The Art of "Asterisking"

What is chasing my good name? Good God, it's an asterisk! In an article at Big Hollywood's website, authors Andrea Shea King and Dave Logan pose the question: "Is Katherine Bigelow Hollywood's Roger Maris?" The connection may be nonsensical at first glance. What would a film director have to do with a baseball player from the past? It has to do with the asterisk. The particular asterisk in question is the one that followed and forever haunted Roger Maris' name. The year he broke Babe Ruth's record was a controversial one. There were so many die-hard Ruth fans out there, that the fact that some hayseed was going to break the Sultan's record not only enraged fans, but baseball's commission as well. The latter enforced the rule, as the article states, " that unless the record was broken in 154 games, the same number Ruth played in 1927, the new record would go into the record books with an asterisk beside it, because baseball's season was now 162 games long, giving Maris an unfair unadvantage." As a result, when Maris did indeed break the home-run season record, and not in the prescribed 154 games, he never fully got to enjoy his accomplishment. The damned asterisk dogged him until his death. The removal of the asterisk came many years later, but Maris never felt that personal validation. It came too late.

The meat of the article comes from Avatar director James Cameron's interview with MTV. The article quotes an excerpt: "I would say that it's an irresistable opportunity for the Academy to annoint a female director for the first time. I would say that that's, you know, a very strong probability and I will be cheering when that happens." From this excerpt, they extrapolate that Cameron might be doing to Bigelow what baseball did to Roger Maris. They ask, "Is Cameron inadvertantly-or deliberately-attaching an asterisk to Bigelow's name if she wins for the Hurt Locker? Is Cameron poisoning the well? If Bigelow is awarded an Oscar, will it be because she was the best?" They seem to think that it is a distinct possibility.

I say, unequivocally, that if she does win, the consensus among the voters is that she will have deserved it wholeheartedly and that it is not in any way a sentimental or symbolic victory. Firstly, Bigelow has won the Best Director laurels from myriad of groups including the National Society of Film Critics, the Austin Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the Washnigton D.C. Area Film Critics Association. Even to the layman's eye, this is quite an impressive and comprehensive list of accolades. In the film community, this solidifies the belief, among major film critic groups and film enthusiasts, that Bigelow did the best directing job of the year. And in all the cases excepting one, these awards groups named Hurt Locker the best film of the year. In effect, this means they believe she crafted the best film of the year beacuse let's face it, the director is the one that harnesses all the talent involved and is the one directly responsible for the final vision, the final success of the film. Most significantly, Bigelow just won the top honor from the Director's Guild of America. According to the Wall Street Journal, only six out of the guild's past 61 recipients of this prize have not gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Director. Couple that with her recent win at the British Academy Awards, and one can see that the odds are in her favor. I personally could sing her praises, but instead I will defer to America's most estimable film critic, Roger Ebert:

Katherine Bigelow's film has a masterful command of editing, tempo, character, and photography. Using no stunts and CGI, she creates a convincing portrayal of the conditions a man like James [the protagonist] faces. She builds with classical tools. She evokes suspense, dread, , identification. She asks if a man like James requires such a fearsome job. The film is a triumph of theme and execution, and very nearly flawless.

By the way, this excerpt comes from Ebert's article on his ten best films of the decade, where Bigelow's Hurt Locker placed second.

After all this exposition, I think that what one person says will in no way malign Bigelow's Oscar win. It is clear that her peers in the Director's Guild as well as the most influential critics' groups in the country have proclaimed her the "best director" of the year. Both of these entities have historically voted with conviction and not out of sentimentality. Leave sentimentality and popularity to the Golden Globes, where, consequently, Cameron's Avatar won both the Best Director and Best Picture statues even though not one critic's group capitulated. One last and most important item: if one continues reading Cameron's interview, he calls Bigelow a "genius director". He said it, I didn't.