Yorgos Lanthimos, Pawel Pawlikowski earn Academy Award nods for "The Favourite" and "Cold War," respectively, but are not among Guild nominees
By Robert Goldrich, The Road To Oscar, Part 12
LOS ANGELES --The awards season norm has seen the nearly annual emergence of at least one difference between the Best Director Oscar and DGA Award nominee lineups. In only five of the 71 years of the DGA Awards have the Guild nominations exactly mirrored their Academy Award counterparts.
This time around directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Pawel Pawlikowski are in line with that history, earning Best Director Oscar nominations for The Favourite and Cold War, respectively, while not being one of the DGA Award nominees announced a couple of weeks earlier. Three of the five directors vying for the DGA Award and the Outstanding Achievement in Directing Oscar are in sync this year: Alfonso Cuaron for Vice, Spike Lee for BlacKkKlansman, and Adam McKay for Vice.
However while Lanthimos and Pawlikowski landed the remaining Oscar nominations, the other DGA nods went to Bradley Cooper for A Star is Born, and Peter Farrelly for Green Book.
On the flip side of tradition, if Lanthimos or Pawlikowski were to win the Oscar, they wouldn’t be aligned with but rather bucking history. Over the past 70 years, only seven times has the DGA Award winner not gone on to win the Oscar. The most recent such occurrence was in 2013 when Ben Affleck won the DGA Award for Argo while Ang Lee scored the Oscar for Life of Pi.
The Favourite tied with Roma for the most Oscar nominations this year with a total of 10. The Favourite nods were for Best Picture, Directing, Cinematography (Robbie Ryan, BSC, ISC), Editing (Yorgos Mavropsaridis), Original Screenplay (Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara), Production Design (Fiona Crombie, Alice Felton), Costume Design (Sandy Powell), Actress (Olivia Colman), and two for Supporting Actress (Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone),
Cold War landed three Oscar nominations: Best Foreign Language Film, Directing and Cinematography (Lukasz Zal, PSC).
While Cooper didn’t make the cut in the Oscar Directing category, he scored nominations for Best Picture, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay (with Eric Roth and Will Fetters) for A Star is Born, which earned eight nods overall. The other five are for Best Actress (Lady Gaga), Supporting Actor (Sam Elliott), Cinematography (Matthew Libatique, ASC), Original Song (Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando, Andrew Wyatt for “Shallow”) and Sound Mixing (Tom Ozanich, Dean A. Zupancic, Jason Ruder, Steven Morrow).
And while a Best Director Oscar nom eluded Farrelly, he garnered nominations for Best Picture and Original Screenplay (with Nick Vallelonga and Brian Hayes Currie) for Green Book, which scored a total of five nods. The other three are for Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen), Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali) and Editing (Patrick J. Don Vito).
On the Directors Guild front, Farrelly earned his first career DGA Award nomination for Green Book.
Meanwhile Cooper’s feature directorial debut on A Star is Born copped a pair of DGA nominations–for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2018, and Outstanding Achievement for a First-Time Director.
This is the 12th of a multi-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies and on SHOOTonline.com, with select installments also in print issues. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards gala ceremony. The 91st Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 24, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, Calif.,and will be televised live on the ABC Television Network. The Oscars also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
First-Time Feature Directors Make Major Splash At AFI Fest, Generate Oscar Buzz
Two first-time feature directors who are generating Oscar buzz this awards season were front and center this past weekend at AFI Fest in Hollywood. Rachel Morrison, who made history as the first woman nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar---on the strength of Mudbound in 2018--brought her feature directorial debut, The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM Studios), to the festival on Sunday (10/27), and shared insights into the film during a conversation session immediately following the screening. This came a day after William Goldenberg, an Oscar-winning editor for Argo in 2013, had his initial foray into feature directing, Unstoppable (Amazon MGM Studios), showcased at the AFI proceedings. He too spoke after the screening during a panel discussion. The Fire Inside--which made its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival--tells the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (portrayed by Ryan Destiny), a Black boxer from Flint, Mich., who trained to become the first woman in U.S. history to win an Olympic Gold Medal in the sport. She achieved this feat--with the help of coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry)--only to find that her victory at the Summer Games came with relatively little fanfare and no endorsement deals. So much for the hope that the historic accomplishment would be a ticket out of socioeconomic purgatory for Shields and her family. It seemed like yet another setback in a cycle of adversity throughout Shields’ life but she persevered, going on to win her second Gold Medal at the next Olympics and becoming a champion for gender equality and equitable pay for women in sports. Shields has served as a source of inspiration for woman athletes worldwide--as well as to the community of... Read More