TCM Schedule for Thursday, February 29, 2024: 31 Days of Oscar - Director

[Auggie]

The Academy Award for Best Director (officially known as the Academy Award of Merit for Directing) is an award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is given in honor of a film director who has exhibited outstanding directing while working in the film industry.

The 1st Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929 with the award being split into "Dramatic" and "Comedy" categories; Frank Borzage and Lewis Milestone won for 7th Heaven and Two Arabian Knights, respectively. However, these categories were merged for all subsequent ceremonies.

Nominees are determined by single transferable vote within the directors branch of AMPAS; winners are selected by a plurality vote from the entire eligible voting members of the academy.

For the first eleven years of the Academy Awards, directors were allowed to be nominated for multiple films in the same year. However, after the nomination of Michael Curtiz for two films, Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters, at the 11th Academy Awards, the rules were revised so that an individual could only be nominated for one film at each ceremony. That rule has since been amended, although the only director who has received multiple nominations in the same year was Steven Soderbergh for Erin Brockovich and Traffic in 2000, winning the award for the latter.

The Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture have been very closely linked throughout their history. Of the 89 films that won Best Picture and were also nominated for Best Director, 68 won the award.

Since its inception, the award has been given to 74 directors or directing teams. As of the 2023 ceremony, American filmmaking duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are the most recent winner in this category for their work on Everything Everywhere All at Once and the third duo to win after Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins (West Side Story) and the Coen brothers (No Country for Old Men).

More, full list of Oscar winners and nominees, and interesting (plus useless) trivia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Director



John Ford holds the record for all-time Oscar (Best Direction) wins at four. One of them, The Quiet Man, airs tonight.


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7:00 AM | Lady for a Day (1933)
A gangster helps an old apple-vendor pose as a society woman to fool her visiting daughter.
Dir: Frank Capra | Cast: Warren William, May Robson, Guy Kibbee

Capra's first Oscar nomination for directing. He'd wait a year to win the statuette for It Happened One Night (1934).

8:45 AM | The Southerner (1945)
A sharecropper fights the elements to start his own farm.
Dir: Jean Renoir | Cast: Zachary Scott, Betty Field, J. Carrol Naish

This film is writer/actor/director Renoir's only Oscar nomination. From wikipedia: As a film director and actor, Renoir made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. He was ranked by the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2002 as the fourth greatest director of all time. Among numerous honors accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir.

10:30 AM | Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
A one-armed veteran uncovers small-town secrets when he tries to visit an Asian-American war hero's family.
Dir: John Sturges | Cast: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis

Sturges' only Oscar nomination was for this film. He is also known for directing Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), and Ice Station Zebra (1968).

12:00 PM | The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Three prospectors fight off bandits and each other after striking it rich in the Mexican mountains.
Dir: John Huston | Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt

Writer/director Huston was a five-time Best Director nominee, winning the Oscar for this film. He nominations include The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1952), Moulin Rouge (1953), and Prizzi's Honor (1986).

2:15 PM | Never on Sunday (1960)
An American scholar in Greece tries to reform a local prostitute.
Dir: Jules Dassin | Cast: Melina Mercouri, Jules Dassin, George Foundas

Dassin's only Oscar nomination was for this film. From Wikipedia: Julius Dassin (December 18, 1911 – March 31, 2008) was an American film and theatre director, producer, writer and actor.

A subject of the Hollywood blacklist, he subsequently moved to France, and later Greece where he continued his career. He was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Screen Directors' Guild. Dassin received a Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Du rififi chez les hommes (1955 -- also known simply as Rififi). He was later nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director and Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen for his film Never on Sunday, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for his Broadway production of Illya Darling.

4:00 PM | Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
A British lawyer gets caught up in a couple's tangled marital affairs when he defends the husband for murder.
Dir: Billy Wilder | Cast: Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton

Writer/director Billy Wilder was an eight-time Best Director nominee but won the award for just two: The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Apartment (1961). Full bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder

6:15 PM | Midnight in Paris (2011)
While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.
Dir: Woody Allen | Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates

Writer/director Allen is a six-time Oscar nominee for Best Director, winning for Annie Hall (1977).

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8:00 PM | The Quiet Man (1952)
An Irish ex-boxer retires to Ireland and searches for the proper wife.
Dir: John Ford | Cast: John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Barry Fitzgerald

Five-time nominee and four-time winner, Ford received the Oscar this film, The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941).

10:30 PM | Giant (1956)
A Texas ranching family fights to survive changing times.
Dir: George Stevens | Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean

A five-time nominee for Best Director, Stevens won the Oscar for this film and A Place in the Sun (1951). The nominations: The More the Merrier (1943), Shane (1953), and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).

From Wikipedia: At the age of 17, Hal Roach Studios employed Stevens as an assistant cameraman filming a Rex The Wonder Horse picture in Utah. Stevens helped grant Stan Laurel a film career as the studio had trouble getting the comedian's blue eyes to register on film (Stevens made a successful test of him using panchromatic film). He worked as director of photography and a gag writer on 35 Laurel and Hardy short films, such as Bacon Grabbers (1929) and Night Owls (1930), an experience that, according to Stevens, taught him that comedy could be "graceful and human." Full bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stevens

2:00 AM | All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Young German soldiers try to adjust to the horrors of World War I.
Dir: Lewis Milestone | Cast: Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, John Wray

A three-time nominee for Best Director, Milestone won the Oscar for this film and Two Arabian Knights (1928). Milestone also directed The Front Page (1931), The General Died at Dawn (1936), Of Mice and Men (1939), Ocean's 11 (1960), and received the directing credit for Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Milestone was questioned by and subsequently blacklisted by the The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1946 for his participation in war-time films that urged support of Russia (in addition to other "liberal" causes). Full bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Milestone

4:30 AM | The Divine Lady (1929)
The story of the romance between Emma, Lady Hamilton, and British war hero Admiral Horatio Nelson.
Dir: Frank Lloyd | Cast: Corinne Griffith, Victor Varconi, H. B. Warner

Lloyd was a five-time Best Director nominee, winning for this film and Cavalcade (1933). He is perhaps best known for directing Mutiny On The Bounty (1935) for which he received a Best Director nomination. Lloyd was British born. A director, actor, scriptwriter, and producer, he was among the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was its president from 1934 to 1935. Full bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd




Trivia from IMDb.com and Wikipedia