “Flight” Written by John Gatins
* “Moonrise Kingdom” Written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
* “Zero Dark Thirty” Written by Mark Boal
