We now start our journey through the 50th Academy Awards, celebrating the films of 1997. Next week we'll do Best Picture, this week we'll do the Acting categories, but today: Best Director.
Now, if you recall, it was a director who set me on this path of 1990, 1997, and 2003: Kevin Costner. Readers voted the years in which he directed a film as the project to follow my The Winner Is John Ford series. Sadly, as we noted yesterday, The Postman was little appreciated in its time, though Costner did "win" Worst Director at the Razzies and its overseas equivalent, Spain's Yoga Awards. Unfair and unjust.
Two directors who missed the Oscar lineup: James L. Brooks for Best Picture nominee As Good As It Gets and Steven Spielberg for Amistad, both nominated at the Directors Guild of America Awards and at the Golden Globes. The Boxer's Jim Sheridan was also nominated at the Golden Globes while missing out at the Academy Awards. And then there's Baz Luhrmann, whose 1996 Romeo + Juliet was no awards favorite in the States but qualified for the next year's BAFTAs, where he was nominated for Best Director against Curtis Hanson, Peter Cattaneo, and James Cameron...and won.
But there can be only one King of the World at the Oscars:
Here's how I'd rank 'em:
