I'm not going to lie, the Directors Guild of America awards were pretty devastating. I of course was cheering for David Fincher, but would have been perfectly content to see Nolan, Aronofsky, or Russell take a surprise win. But for some reason, a largely inexplicable reason at that, director Tom Hooper of The King's Speech received the award, and in the process stuck a fork in the Oscar race.
When you've been watching/writing about the Oscar race for several years, following it from NBR to Oscar night, you kind of learn to stop caring and not mind what happens. Did I think Slumdog Millionaire deserved its runaway success? No way, but I was happy for Danny Boyle. Was I angry that Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight was slapped in the face by shutting its creator out of the 2008 race? You bet, but Heath Ledger won his posthumous award, and that felt okay. Even in years where the films and people I want to see win have won -- Scorsese/The Departed in 2006 and the Coens/No Country for Old Men in 2007, it's never really about the Oscars; they're a game, a marker of how the industry wants to project itself. In the end, the movies survive with or without awards, and I often forget No Country for Old Men actually won Best Picture.
So on a morning where the blogosphere is pretty much collapsing with proclamations of "worst awards season ever" and "the Oscar race is over" and other mostly reactive and childish rants on the subject, I thought it would be better to step back and think about this in a more neutral way.
Yes, the DGA and the Oscar have only missed six times in 64 years, but two of those were in the last ten years -- Roman Polanski winning Director and Rob Marshall's Chicago winning Picture, along with Steven Soderbergh winning Director and Ridley Scott's Gladiator winning Picture. So for fans still believing David Fincher is the frontrunner and The Social Network can pull back to have "Traffic-like" mini-sweep, hold on to hope.
For now, I'm going to defend Tom Hooper, even though I think he is the least deserving when he's on a slate full of directors pushing the envelope, directors trying very hard to make personal, daring cinema that reconceptualizes our visual digestion of material. I'm going to defend him because, in any other year and in pretty much any other line-up, I would be defending him. In his own ways, I think Hooper is a visionary as well, a promising upstart of a cinema director with a steep history in television and a will to explore the beauty in the unconventional.
And no, I'm not caring about the way the actors work together or the quality of the screenplay on The King's Speech, elements of discussion that are for another day. What I find interesting, fascinating even, is how Hooper structures his visuals. Characters are rarely shot in the center of compositions. Rather, close-ups occur in the side of frames, long shots make vertical distances feel awkward and uncomfortable, wide angle lenses distort faces, and there's a general sense of space feeling troubled. I noticed this first on John Adams, where doorways were always used as a bizarre framing device, figures towered into or shrank from the frame, and everything looked dirty (in a good way).
I noticed it again in The Damned United (currently on Watch Instantly on Netflix), a movie as kinetic, humorous, and strangely unconventional as any sports movie from the last several years you're likely to find. If you were like me and you thought Invictus was melodramatic, overstated and overdirected within an inch of its life, go watch United. It made me claim Tom Hooper will be Britain's next major directing talent last year, and it seems my prophecy has come true.
Regardless of my own personal feelings about The King's Speech, a film that I like very much and find a lot worth studying and thinking about beneath its buddy-film pretense, in relation to the other films nominated for this year's Oscar (it ranks 9th for me. Right above The Kids Are All Right), I do think it's well-directed. I think Hooper's choices of structuring and pacing are very interesting, I think his formal elements are very creative, and more than anything, I think he's interested in something a lot of my own scholarship is interested in -- reconstituting popular perceptions of historical events. He destabilizes the image, making it look as awkward as it is pretty, presenting alternative views of famous people, both embracing and critically thinking about the biopic conventions.
While The King's Speech is most certainly an "Oscar Movie" -- it feels good, it looks good, it's performed well, it's all about accumulating a warm and fuzzy emotional impact -- I'm also not going to just dismiss it as a worthless winner. It's not. If you were to watch it and The Social Network, Black Swan, The Fighter or True Grit back-to-back, I'd daresay a majority of people would choose one of those four over The King's Speech. But this isn't about my personal preferences or my emotional reactions.
This is about explaining the race, and the movies in the race. There's a reason the industry is suddenly jumping through hurdles to give The King's Speech awards. I think it has a lot to do with four factors: Colin Firth being overdue, Tom Hooper being recognized as a talented upstart, the story of screenwriter David Seidler, and Harvey Weinstein's impeccable marketing skills. Throw 'em together and what do you get? The new Best Picture frontrunner.
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