Oscar Views – Part Three

With the other award ceremonies done and dusted, the likely winners at the Oscars are now clearer than before. Few categories seem less certain than Achievement in Directing. The Revenant director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has now won the Golden Globe, the DGA award and the BAFTA for Directing, and looks set to become the third back-to-back Oscar winning director, joining John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. This is a remarkable achievement considering Iñárritu is not a prolific filmmaker, having directed only seven features including his debut Amores Perros. Yet each have had a distinctive style and, noticeably, each of his films perform interesting experiments with the cinematic form. Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel are all network narratives that utilise editing to distort and confuse chronology, using the harmonics of image and emotion rather than strict narrative logic to progress the film. Birdman drew great praise for its (trick) single take that consists of most of the film, and despite being acerbically critical of celebrity culture, manages this critique without being mean-spirited or cruel. The Revenant is similarly an impressive formal experiment, with many long takes and a remarkable use of light. Iñárritu has said “We shot at the end of the day every day, at dusk time, which I always say is the time when God speaks.” This lighting and shot composition adds to the ethereal quality of the film, and explains why the various electorates of the award-giving institutions would credit this work. While the work of the other nominated directors is distinctive and effective, The Revenant is the film that stands out as being distinctly “directed.” This might suggest an emphasis on the artifice of the film that could be distancing, and yet the film also has a feeling of organic unity to it, clearly carefully designed yet feeling immediate and vibrant, its themes of survival, revenge, regret and even love exquisitely expressed through image and sound over the course of a fairly simple story (note, The Revenant is not nominated for Screenplay). Of course credit is also due to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who looks set to pick up his third consecutive Oscar after Gravity and Birdman. Much as in those earlier films, Lubezki draws the viewer into these complex visual assemblies, the engulfing landscape of The Revenant as immersive as the 3D work in Gravity and the twisting corridors of Birdman’s theatre. Were I a member of AMPAS, I would pick these fine cinematic poets to receive awards for Directing and Cinematography, as they are fine practitioners and experimentalists of the cinematic medium, continually pushing it in exciting and engaging directions.

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