On Screwing Ben

There's a fairly old joke for situations in which a motion picture is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture while the director of said motion picture is not nominated for the Best Director award: "(insert title of film)" is apparently a film that directed itself. I don't know how old the joke is, but the first person I ever heard crack it was longtime Oscar host Billy Crystal way back in 1990.

It's a joke that still holds true today, with the Academy Award nominations for Best Director for films released in 2012 conspicuous for the absence of several high-profile names. Kathryn Bigelow, Oscar winner for 2009's The Hurt Locker and the first woman ever to win an Academy Award for Best Director, was shut out of the derby despite the fact that her highly-controversial film on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, received a nod for Best Picture among others, as was Tom Hooper, who won the 2010 prize for The King's Speech, despite the fact that his adaptation of the musical phenomenon Les Miserables became the first musical since Dreamgirls to receive a nomination for Best Picture.

The exclusion that has arguably generated the most violent reaction, however, is that of Ben Affleck, who directed the spy-thriller Argo, a film which, prior to Affleck's exclusion from the Best Director category, was widely viewed as a strong contender for the top award. Affleck, like Bigelow and Hooper, has an Oscar under his belt, albeit one he won over fifteen years ago for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon.

There is an inevitability to the exclusion of directors from the Best Director category considering that the field of nominees for Best Picture has expanded from five to ten while the number of slots available for Best Director nominees has stayed pegged at five. Affleck and company should take some consolation from knowing that, at least, they weren't overlooked in favor of someone who did not direct any of the nominees for Best Picture.

Still, this should be cold comfort to a guy who has pulled off one of the most remarkable career reinventions in recent years, and who deserves due recognition for what I and many others feel is a truly extraordinary film. Unlike Bigelow and Hooper, Affleck doesn't have a little golden man for Best Director sitting at home. The Golden Globe he just won may not quite cut it.

To my mind the main reason Ben Affleck's work on Argo deserves an Oscar (and not even just an Oscar nod) was the difficulty of the subject matter. Recent and even not-so-recent history shows that movies set in, or which touch upon events in the Middle East tend to be a really hard sell. Affleck's buddy Damon, who happens to be an extremely bankable movie star on a good day, learned this the hard way when he teamed with Bourne series director Paul Greengrass for the critically-reviled and commercially-ignored film The Green Zone, which was basically a heavy-handed critique of the Bush administration's incursion into Iraq in 2003. Damon's flop was the latest of a long line of films talking about war or political turbulence in the Middle East, including films including Ridley Scott's Body of Lies and Peter Berg's The Kingdom, Sam Mendez's Jarhead, among many others. Even Bigelow's Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker grossed chump change during its entire theatrical run. Not only that, but tensions between the United States and the Middle East, and in particular in Iran, remain high today. This makes the success of Argo, both with audiences and critics, a particularly outstanding achievement, and the fact that Affleck, the principal architect of this success, succeeded where many others before him had failed, easily merits a Best Director nod all by itself.

Affleck's exemplary treatment of the subject matter, I think, was really what made the difference between the film flopping like so many before it and becoming a breakout hit. The film was, as hard as this may be to believe, apolitical in a way, because it was not about the righteousness of either side of the political tension, but quite simply the peril faced by the men and women from the U.S. Embassy who hid in the Canadian Ambassador's house and by the man who took it on himself to bring them home. There was a touch of heavy-handedness in the way Affleck portrayed a couple of pivotal Iranian characters, but overall he made a film that transcended all politics, a film about unbelievable courage and heroism, pure and simple. The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences clearly recognized the virtues of this film, so why not attribute them to the guy who directed it? This particular mystery is really one for the books.

We mere mortals will probably never know why Ben Affleck was screwed out of an Oscar for Best Director for his work on Argo by the members of the AMPAS, but those of us who admire his work as a director can take considerable solace from knowing that this guy appears to have plenty left in the tank, and that as far as Ben's Oscar prospects are concerned, tomorrow is another day.