"Lincoln" Film Award Nominations & Wins

[Thomas Thorne]

Looking at Oscar entrails, I think Steven Spielberg has a virtual lock on winning Best Director and his "Lincoln" should win Best Picture as well. The 2 awards have gone to the same film for 42 of the last 50 years.

Since the AMPAS started nominating 5 directors for the AA for Best Director in 1936,only one picture has ever won Best Picture without its director being nominated for Best Director. That was "Driving Miss Daisy in 1989.

What was stunning this year according to some observers was the failure of 3 of the directors who won Directors Guild of America nominations to win Academy Award nominations. These were the 2 men and 1 women who directed "Argo","Les Miserables" and "Zero Dark Thirty" respectively.

I understand that these films were considered to have the only chance to beat "Lincoln" and their failure to have Best Director nominations might be their doom. Modern Hollywood might find it difficult to give their highest honors to pictures such as "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty" whose heroes are CIA agents. "Argo"-which I love-is the best neo Alfred Hitchcock movie since the death of the Old Master in 1980. It has the bubbly joy of the greatest Hitchcocks in its craftmanship but that very quality denied Alfred Hitchcock any competitive Academy Award during his long career.

Academy Award voters love to give awards to serious pictures and sometimes give them to films that are serious,stately and dead.

"Les Miserables" is the only one of these four pictures I have yet to see. I gather its defects derive from the greatness of its material. One would have to really try to make a bad "Les Miserables" but it is equally difficult to make a "Les Miserables" equal to or better than its story. I have also read that the singing sequences involve uncomfortable close ups.
Tom