One Category at a Time: Director

Most years, the Oscar for Best Director goes hand-in-hand with the Oscar for Best Picture. It stands to reason that if you really love a movie, you love the way it's directed, but sometimes a tight race between two films can result in enough of a discrepancy for the categories to split. What we have this season is not simply a tight race between two films, but between four or five films, meaning dozens of winner permutations are possible.

Point is, we could see a Picture/Director split for the third consecutive year, and even though the critics have made it clear who their preference is, that frontrunner is not necessarily as safe in the hands of the Academy.

DGA reaffirms Boyhood/Imitation Game as Oscar front-runners

The Directors Guild of America has named its five Best director nominees for 2014, and they are:

Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Clint Eastwood, American Sniper
Alejandro G. Inarritu, Birdman
Richard Linklater, Boyhood
Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game

This has to be a good sign for the Weinstein Co. and The Imitation Game, who needed this nomination in a competitive field to still vie for the Best Picture title. I'm more confident now than ever that it will be the movie to win the whole thing in the end.

But will Tyldum himself pull a Tom Hooper and triumph in Best Director, or is there no way anyone takes this away from Richard Linklater?

As for the Oscar nominations (less than 48 hours away!), will this group repeat? I can't help but think that the smaller, more discerning directors branch of the Academy might pass over Wes Anderson's idiosyncratic comic stylings on favour of  a fringe contender. The other four, however, feel solid to me.

[UPDATE:]

And now the documentary nominees, all of which made the Oscar shortlist have been unveiled:

Dan Krauss, The Kill Team
John Maloof, Charlie Siskel, Finding Vivian Maier
Jesse Moss, The Overnighters
Laura Poitras, Citizenfour
Orlando von Einsiedel, Virunga

For all the talk of Citizenfour being the frontrunner (which it is), it's interesting to note that Finding Vivian Maier has now scored more guild mentions than any other doc this year.

Review - The Imitation Game

“Are you paying attention?” a blank movie screen asks it audience in an austere British accent. “Good. This is going to go very quickly now. If you are not listening carefully, you will miss things. Important things.”

The voice belongs to Alan Turing (by way of Benedict Cumberbatch), the subject of The Imitation Game. The preeminent mathematician and number theorist is widely regarded the 'Father of Computer Science', but his other claim to fame – which this film dramatizes – is that it was he who cracked the Germans' mind-boggling Enigma Code during WWII, thus turning the tide in the Allies' favour.

I thought it might be fitting to encrypt this review, but since not everyone is as proficient at deciphering garbled letters as Mr. Turing was, good old fashioned English will have to do. Come to think of it, 'good', 'old fashioned', and 'English' are probably the three best terms to describe The Imitation Game.

Yes, the film is very English, like an episode of Masterpiece Theatre that's slightly too good to be relegated to the telly. Yes, the film is old fashioned, mounted with a classical absence of style that your grandmum would love. And yes, for any sniping about how flagrantly it's been groomed to win over Oscar voters, the film is indeed quite good.