Oscar Volley: Best Director could be 2012 all over again

Team Experience is discussing each Oscar category before the nominations come out. Here's Eric Blume and Glenn Dunks to talk Best Director...

ERIC:  Hi Glenn, excited to dive into this year's crop of Best Directors with you.  To me, the big question is whether all three of the "big gun pictures" will carry their directors to nominations.  That's Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon; Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer; and Greta Gerwig for Barbie.  I personally can't get too excited about Nolan or Scorsese, even though they both do expert work but nothing that rattled my cage.  I think one of Gerwig's biggest achievements directing that film...and this is no easy feat...was dealing with what must have been BINDERS of notes from Mattell and Warner Bros and still delivering the film she set out to make...

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"Barbie" Gets Pushed to Adapted Screenplay

by Cláudio Alves

Shed a tear for Andrew Haigh's Oscar hopes.

What many believed was bound to happen finally did. Despite Warner Bros. campaigning Barbie's script as original, an Academy committee formed by members of the Writers branch - Howard A. Rodman and Dana Stevens took precedence as governors, while Eric Roth recused himself - and  chose to uphold the usual rules for IP-based material. That means Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach will have to compete in Best Adapted Screenplay, shaking up the race in a big way. The pink fantasy was the assumed frontrunner in the other category, facing off against The Holdovers as its biggest competition. Now, it's up against a veritable battalion of Best Picture contenders, including titles wrestling for the honor of nomination leader – Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, and Poor Things…

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First Round Oscar Predix - Picture / Director

by Nathaniel R

Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in "Maestro" (Netflix)

As noted in Best Actor & Best Supporting Actor, we're pretending as if the strike will be resolved and movies will actually arrive later this year (because if we don't predictions will be nightmarishly impossible). So let's look at Best Picture and Best Director. What might the future hold for us in these two categories? 

EARLY BIRD DIRECTORS 
It's possible that we've already seen 60% of the Best Director list (Greta Gerwig, Chris Nolan, Celine Song) but that would be highly unusual. This isn't 1972 where the two biggest contenders (Cabaret & The Godfather) had already been popular for literally over a year when they dominated Oscar night. The Oscar formulas and awards season release patterns have calcified in the half century since then. The earth still orbits the sun at the same speed as it did decades earlier, but time (at least in pop culture) has sped up considerably; you're an "old" movie much quicker now... 

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Jacqueline Durran: From Kubrick to Barbie

by Cláudio Alves

Two-time Academy Award winner Jacqueline Durran is undoubtedly on the path to another Oscar nomination, maybe even a third victory. The British costume designer brought the pink paradise of Barbie to life, delighting audiences with a mixture of archival recreations sized-up from doll scale and original creations in line with Greta Gerwig's reality-hopping narrative. The movie is a delight for costume lovers everywhere as soon as its first scene when it contrasts the graphic modernity of the 1959 swimsuit-clad Barbie with the attire of midcentury girlhood, their look defined - perchance shackled - by domestic aspiration. Then comes a series of classic Mattel outfits, a flurry of rosiness, and our welcome to BarbieLand. It's a colorful explosion of femininity as understood by kids' imaginations... 

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Review: Come on, "Barbie," let's go party!

by Cláudio Alves

What does it mean to sell out? Some would decry Greta Gerwig's move from mid-budget indies to big studio fare as a modern example. This line of thought posits the director's fourth film, Barbie, as capitulation to the tyranny of big bucks, no more than a glorified toy commercial for "vacuous, hypersexualized dolls." But when you're actually watching Gerwig's movie, it's difficult to take the pink oddity as proof evident of any sacrifice of vision or integrity for the sake of profit. Barbie's too ambitious a creation - in terms of text, tone, performance, audiovisual stylings galore - to support such dismissive readings.

From beginning to end, the summer's biggest comedy bursts at the seams with ideas, saturated with the clear intent of a creative mind given free rein. It glows with the kind of resources seldomly bestowed upon women directors. That doesn't mean the picture's perfect, exempt from criticism, or its enthusiasm is without drawbacks. But, even if Gerwig can't quite have her cake and eat it too, she manages to share a personal, goofy, deeply idiosyncratic proto-existentialist dream with her audience. Better yet, she does it with the attitude of a kid, their favorite toy in hand, eyes widening at the playtime possibilities before them…

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