Darren Aronofsky vs. Tom Hooper: Who Deserved It More?

Some great directors of all time have never won an Academy Award for Best Director and many were never nominated. Just to mention a few names: Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Sam Wood, Spike Lee, Herbert Ross, Tim Burton. See the long list.

But this year’s Oscar Best Director Award was at the very least, disheartening! Period.

Tom Hooper won the Oscar for director for The King’s Speech at the 83rd Academy Awards. It is the first Oscar win for the 38-year-old filmmaker, who was considered to be in a tight race with The Social Network’s David Fincher (who was previously nominated for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and who has won several commercial directing awards from the Director’s Guild of America).

In addition to David Fincher, Hooper beat Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan (did anyone see this movie?), Joel and Ethan Coen for True Grit (no surprise here!) David O. Russell for The Fighter, as well as another returning nominee in Christopher Nolan for Inception (who was previously nominated for The Dark Knight and Memento).

None of these directors had won the award before, which meant the DGA’s and the Academy Award’s pattern of celebrating new talent (even talent that’s been around a decade) will continue.

In the past 25 years, the DGA has only had 4 repeat winners in Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone. While in history, the Oscars have only two directors who have received two consecutive Best Director statuette wins: John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). Mankiewicz is the only writer-director to have back-to-back double wins for both screenwriting and directing – quite a feat frankly!

Now Tom Hooper alone won the Directors Guild of America Award, the Golden Globe and a BAFTA, the British equivalent of the Academy Award.

Tell me why?

If you have seen The King’s Speech you would realize within 25 minutes that the film chronicling England’s King George VI effort to overcome his stutter has resolved. The King can read a speech without a stammer with headphones. Now isn’t that quite a Resolution?

I really do not get the Hollywood’s weakness for everything royal and British. It is enough for a British actor to play an English queen or king to get nominated, it seems. For example Helena Bonham getting nominated here is just ridiculous, she is good of course but nothing deserving an Oscar nomination.

The film is well made and acted, no doubt. But it is basically a sentimental and simplistic one at that.

I can name a bunch of directors who can easily make this movie to equal quality. It was not a hard movie to direct. Tom Hooper is a burgeoning director and I think this is not the high light of his career – so to beat Daren Aronofsky at it with a film that could have easily been shot for the Short Film Category is bewilderment!

Big deal that he was stuttering!. He could have been Silent the whole movie and it would not have changed much! Colin Firth’s felonious impersonation of George VI painted the Duke of York as the world’s most obnoxious five year-old, a character bereft of even a scintilla of sympathy or likability.

The biggest offense I took after sitting through 2 hours was the flaccid and deflating denouement in the King’s final speech, an agonizingly long, mistimed, and utterly uninspired rendition of George VI’s wartime speech.

On the other hand, Black Swan is an enthralling and visceral experience from beginning to end. Darren Aronofsky used what he learned from making the raw and unflinching The Wrestler and the cerebral horror and incredibly disturbing Requiem for a Dream, and has crafted a film that you will simply not be able to take your eyes off of. He builds up rather slow, but right after that first moment of off-the-rails insanity, he delivers one hell of an incredible piece of cinema. One that is not easily able to be classified to any one genre.

Black Swan is never a low budget character piece. It is a film that navigates between being thrilling and horrific at the same time. While the horror elements start to take more prominence in the second half (specifically the rather squeamish elements of body horror, done in a way that would make David Cronenberg proud), the film never lets one completely overtake the other. It manages to maintain this sense of dread, darkness and rather graphic wound infliction throughout.

The visuals and editing are the drive of what helps make the film so well done. Contrasting blacks and whites so frequently give the obvious hints of good and evil, innocence and darkness.

Aronofsky likes to throw in hints of ambiguity at every turn, changing the colours for each character depending on the scene, and depending on what they may or may not be doing. Even the scenery and set design is in plain black and whites, always making the audience guess the true motivations and intentions of both character and creator. Adding in the element of reflection, both in others and the self (mostly through mirrors), only helps compound these feelings of ambiguity and confusion. It will consistently keep audiences thinking about what is being shown and what is actually going on. The subtle visual effects and astoundingly well done score only help add to the greatness.

Aronofsky also deserves recognition for the film’s lean running time. When so many films like The King’s Speech are often far too long and dragged out, this film maintains a sense of momentum that never gets lost at any point. The film’s slow points are never dragged out, merely well padded out for the shift from Nina being innocent to adrenaline soaked horror as she descends into the realm of darkness.

Rather gracefully, Aronofsky manages to balance the goal of Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin’s script to blend Nina’s tale with the story of Swan Lake itself, and never loses sight or direction at any instance. This is bravado style filmmaking at its finest, and more than suggests that the brilliant direction in Requiem for a Dream was not a fluke.

The Oscar, without an iota of doubt should have gone to Darren Aronofsky!