In 2011, the swan that drew the most attention on Oscar night was worn by the inimitable Björk. A decade later, the most-talked about swan is Natalie Portman, who won the Oscar for her portrayal in Black Swan of a young ballerina who, in a swan song of a performance, plays both the Black and White Swans in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
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But the real star of Black Swan — yet one did not receive the golden statue — is its director, Darren Aronofsky. In nearly a decade and a half of making feature films, he has displayed considerable skill on both sides of the camera, coaxing a career-reviving performance out of Mickey Rourke and vividly portraying the ravaging effects of addiction. His films have been largely successful with lay audiences and critics alike, especially the innovative Requiem for a Dream and acclaimed The Wrestler. Neither past successes nor innovation, however, are guarantors that he’ll leave the Kodak Theatre with an award.
Consider this brief list of directors who never won an Oscar: Altman, Hitchcock, Welles, Kurosawa, Kubrick. Each of these auteurs left an indelible mark on cinema worldwide, but they never took home a statuette.
Another striking fact emerges when the correlation between the award for Best Picture and Best Director is examined: out of the 80 films that have been awarded Best Picture, 59 of them have also had their directors rewarded. Fortunately for Aronofsky, Black Swan has been nominated for both; unfortunately, the same also holds true for every nominated director.
But what exactly is the Oscar for Best Director all about? Why is Aronofsky nominated while Christopher Nolan, who wrote and directed Inception, which is up for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture, was not? The short answer is that the Oscars are based on peer recognition.
Here’s a brief rundown of the voting process: In December, Academy members send in nomination ballots for their respective categories, i.e. actors nominate actors and directors nominate directors. Once all the nominations are announced in late January, final ballots are released, where, with some exceptions, every member of the Academy can vote on every category.
Black Swan was hardly Aronofsky’s strongest work, yet his peers had never nominated him before. In some respects, it’s just a doppelganger-based psychological thriller transposed to a new context. In others, what is being portrayed is more interesting than how it is being portrayed — an achievement of the script and not necessarily the director. Requiem for a Dream is more visually compelling, and Pi better captures the destruction wrought by the pursuit of perfection, something Black Swan strives to do.
With True Grit, the Coen brothers barely reached the same level of excellence that they did with No Country for Old Men, and David O. Russell, who directed The Fighter, has yelled at enough actors, who constitute a significant proportion of eligible voters, to ensure that he won’t win. Aronofsky sure deserves recognition for his oeuvre, but this wasn’t his year. This was Tom Hooper’s and the English monarchy’s year.