Ranking the Best Director Winners of the Decade
This is usually the time of the year that I spend talking about the best-received Couch pieces of the last year. But COVID-19 has made our 4th blogaversary considerably more muted, for as you might have noticed, there has been a whole lot less to write about with the world under lockdown.
This is also the time of year where I’d start peppering with you some of the best film, music, sports and television of the first half of the year. But with COVID-19 greatly lessening the presence of new sports and music, and essentially halting new movies and television, we have had very little of that to write about. Instead, what I’m hoping to do over the next several weeks is do what many publications and TV channels alike have been doing over the last 5 months: retrospectives!
More specifically, I’m going to be looking back at the last decade in major awards show decisions. The Grammys and the Oscars— but really the Hollywood awards circuit in general —have become annual viewing experiences and emotional investments for me. They’re my favorite thing outside of actual sporting events to get needlessly worked up and competitive about, and it’s over the last decade that those annual loud and unsolicited opinions of mine really began.
Last week we talked about the Grammy for Best New Artist.
Next up: the Oscar for Best Director! Note that the years listed in the rankings denote the year of the film that they were nominated for, not the year of the ceremony itself.
Best Director is a strange Oscar category to project every year, and it’s just as strange to analyze in retrospect. The chief reason for that is, in comparison to essentially all other categories, it’s difficult for the untrained eye to recognize great direction in a film. It’s easy to spot great acting when you see it, or great writing, or great visual effects, and hell, even objective measures of a great movie. But ”Best Director” is not unlike the Coach/Player awards in sports, where it’s often difficult to determine who benefitted whom. Is the coach great because he had great players, or were his players great because of their coach? Was a director great because she had phenomenal actors and a great screenplay, or were the screenplay and acting maximized and accentuated by a terrific director?
All of this is a long-winded way of me saying that of this series, this is likely to be the ranking I feel least impassioned about, because honestly, it’s the one I’m least informed about. That said, because I’m a #straightwhitemale, I still have strong opinions, and because I’m a #millennial, I feel the need to publicly air them. So without further ado, my rankings of the decade’s winners for Best Director:
10. Ang Lee, Life Of Pi (2012)
I have to level with you: I haven't yet seen Life of Pi. It’s the only Best Picture and/or Director winner of the decade that I haven’t seen, so fortunately I won’t need to fall back on that excuse a lot more. Because I feel bad for ranking someone last in part because I haven’t seen his movie, I want to acknowledge that Ang Lee is a brilliant director; Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are two of the finest movies I’ve ever seen. Furthermore, his was a nice upset win, as most expected Steven Spielberg to win for his aggressively decent-but-underwhelming Lincoln.
That said, all anyone really will remember from this year's directorial plaudits is the snub of Ben Affleck. The director and lead actor of the acclaimed Argo had virtually swept through the awards circuit, and the Academy Awards were supposed to be his coronation, only for him to not even be listed among the nominees. Furthermore, what I do know about Life of Pi is that the film was largely one character in a wave pool on a soundstage. You could argue that this made the director's job more difficult and thus the movie his accomplishment, but I would argue the opposite, that the film was likely a success because of the work of the visual effects department.
9. Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity (2013)
Alfonso Cuarón kicked off the decade of dominance by Mexico's 'Three Amigos of Cinema' with a win at the 2014 Oscars for his space epic. Gravity has proven to be one of the movies that was an instant commercial and critical smash, but is easy to be cynical about in retrospect. For the record, I quite like the movie.
But if we're being fair, my last criticism of Ang Lee's victory could apply to Cuarón here. Gravity was an enthralling watch because of the stunning CGI and the marvelous acting of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. It's hard to see the directing choices making a huge difference in the film's quality. However, it wins the tiebreaker over Life of Pi not just because I actually saw it, but because 2013 didn't really have a snubbed director: the alternatives were David O. Russell for his mess of a movie (American Hustle), Steve McQueen for the indulgently brutal 12 Years A Slave, or Martin Scorcese for the softcore porno Wolf of Wall Street. So yeah, all things considered, I was okay with Alfonso walking away with the statuette.
8. Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water (2017)
From one 'Amigo' to another: Guillermo del Toro's win made him the last of the three esteemed Mexican directors to win the lofty honor, each one's Oscar feat coming within 5 years of each other. There was a prevailing sentiment that del Toro's win for Shape of Water was a bit of a career achievement award for the beloved director, who had become synonymous with a sort of magical-realism.
I'll admit, despite being very aware of Guillermo del Toro's name and style, this was the first film of his that I'd seen. And perhaps that colored my experience, but I personally found the movie as much unsettling as it was enjoyable, and many of the artistic choices confusing. All that being said, despite my personal feelings about the film, it was one that had his influence all over it, and if we're looking at his victory as it being a statement on the accomplishments of his career, I can't be too upset about it.
7. Tom Hooper, The King's Speech (2010)
No need to blink or rub your eyes, it’s true. The director of Cats is an Oscar winner for Best Director, in the LAST DECADE. Fortunately, that honor (his first and so far, only) came not for the remarkably horrible musical, but for the significantly better King's Speech, winner of 2010's Best Picture as well.
Hooper's win is one that is hard to be too excited about it. My dad likes to describe certain movies as "British people being British," and sometimes even the best English films can essentially be boiled down to that, as is the case here. Furthermore, in terms of the field of nominees, this may be the least 'deserved' win of this entire list. Hooper's victory saw David Fincher of the pulsating Social Network and the Coen Brothers for their delightful remake of True Grit all snubbed, and the nominees didn't even include Christopher Nolan for his magnum opus Inception, which probably has the biggest lasting impact of all of 2010's films.
Those frustrations aside, though, it's hard to find anything really wrong with The King's Speech, and while like the film itself, the direction may not necessarily shine, it also doesn't put a foot wrong.
6. Damien Chazelle, La La Land (2016)
Damien Chazelle, this decade's only American Best Director winner, is the Kendrick Lamar of directors; he's shot from promising young talent to one of the most esteemed auteurs today in incredibly fast time, as a result of pumping out three remarkable films. The irony of his 2016 win is that, while La La Land might be my personal favorite of Chazelle's short-but-brilliant filmography, it was probably his least impressive directing feat.
Much of La La Land's brilliance has to boil down to the score and soundtrack, neither of which were his doing, and to the acting of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, whose characters in the film didn't transform much from their naturally easygoing and committed personalities. This doesn't mean his directing didn't help make La La Land the marvel it was, just that in comparison to his achievements in Whiplash and First Man, and in comparison to Barry Jenkins' and Denis Villenueve's influences on Moonlight and Arrival, respectively, it doesn't particularly stand out.
5. Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant (2015)
Guillermo del Toro was the last of the Three Amigos to win Best Director, and Alfonso Cuarón's two victories bookended their feats, but in the middle of that success sandwich was a two-peat by Alejandro González Iñárritu. With his win for 2015's Revenant, Iñárritu became the first director since 1950 to win the Academy Award for Best Director in back-to-back years.
Given a field of nominees that were all good, but not "must-win" good, his win was neither altogether surprising nor undeserved, and truthfully I did prefer this film to his previous winner Birdman. However, I do think that objectively it was the more uneven directing job. Much of what made the film difficult to watch-- its excessive depiction of violence and gore, the low, at-time indiscernible grunts of Leo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy -- can likely be attributed to Iñárritu. At the same time, much of what made the incredibly bleak film worth watching were also the director's touches: deciding to use only natural light was an inspired decision that led to a visually stunning movie, and interspersing heavy scenes with calmer, beautiful ones provided a necessary respite for the viewer.
4. Michael Hazanavicius, The Artist (2011)
In late 2011-early 2012, The Artist, the little silent movie that could, slowly gathered steam on the awards circuit before arriving at the Academy Awards to claim a remarkable slew of awards: namely, Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. Cynics might argue that a charming, inoffensive movie about Hollywood's heyday doesn't count as a "surprising winner," and skeptics might argue that a silent film could only be as successful as its score and actors, which included Hazanavicius' wife, Bérénice Bejo.
Neither of those statements would be wrong. However, in my estimation, to make a silent, black-and-white movie in 2011 not only watchable, but enjoyable, is an impressive directorial feat. It's clear that Hazanavicius got the absolute most out of his actors in The Artist, and at the risk of sounding harsh, one only need to look at the filmography of the two principal actors since that film to confirm that. Furthermore, such decisions like shooting in the same screen ratio and frame rate as films from the silent era, and the few instances of injecting sound for emotional impact, were terrific choices.
3. Bong Joon-ho, Parasite (2019)
Subjectively, this was certainly my favorite win of the bunch. In one fell swoop, Joon-ho scored a major upset on the night (Sam Mendes of 1917 was the heavy favorite), earned a satisfying deserved win, and became South Korea's first Best Director winner.
That Bong Joon-ho's win isn't #1 on my list is not a statement of anything wrong with his win. Rather, he's a victim of his own marvelous creation here; Parasite is such a note-perfect screenplay, with such tremendous acting from all parties, that it almost seems like he had to do very little to improve on his brilliant writing and casting decisions.
2. Alfonso Cuarón, Roma (2018)
With his triumph for the beautiful, understated Roma, Alfonso Cuarón not only garnered his second win in six years, but the Three Amigos' fifth in that same time period, and the first of two consecutive foreign-language winners for Best Director, with Bong Joon-ho's victory coming one year later.
I will confess I found it difficult to appreciate Roma as thoroughly and immensely as critics universally appeared to. However, where I thought Cuarón's direction was arguably the least impactful aspect of the enjoyable Gravity, his masterful control was easily the most important part of Roma, which otherwise could have been a sadly forgettable film. The decision to shoot in black-and-white ironically only heightened the film's beauty, lending to particularly breathtaking scenes in the desert and at a mansion in the woods. The way the characters' emotions played out quietly, then all at once, put us right there with them. And above all else, his work not only with the child actors but also with Yalitza Aparicio, a young, indigenous Mexican woman who had literally no background in acting, was stunning, successfully helping the latter become an instantly sympathetic, heroic protagonist.
1. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman (2014)
In a decade that was so throughly defined by them, and an article that has made so much mention of them, it's only fitting that the #1 spot go to one of the Three Amigos, and that honor falls to Alejandro González Iñarritu, for his first victory. Birdman was far from my favorite of the winning films, and here are just some of the other directors that could have won from 2014: Richard Linklater, of the universally-adored Boyhood; Wes Anderson, for the unstoppably delightful Grand Budapest Hotel; Bennett Miller, for the slow-burning Foxcatcher; Christopher Nolan, for the heartfelt space epic Interstellar; Ava DuVernay for the deeply impactful Selma.
All the above should tell you there is not a hint of personal bias in granting this victory my #1 spot. It's simply, objectively true that Iñárritu's work on Birdman was nothing short of brilliant. It was a technical masterclass, the single-take technique and the percussive score rendering it impossible to take your eyes off of it. The perfectly-timed injections of the surreal and the occasional shockingly dark humor guaranteed that the audience had no idea of what was coming next. And the way the cast interplayed with each other showed the effect of having a 'coach' that knew exactly how to get the absolute best out of each and every actor.