Best Director

You may be asking yourself, “Gee, did any women direct movies this year?” Why, thank you for asking! Here is an incomplete list:

Joey Lauren Adams, Come Early Morning
Sofia Coppola, Marie Antoinette
Laurie Collyer, SherryBaby
Catherine Hardwicke, The Nativity Story
Mary Harron, The Notorious Bettie Page
Agnieszka Holland, Copying Beethoven
Nicole Holofcener, Friends With Money
Karen Moncrieff, The Dead Girl

Anyway, on to the boys’ club. The Red Sox and the White Sox finally won the World Series in recent years, and another decades-long curse is almost definitely coming to an end. Kids, cross your fingers, do your chores, and don’t talk back to your moms, because if you’re good, we could really, seriously, I mean it this time, see Martin Scorsese win the damn Oscar already. The American filmmaker most absurdly overdue for his props has returned to the gangster genre with The Departed, and the praises have been joyously sung. It’s a modern curiosity that year after year, Hollywood shakes its collective head in wondering how their beloved Marty didn’t win, and with all the outcry upon his loss, who exactly were the people who voted for Robert Redford/Barry Levinson/Kevin Costner/Roman Polanski/Clint Eastwood instead? For now, you can write Marty’s name in your most permanent marker as a stone-cold guaranteed nominee. (And please, be good.) Next up is Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, director of past nominees 21 Grams and Amores Perros, for helming the cross-continental Babel. About even for third and fourth place are Stephen Frears and Bill Condon, for their extremely opposite work: Frears’s stiff-upper-lipped The Queen and Condon’s glittery extravaganza Dreamgirls. These four men picked up the all-important DGA nominations, and the fifth nominee was…the directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. Whoa, Valerie? As in, a female? Yes, this is a husband and wife team, directors of the late, great Mr. Show, and Ms. Faris is only the sixth woman ever to be nominated by the Directors’ Guild for a feature film. (The others, thank you for asking, were Oscar nominees Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion, and Sofia Coppola, plus Randa Haines and Barbra Streisand.) Directing teams are unusual, and only twice has a Best Director nomination gone to a pair of filmmakers (for West Side Story and Heaven Can Wait), the unspoken sentiment being that a director’s job is to provide a singular vision, and having two visions makes the whole thing a little iffy. The fifth nomination could go to Spain with Pedro Almodovar, or to Mexico with Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) or Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men). (With Del Toro, Cuaron, and Gonzalez Inarritu, it’s a banner year for Mexican filmmakers.) Closest to the finish line are Paul Greengrass and Clint Eastwood: Greengrass portrays the Americans who fought back in the hijacking of United 93, while Eastwood depicts the Japanese soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima. Patriotism could tip the scales toward Greengrass, but Oscar’s recent infatuation with Clint Eastwood should translate into his inclusion (and definitely for Letters rather than Flags.) Scorsese and Eastwood? Oh, crap, not again…