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.
Music Biopics Get Creative At Toronto Film Festival
Many of the expected conventions of music biopics are present in "Piece by Piece," about the producer-turned-pop star Pharrell Williams, and "Better Man," about the British singer Robbie Williams. There's the young artist's urge to break through, fallow creative periods and regrettable chapters of fame-addled excess. But there are a few, little differences. In "Piece by Piece," Pharrell is a Lego. And in "Better Man," Williams is played by a CGI monkey. If the music biopic can sometimes feel a little stale in format, these two movies, both premiering this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, attempt novel remixes. In each film, each Williams recounts his life story as a narrator. But their on-screen selves aren't movie stars who studied to get a part just right, but computer-generated animations living out real superstar fantasies. While neither Williams has much in common as a musician, neither has had a very traditional career. Their films became reflections of their individuality, and, maybe, a way to distinguish themselves in the crowded field of music biopics like "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Rocketman." "This is about being who you are, even if it's not something that can be put in a box," Pharrell said in an interview Tuesday alongside director Morgan Neville. Also next to Pharrell: A two-foot-tall Lego sculpture of himself, which was later in the day brought to the film's premiere and given its own seat in the crowd. The experience watching the crowd-pleasing "Piece by Piece," which Focus Features will release Oct. 11, can be pleasantly discombobulating. A wide spectrum of things you never expected to see in Lego form are animated. Virginia Beach (where Pharrell grew up). An album of Stevie Wonder's "Songs in the Key of Life."... Read More