Joel Coen Is Third Straight Film Alum to Earn Best Directing Oscar

By Richard Pierce

Want to increase the chance of winning your Academy Awards office pool next year? A good bet would be to vote for Tisch School of the Arts (TSOA) alumni in the major categories. The 80th annual Oscar telecast on Feb. 24 featured four wins (best picture, director, supporting actor, and adapted screenplay) for No Country for Old Men, written and directed by Joel Coen, TSOA’78, and his brother Ethan. This marked the third consecutive year in which an NYU film school alumnus has won the all-important directing award—last year’s prize went to Martin Scorsese, WSC ‘64 and Steinhardt ‘68, for The Departed, and Ang Lee, TSOA’84, took home the Oscar in 2005 for Brokeback Mountain. It was also the second consecutive year that an alumnus won for Best Picture.

      “These films are all major cultural landmarks,” said Tisch Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell. “Tisch has had best picture, best director, and/or best screenplay for some of the most important films ever made.”

      In the 2008 writing category, alumna Tamara Jenkins, TSOA ’94, was a nominee for original screenplay with The Savages, a category Michael Arndt, TSOA ‘87, won last year for Little Miss Sunshine. Joseph Cedar, TSOA ’95, adapted and directed the film Beaufort, which scored a nomination this year for Best Foreign Language Film. And actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, TSOA ’89, was a nominee for supporting actor in Charlie Wilson’s War, his first since winning the Best Actor award in 2005 for Capote.

      Other recent academy winners include Tisch faculty member John Canemaker, who won for animated short film with The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation (2005); Jim Taylor, TSOA ’96, who won for adapted screenplay for Sideways (2005); Charlie Kaufman, TSOA ‘80, who won for original screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003); and Keir Pierson, TSOA ‘97, who was a nominee for his original screenplay for Hotel Rwanda (2003).

      “For Hollywood to award our alumni the Academy Award for Best Director for the last three years is acknowledgment that the Kanbar Institute has made a profound contribution to American cinema in terms of the quantity, diversity, and quality of the filmmakers we graduate,” said Sheril Antonio, associate dean of film television and new media at Kanbar.