Odds & Ends

...giving an award for best "direction," separate from the film itself, strikes me as pointless. Writers, actors, costume designers, composers; all these people can get an award for their work because it's only a part of the film. But the director, like the producer, is supposed to make sure that all these parts coalesce and add up to a good film. If the director didn't make the best movie, then how can he be the best director, when the director's job description is, basically, the job of making the best movie he can? The quality of "direction" is often defined as some visual flourish or cool camera angles, but that's hardly the most important part of what a film director does. If a director creates a lot of great camera angles, but the acting is weak, then I don't think you can say that he did a great directing job in spite of the bad acting; we need to ask, rather, why he didn't get better performances out of the actors (maybe he was too busy with the camera angles). The weak performances in, say, Hitchcock's The Birds are a failure of the director, not just of the actors, and that means that The Birds is not a particularly well-directed film no matter how many great shots Hitchcock pulls off.

I guess there are some cases where you can separate the director's contribution from the film -- like, say, when he was stuck with a bad script which the producer wouldn't let him change; the director might do good work as far as the script allows. But those kinds of movies, B movies mostly, don't get nominated for Oscars anyway, so the point isn't really relevant. When it comes to the kinds of movies that do get nominated, the quality of the script is usually part of the director's responsibility, just as it's the responsibility of a magazine editor to get the best possible articles out of his or her writers.