Tag Archives: best-director

2013 Oscar Predictions: Oscar Index Evaluates The Best Director Race

You’re done gorging on turkey, which means only one thing: ‘Tis the season to be stuffed with Oscar punditry. Movieline ‘s Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics has awoken from its L-Tryptophan slumber to provide you with our latest Oscar Index , which evaluates the contenders for Best Director. The latest Index on Best Picture can be found here , and over the course of the long weekend, we’ll be weighing in on the Best Actor, Actress and Support Actor and Actress races. How The Oscar Index Works With each award category that we track, we’ll present four different rankings. Movieline Executive Editor Jen Yamato , Managing Editor Brian Brooks and myself will each provide our personal weekly rankings of the movies and actors in the running, and then those results will be weighted and averaged to determine an official Movieline ranking for each category. Let’s begin: Best Director In terms of perception, the Best Director category has been fairly static for a while now, but that should change next week as Les Misérables   and Zero Dark Thirty   screen for critics and reaction to them begins to flow through the blogosphere. Up to this point, the strong standings of the directors of those films, respectively, Tom Hooper and Kathryn Bigelow , has been almost pure buzz, so their positions could rise or fall sharply once actual scenes and performances can be scrutinized. Until then, Steven Spielberg remains the auteur to beat despite Lincoln ‘s  at-times sloggy pace, and Ben Affleck is holding strong as his Argo continues to do well at the box office and on the word-of-mouth exchange.  The Master director Paul Thomas Anderson could use a Harvey Weinstein-style reheating,  and Ang Lee may need a different kind of PR campaign after he annoyed critics, including Movieline’s Alison Willmore  and the New York Times’ A.O. Scott ,, by undercutting the often-breathtaking visual narrative of Life of Pi with a cliched journalist-interviews-story-subject framing device. That could result in Lee falling in favor harder than the zebra hits the lifeboat in his film. Frank DiGiacomo’s Picks Jen Yamato’s Picks Brian Brooks’ Picks 1.  Steven Spielberg  1.  Tom Hooper  1. Steven Spielberg 2.  David O. Russell  2.  Steven Spielberg  2. Ben Affleck 3.  Kathryn Bigelow  3.  Ben Affleck  3. Ang Lee 4.  Ben Affleck  4.  Kathryn Bigelow  4. Michael Hanecke 5.  Tom Hooper  5.  David O. Russell  5. Benh Zeitlin And the leaders are… Movieline’s Top 5 Best Director Contenders: 1. Steven Spielberg ( Lincoln ) 2. Ben Affleck ( Argo ) 3. Tom Hooper ( Les Misérables) 4. Ang Lee ( Life of Pi ) 5. David O. Russell ( Silver Linings Playbook ) Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.

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2013 Oscar Predictions: Oscar Index Evaluates The Best Director Race

Darren Aronofsky Calls Spirit Award Winner Black Swan ‘Fun,’ Defines Indie Film

Backstage at the Spirit Awards Saturday afternoon, Darren Aronofsky was in a jaunty mood. And why not? With Black Swan ‘s two biggest Oscar rivals, The Social Network and The King’s Speech , absent from competition at the penultimate awards show of the year ( TSN excluded by budget, TKS relegated to the foreign film category), the night belonged to Aronofsky’s stylish psychological ballet thriller. So after Black Swan took home Best Cinematography (Matthew Libatique), Best Actress (Natalie Portman), Best Director, and Best Feature, Aronofsky took to the winners’ room to have some fun with the press.

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Darren Aronofsky Calls Spirit Award Winner Black Swan ‘Fun,’ Defines Indie Film

Oscars 2010: Winners round up and photo gallery (Yorkshire Evening Post)

Kathryn Bigelow made Oscars history today by becoming the first woman to win the best director award, describing her victory as “the moment of a lifetime”.

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Oscars 2010: Winners round up and photo gallery (Yorkshire Evening Post)