The Strange and Complicated History of International Directors and The Academy Awards
Part 1: The 1960s — Things Get Strange
One of those endless debates by film lovers and fans of the Academy Awards has been the relationship between Best Director nominees and the nominated Best Pictures. You would think that after 2009 when the Oscars officially expanded the field of nominated movies to ten while keeping nominees in every other category to five that this debate would finally be over with, if for no other reason that in that same period three different films — Argo in 2012, Green Book in 2018 and CODA in 2021 — have since won Best Picture with no corresponding Best Director nomination. But the debate still rages every year, nevertheless.
It should be noted that between 1944 and 2008, the period when Best Picture nominations were capped at five, the Academy Awards history of both Best Picture and Best Director was incredibly spotty to say the least. Indeed during that period the two categories only correlated perfectly five times. (Interestingly enough, the last time that happened was in 2008 — and everyone was so pissed that The Dark Knight was ignored for Best Picture that the Oscars didn’t get any credit for it.) No one seemed that irked by it during the first eighteen years or so, I should add even though many of the greatest directors of this period such as Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock and King Vidor, were getting nominate for Best Director without corresponding Best Pictures. It was just something that happened.
I think that the problems really began with the rise of so many foreign films (as the Oscars referred to Best International Feature for most of its existence) started to get nominated in the Best Director category. Hollywood had been perfectly fine letting international actors from all over the world star in its studio films earn Oscar nominations and awards. They were more than willing to let immigrant directors and writers win as long as they were for American movies. But around the time the studio system started to collapse in the 1960s many of the more important categories — especially directing — started to get invaded by ‘foreigners’. And Hollywood spent much of that period — in fact pretty much to the start of the 21st century — with a not always subtle case of xenophobia. I’ve discussed this in my series on British actors and directors but they at least had a common language. The creative forces in Hollywood reacted as poorly to movies with subtitles being part of ‘their awards’ — which they considered an American institution — as if they wanted to tear down the Hollywood sign and build a wall. There are many ways to illustrate that point but I think the Director nominations are by far the clearest way.
I am of two minds of this, I should add. On the one hand one can’t deny that the nominated films were among some of the greatest movies of all time, helmed by some of the greatest directors in history. In recognizing them the Directors branch was showing a growth that the rest of the industry has never truly been able to demonstrate. On the other hand, far too often the presence of these directors in these categories excluded incredible talents for incredible films. It was a trade-off that I’m not sure ever worked perfectly.
The first time this became very clear was in 1963. As I mentioned in my series on British films and filmmakers Hollywood was already upset because of the presence of Tom Jones, a film that they found morally offensive winning every award for Best Picture. They had been hoping that Ralph Nelson’s Lillies of the Field — a movie that was inspirational and more important, American — would be able to stop it in its tracks that year. Then the Oscar nominations came out. Lillies of the Field was nominated for Best Picture, Actor and Supporting Actress and Screenplay. However Ralph Nelson was ignored for Best Director.
Only Tom Jones and Elia Kazan’s America, America had Best Picture and Director nominations. What enraged Americans was the presence of Federico Fellini getting a directing and screenplay nomination for his masterwork 8 ½ which had also been nominated for Best Foreign Film. Up until this point since Best Foreign Language Film was created in 1948, by and large the majority of international films were nominated in this category, might receive a few technical nominations but nothing of consequence.
Fellini, however, had been challenging the status quo for a while. He had already been nominated for Best Screenplay four separate times. In 1962 he had received his first Best Director nomination to go with his writing nomination. By and large, however, no one seemed to mind because the Academy Awards had been deservedly focused on three masterpieces: The Hustler, Judgment at Nuremberg and West Side Story. No one was really that annoyed that Fanny was nominated for Best Picture and Joshua Logan was ignored for Best Director. The following year Pietro Germi was nominated for Divorce, Italian Style for directing and won for Best Original Screenplay. That was another strange year for the Oscars but no one was that irked either. However when Fellini crashed the party for Director in 1964, a lot of people in the Hollywood guard were angry because it met that Tom Jones was going to win all the major awards and there was nothing they could do to stop it. Fellini, undeterred, attended the ceremony trying to see if he could convince Mae West and Groucho Marx to play the leads in his next film Juliet of The Spirits. (He failed, obviously.) 8 ½ won Best Foreign Film — no one was that shocked by this — and Fellini left as much in love with America as anyone.
In 1965 another invader came, this time not even having the dignity of coming from Europe. Hiroshi Teshigahara became the first Japanese director to received an Academy Award nomination in that category for his landmark film Woman In The Dunes. No one in Hollywood was happy about this, however, because Teshigahara had robbed a brilliant American filmmaker of a nomination. Ship of Fools, another in a long line of Stanley Kramer’s masterpieces during the 1950s and 1960s was nominated for Best Picture and had received seven other nominations. The movie boasted an international cast — Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret and Michael Dunn all received acting nominations but Kramer was excluded and many in Hollywood were unhappy about it.
The biggest invasion to date came with the 1966 nominations — and in the case of such film, the repercussions were beyond its present at the nominations. Claude LeLouch’s A Man and A Woman his simple story about how a widow and a widower begin to form a relationship had become a critical and box office hit. LeLouch tied for the Palme D’Or at Cannes and Anouk Aimee, the female lead was an overnight sensation like so many great French actresses — Signoret, Bridget Bardot and Catherine Deneuve — were becoming in America. The film would receive four Oscar nominations, including two for LeLouch for directing and writing. He won the latter along with best Foreign film.
The other film is known as one of the great masterpieces of all time: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup. His first film in English, the film tells the story of a fashion photographer (played by David Hemmings) who unknowingly captures the death on film following two lovers in the park. The film was very free in its nudity and is considered a model for the giallo genre that would become immensely popular in Italy.
And for the Legion of Decency, the Catholic organization that had been the official censor for Hollywood for thirty years making sure not a scrap of sex or violence got into movies, it was a bridge too far. Their power had been flagging during the 1960s as American films were testing them more and more but here they drew a line in the sand. If America was going to release Blow-Up it would be without their official seal of approval. MGM defied it and when it became a critical and commercial hit despite that, for all intents and purposes the Production Code Hollywood had in place was dead. It stumbled along for a couple more years but in 1968 it was abandoned in favor of the MPAA film rating system — something the religious right and the moral majority have never recovered from when it comes to Hollywood since.
Antonioni received nominations for Best Director and Original Screenplay — the only ones the Oscars would ever give him in competition. There’s a good argument the old guard never forgave him for what he did to their product.
By 1968 Hollywood could no longer deny the impact of the rest of the world but that didn’t make them any happier. One of the clearest examples of this came with the Best Director nominations that year — and there was an argument for their unhappiness.
In 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo made one of the greatest masterpieces in cinema history: The Battle of Algiers. An almost documentary type film, it tells the story of a terrorist group in Algiers fighting for independence from the French government. It had been nominated for Best Foreign Language film in 1966, losing to A Man and A Woman.
And then in one of the biggest mistakes in Oscar history, the film was nominated for Best Director and Screenplay two full years after its release. This technicality in the rules infuriated Hollywood for many reasons, not the least of which was Pontecorvo’s nomination for Best Director had pushed Paul Newman out of the director’s race for what was his directorial debut Rachel, Rachel. He had already won the Golden Globe for Best Director and has been nominated for the Director’s Guild award, to exclude him from the nominations — especially since the film had been nominated for Best Picture and three other major Oscars — in favor of Pontecorvo seemed the most grievous of insults to a man who even in 1967 was sorely lacking for honors from the Academy.
Then the following year history was made — and it clearly bothered Hollywood. Costa-Gavras made one of the greatest critical and box-office international films today, the political thriller Z. In it the public murder of a prominent politician and doctor amid a violent demonstration is covered up by the military and the government. Modeled after the military takeover in Greece Gavras didn’t even bother to hide what he was writing. In the credits he wrote: “Any resemblance to actual events, to persons, living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.” The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes and Best Actor for Jean-Louis Trintignant. In a move that showed true shift, the New York Film Critics for the first time gave Best Picture and Director to a non-American film. (They would do so quite a bit more often in the decades to come.)
When the Oscar nominations came out Z was the first film nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Film in the same year. It would also be nominated for Best Director, Adapted Screenplay and Editing. The movie won Best Editing and Best Foreign film, considered a consolation prize.
But the presence of Z in this category panicked the Academy. Not long after they introduced a rule change. A movie that was nominated in the category Best Foreign Film would only be eligible to contend for other ‘official awards’ the following year. The producers had not accepted the Golden Globe prize for Best Foreign film because Z had not been considered for Best Drama and many had been angry when Hollywood seemed to give in to the demands of these actors.
Perhaps by doing so the Academy thought this would resolve things for good: they were offering a carrot to the International film community by making a promise that they were sure would never happen again. They had no idea they were about to open a floodgate of new problems for them.
In the next article I will deal with how some of the greatest international directors stormed the Oscars during the 1970s — frequently at the expense of some of the greatest American directors.