Director’s Guild president Taylor Hackford today announced the five nominees for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2012, which included Steven Spielberg and Les Misérables director Tom Hooper, but not Paul Thomas Anderson, Rian Johnson, Steven Soderbergh, or Quentin Tarantino. If you wonder why there are so many bad movies, that a voting majority of directors have boring, crappy taste may have something to do with it.
Argo – Ben Affleck
Zero Dark Thirty – Kathryn Bigelow
Les Misérables –Tom Hooper
Life of Pi – Ang Lee
Lincoln – Steven Spielberg [full press release]
This is Spielberg’s 11th DGA nomination, a record. I don’t know what’s worse, the DGA not recognizing The Master, Django Unchained, or Looper (all of which feature in my top five of the year), or that they honored Les Mis with anything but a Smash Mouth parody. Especially since the Les Mis haters were so vocal:
Director Tom Hooper piles one terrible decision upon another, with the result being a movie so overbearingly maudlin and distorted that it’s one of 2012’s most excruciating film experiences. –The Wrap
…a maudlin act of white-noise desperation, underscored by director Tom Hooper’s inability to discern the difference between quiet and loud – not just musically, but as a storyteller and dramatist. -Todd Gilchrist, THR/Celebuzz
This fake-opulent Les Miz made me long for guillotines. -Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
Fans of the original production, no doubt, will eat the movie up, and good luck to them. I screamed a scream as time went by. –The New Yorker
A swing and a miz. –Boston Herald
Not for nothing, I went in as a Les Mis virgin, and I thought the first half about redemption was sort of interesting, and the second half about a torn-from-a-romance-novel love triangle was pretty boring. My uncontrollable laughter at Eddie Redmayne’s Parkinson’s-esque delivery was a particular highlight. Russell Crowe gets more crap than he deserves for his singing, which actually got more tolerable as the movie progressed, whereas Hugh Jackman’s flat, vibrato-y tenor got less. (Best singer of the cast was Amanda Seyfried, though Anne Hathaway did a great job acting through her singing).
BAH! They almost tricked me! Don’t you see? This is how they get you! I refuse to discuss the self-congratulatory awards prospects of a movie created solely for the purpose of winning self-congratulatory awards! Here’s your gold pander star for excellence in pandering, pandery! F*ck that movie, f*ck awards, and f*ck you! (*burns bra, flips off the TV*)