Director #57 George Clooney and #56 Alexander Payne on the set of The Descendants.
And now we move on to part 7, all of whom, in theory will be in the 3.0 Top 100 Directors of All-Time List. Whether that happens in practice, or whether some alterations will happen to how I compose the next version of the list is not yet decided.
So, again, we have the ranked list of every director who has ever been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. If you somehow missed the first several parts of the list, you can find them at various points here, with an introduction here that explains the project and the scoring system. After only getting through three of these in all of 2012, this is the third one to appear in 2013 because I want to finish the list before another Oscar season arrives and the list changes again.
As with several previous posts, there is a theme here. But this theme is produced by where we are on the list, rather than any coincidences. These are the directors who haven’t made as many films. There are 25 directors on this list. Of those 25, four of them (Michael Curtiz, George Cukor, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, George Stevens) are old pros, coming out of the Studio Era. They directed a combined 194 films, of which I have seen 161 (so, I am missing 33). Those four directed an average of 48.5 films (though Curtiz, with 100, has the bulk of that). Of the other 21 directors on this list, they have combined to direct 163 films, of which I have seen 161. So, the other 21 directors have averaged directing 7.76 films. And if we take out a few more (Alan Parker, Milos Forman, Alan J. Pakula, Jonathan Demme, Bernardo Bertolucci), we are left with 16 directors who have only directed a combined 90 films (or 5.63 films per director). They are here because, for the most part, they haven’t made any bad films yet (or just one) and they don’t have the weight bringing down their handful of good or great films. There are only 7 directors, however, who have managed to get into the Top 50 while not yet having directed 10 films, so most of the remaining newer directors are gathered here in this post. (more…)
You can read more about this year in film here. The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees. There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end. If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom. Films in red won the Oscar in that category. Films in blue were nominated. But remember, there were only a handful of Oscar categories in this, the second year of the Oscars (and, in fact, several fewer than the year before).
