One can imagine worse dilemmas than having to follow up a best-picture win at the Oscars. Ooh, everyone is trying to give you money? Allow me to engage the world’s most minuscule string section.
Yet there is no doubt that not every director has dealt well with those expectations. One or two fans of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, the first film not in the English language to win that prize, may be taken aback by the fizzy, hectic Mickey 17.
Arriving in cinemas this weekend after being juggled around the schedule for a year, the zany science-fiction satire has its share of good reviews. But those expecting the taut discipline of Parasite are in for a shock. Starring Robert Pattinson and Robert Pattinson as cloned space workers, the film is a clattering, brassy mess of half-formed rants.
So a typical example of post-Oscar hubris run expensive riot? Not really. Mickey 17 looks very much like the work of the man who directed Snowpiercer in 2013 and Okja in 2017. This is what this Korean director does when he gets to work in English.
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Best-picture follow-ups fall into distinct categories. There is the established director who takes it to the next level. David Lean had a host of fine British films on his CV when he ratcheted up the scale with Bridge on the River Kwai, in 1957. He followed that best-picture win with the renowned Lawrence of Arabia.
This is a model of how you take advantage of prestige to realise a hitherto impossible vision. That film’s win in best picture positioned Lean in another category: the giant of his age. He duly followed up with one of the highest-grossing films of the postwar era, a film so huge it had a nightclub on Baggot Street named after it. Dr Zhivago now looks sugary and bloated, but nobody could call it a failure.
Many properly established directors just shrugged and kept doing what they always did. Alfred Hitchcock followed up Rebecca, winner in 1940, with the middling Foreign Correspondent, already in production when Rebecca opened, and then the almost forgotten Mr and Mrs Smith. No matter. The famed Suspicion followed in 1941 and his legend continued.
One suspects Clint Eastwood barely took a breath before moving from Unforgiven, winner in 1992, to the undervalued A Perfect World.
The interesting cases are those in which a director is elevated from relative unknown to the top of the heap. The king response here was (twice) from Francis Ford Coppola. Before The Godfather he had made a no-budget horror, a funky comedy, an indifferently received musical and one quiet critical hit. It is said he was forever one stumble away from the sack on The Godfather.
Showing the right balance of ambition and self-awareness, he followed that best-picture winner with The Conversation, a masterpiece that secured him his first Palme d’Or, at Cannes. He won best picture again for The Godfather Part II – made hand in hand with The Conversation – and followed that up with Apocalypse Now, a masterpiece that won him his second Palme d’Or. (Nobody has yet won three.)
That last film almost sent him insane, but he still set the gold standard of how you react to a best-picture win. Contrast that with Michel Hazanavicius, winner in 2011 for The Artist, moving on to the pompous, lachrymose, overblown and almost unseen The Search.
Which disaster brings us to the greatest warning from history. Critical battles have, for more than 40 years, raged over what Michael Cimino did after winning for The Deer Hunter, in 1978.
I am sympathetic to the European view that Heaven’s Gate, much hated by US critics, is a fine film with worthwhile things to say about the American experiment. That is almost irrelevant. What matters is that everyone involved lost the run of themselves and, enthused by the notion that a fresh genius had been minted, delivered the most damaging flop in Hollywood history.
In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind argues that Cimino’s western brought a close to the postclassical age of director-driven cinema. It ultimately ended the independent existence of United Artists, set up by Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford 60 years before.
Hubris remains a risk for anyone in this position. Is any similar catastrophe waiting over the horizon to finish off cinema for good? It seems unlikely Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, successor to the triumphant Oppenheimer, will fail to deliver the readies for Universal.
And this year’s winner? I think Sean Baker will be all right. The director of Anora is a modest man with no ambitions to break anyone else’s bank. “I’m not going to change what I do so easily,” he told The Irish Times last year. “Hopefully, now I’ll never be seduced.”
