No more link between Oscars for Best Picture and Director?

The Oscar nominations are out: let the whining begin!

It seems like every year the list of “snubs” gets longer and longer, as everyone who had delusions of getting a nomination gnashes their teeth in public when the expected nomination fails to materialize.  The snubs this year range from the bizarre yet explicable (The Lego Movie wasn’t nominated for Best Animated Film because that branch of the Academy hates computer animation, no matter how entertaining) to the predictable (Jennifer Aniston not being nominated for a film nobody saw that went into wide release in January).

There has been one increasing source of “snubbery” due to a decision made in 2009 to expand the number of Best Picture nominees.  The rationale for the change, supposedly, was that the Academy was tired of the five Best Picture nominees being hogged by small independent films while studio blockbusters were ignored.  Studios wanted to make their money AND be nominated for awards too, and it was thought that adding a couple of slots to the Best Picture field would let a couple of “popcorn movies” into the hunt.  However, only the Best Picture category was expanded, and there’s the rub.

One of the tightest bonds at the Oscars is the link between Best Picture and Best Director.  Since 1933 only two films have managed to win Best Picture without getting a nomination for Best Director: Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 (probably Hollywood’s attempt to reward a film about race relations that wasn’t Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing) and 2012’s Argo (which was the Academy having a little fun at Ben Affleck’s expense).  The tie may be loosening, as the last two Best Director winners failed to win Best Picture (Gravity’s director beat out the director of 12 Years a Slave; Ang Lee won for Life of Pi over the director-nominationless Argo).

But now with eight to nine nominees for Best Picture but only five nominees for Best Director, you create a whole host of snubs.  The three or four directors who aren’t nominated for directing a Best Picture nominee are “snubbed,” which this year are Clint Eastwood (American Sniper), Ava DuVernay (Selma), James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) and Damien Chazelle (Whiplash).  How can these Best Picture nominees be taken seriously if their director wasn’t nominated?

On the other hand, any director who is nominated when his (or her . . . let’s try not to be as sexist as the Academy) film is out of the running for Best Picture creates a snub in the other direction.  This year that would be Foxcatcher being snubbed despite Bennett Miller getting a Best Director nomination.  Doubling up on this snub is that there are now four snubbed directors of Best Picture nominees who could make a claim for the Best Director nomination that went to someone whose film was not so acknowledged.

Going forward, will the differences between the number of Best Picture nominees and Best Director nominees cause the historical link between the two to dissolve?  Will Best Director Oscars go to large, technically ambitious films like Life of Pi and Gravity, while the Best Picture awards go to smaller, more artsy films like 12 Years a Slave and Argo?  This year, I can easily see the Academy giving the Best Picture award to the frontrunner Boyhood, but snubbing director Richard Linklater in favor of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose Birdman was more technically ambitious.  Will they really give a Best Director award to the guy who directed Dazed and Confused?

The directorial snubs this year boil down to claims based on age and/or politics (Clint Eastwood), race AND gender (Selma’s DuVernay), and general obscurity (Marsh and Chazelle).  At least there isn’t someone who failed to get a Best Director nomination because Academy voters are still embarrassed about DareDevil.