The Directors Guild of America announced their nominees for Best Achievement in Directing for 2011:
- Woody Allen, Midnight In Paris
- David Fincher, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
- Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
- Alexander Payne, The Descendants
- Martin Scorsese, Hugo
The nominations, aside from the inclusion of David Fincher, feels generic and bland. That’s not to say that the directors/films nominated are bland or bad (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made my top ten of 2011 list and I enjoyed Midnight In Paris and The Descedants a lot. Wasn’t so crazy about Hugo), it’s just that during awards season, there are three or four films consistently nominated for every award under the sun while truly great work seems to fly under the radar.
I would’ve love to see a director like Nicolas Winding Refn receive a nomination for Drive. Or Steve McQueen for Shame or even Mike Mills for Beginners.
“Nostalgia is a trap, there’s no question about that. It’s based on the idea that now is always terrible. So there’s always a sense that if you could have lived in a different time, things would have been more pleasant. One thinks back, for instance, to Gigi, and you think, well, this is Belle Époque Paris, they have horses and carriages and gas lamps and everything is beautiful. Then you start to realize that if you went to the dentist, there was no Novocain, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Women died in childbirth — there were all kinds of terrible problems.
Naturally, if I’m sitting here now, and they’re dying in Libya and the economy is going under and we have a terrible split in the country and they’re patting us down in airports, I think to myself, ‘God, wouldn’t I be better off sitting at Maxim’s in the 1890s?’ But it doesn’t really work that way, and that’s how nostalgia trips you up. For movies it’s great! In movies, you can create the past as you want to see it. But I do think that’s the sad note in my movie, that everybody doesn’t want to be where they are.”
- Woody Allen
Midnight In Paris (Dir. Woody Allen)
