2018 Oscars: Is It Spring Again for the "Auteur Film," Where the Director Calls the Shots?

The box office doesn't make it obvious. But something is changing.

The auteur film is on the rise again — all right, that sounds a little overheated.

The claim comes from The Atlantic. In a January piece headlined "The Year of the Auteur at the 2018 Oscars," the magazine wrote that “for the first time in 90 years, all five Best Director nominees wrote their own films.”

They were Greta Gerwig with her first film, Lady Bird; Jordan Peele with his first film, Get Out; Christopher Nolan with his experimental war picture Dunkirk; and two directors known for their personal stamp — Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water and Paul Thomas Anderson for Phantom Thread. Of the nine Best Picture nominees, five were written by the men and women who directed them, and each had a style of its own. Only two fit the old-fashioned Academy mould — The Post and Darkest Hour.

In the end, The Shape of Water took Best Picture.

The headlines this awards season were full of interviews with the directors themselves, above all Gerwig and Peele, who reached the nominee list with their first features. Their almost storybook jump to the front rank, and their "diversity," seemed to raise the volume on their own.

Unfortunately, the box office can't back up the idea that the auteur film rose in 2018.

The chart above, built from Box Office Mojo data, shows that across the 35 years from 1982 to 2017, the combined box office of Best Picture nominees ran between 3% and 20% of the previous year's total North American box office. The three most recent peaks came in 1982, 1997 and 2009, when E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic and Avatar — the top earners of their years — pulled the nominees' totals up.

There is also this: since 2009 the nominee list has doubled in size. Halve the ratio to account for that, and the figures for the past nine years drop to half of what the chart shows. This year's nine films took $689 million at the North American box office, or 6.23% of the 2017 North American total — level with the two years before. Allow for the larger nominee list and 2018 counts as one of the weakest years ever for nominees' box office.

In other words, while the media cheered the arrival of "the auteur film's spring," North American audiences did not choose the same way. Only the Academy showed any enthusiasm for auteurs. The last time "the auteur film" filled the press was in 2011, under the headline “Is the Era of the Hollywood Auteur Over?”

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The concept of the auteur film was a joint invention of French intellectuals and French filmmakers.

In the late 1940s, two French critics, André Bazin and Roger Leenhardt, set out what is now known as auteur theory: the director decides a film's form, style and meaning, which makes cinema a way for directors to express thought and feeling. François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and others developed the idea further, and it became one of the lines people draw between art films and commercial films.

French intellectuals and filmmakers pushed the concept in order to win cinema a place as an art, on a level with music, painting and literature. But as theorists' thinking so often does without meaning to, it echoed the world outside: auteur theory was also born to answer a current then emerging in Europe, one nothing like Hollywood's.

The earliest films, in the United States and in Europe alike, arrived as entertainment products. After that, cinema met very different fates on the two sides of the Atlantic.

In 1918 the First World War ended in Europe. The fighting had wrecked the film industry Europe had built, and Hollywood, with its mature studio system, moved in on a large scale. Take France: in the years after the war, French films made up only 20% to 30% of everything screened in the country. By 1924, Hollywood films held 85% of the French market.

"This produced a sustained call for a different kind of French cinema, one that might help fight off foreign competition in both domestic and overseas markets. Some companies were clearly willing to experiment, and several directors of the fledgling French Impressionist movement had already shot their early films for major companies." In Film History: An Introduction, the film historians David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson argue that the need to fight Hollywood produced a kind of cinema whose main purpose was artistic innovation.

The same thing happened at the same time in Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and elsewhere, and it nurtured a European tradition that prized art in film. Nearly 30 years later, once the Second World War was over, that tradition came back across Europe with a vengeance, bringing a run of classics that included Rome, Open City and Wild Strawberries.

Auteur theory and art cinema formed an alliance and vouched for each other. When an art film appeared, the intellectuals and critics behind auteur theory gave audiences a way to read it; and as more art films came into the world, the theory's own credibility was confirmed.

Because many people in the auteur-theory camp later became the leading figures of the French New Wave, it is easy to put an equals sign between the auteur film and the New Wave style itself — doubt about everything, character motives that stay obscure, poetic camerawork, broken plots.

By today's definition, the main test of an auteur film is how much say the director has — which generally sets it against Hollywood's "producer-centred system." There are exceptions: Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood's master of suspense, directed inside the studio system and is still counted among the auteurs. Many Hollywood critics still look back fondly on the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s; Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were among the finest auteur directors of that decade.

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In 2018, Dunkirk, the highest earner on the Best Picture list, passed $500 million worldwide and ranked third among films about the Second World War — a number that stands up against commercial pictures. Joining the auteur film to the commercial film in a way that suits mainstream audiences is one of Nolan's hallmarks.

Get Out was last year's biggest dark horse. The horror comedy, which bends social reality back at the viewer, let Jordan Peele speak for a Black audience that had been ignored, and made him the second Black director to break through that barrier, after Moonlight. The nerve of this first feature, the argument it started and box office 40 times its cost all made Peele one of the most closely watched "auteurs" of the year.

Lady Bird, answering the same note, marked another wave of attention for films led by women in front of the camera and behind it. With Wonder Woman breaking records for box office and reviews last year, and with more people watching how much say women have in Hollywood, the nomination seemed to mean far more than "a new director gets through with a first feature." The press began calling Gerwig "the first female auteur of American theatrical cinema" — even though the "auteur" Kathryn Bigelow had already been nominated twice before her, and took Best Picture and Best Director in 2010.

The Shape of Water, Phantom Thread, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Call Me by Your Name are each singular films, each made for one particular group of viewers. In chasing what the director wanted to say, each took some risk, and each succeeded.

These seven films were so distinct, so sharp-edged, that The Post and Darkest Hour — auteur films themselves — looked too mild, too traditional, too old-fashioned beside them, and fit the stereotype of the Academy pick: a big-name director, stars, a true story, box office that won't embarrass anyone. This year, the sort of film that usually locks up one or two key awards in advance played a supporting part instead.

The main reason for the shift is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars, is working hard to get younger and more diverse.

In 2017 the Academy took in 774 new members from 57 countries, the most "diverse" intake in its history, 39% of them women and 30% people of colour — both figures far above the numbers of two years earlier. The Atlantic argues that it is exactly this more open, more varied body that is readier to reward the industry's most singular artists.

As an elite body, the Academy has always encouraged the auteur film more than the mass market does. When it does line up with "popular demand," the reason is usually excitement about "new technology" — as with the three science-fiction films mentioned above that produced the peak years, all of them technical breakthroughs that shaped the North American market for years afterwards. On the whole, steady recognition for the non-mainstream auteur film is a constant at the Oscars; this year a run of coincidences simply amplified it.

As noted, this more open-minded, more personal turn has not spread to audiences. But over the past year one thing has made audiences pay closer attention to auteur films: Rotten Tomatoes.

At no point in film history have audiences leaned this heavily on how critics score a film. Rotten Tomatoes gathers those scores through a blunt mechanism and works out a "freshness" rating, so that good and bad seem plain at a glance. Once the percentage is out, the same outlets that wrote the reviews take it away for their headlines, which makes a self-reinforcing loop. When a film's early score is decent, trusting audiences and more critics keep it fresh to the end; a film that opens rotten usually cannot be saved.

Every film nominated this year won Rotten Tomatoes' approval, and on that basis earned box office that was not bad against its cost. But audiences are not turning up for the "auteur film" — mother!, a textbook auteur film with a famous director in Darren Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence in the lead, took only $17.8 million in North America, half its budget, after Rotten Tomatoes handed it a death sentence (Martin Scorsese once attacked Rotten Tomatoes on its behalf).

Mainstream audiences' support for the auteur film may rest entirely on their trust in critics. Most of the time, what they are watching is still the polished industrial product built for them.

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Hollywood still belongs to the blockbuster.

So far, the nine Best Picture nominees at this year's Oscars have earned less than $700 million between them, while Marvel's new Black Panther, two weeks into its run, had already passed $500 million.

America's cultural elite have never stopped attacking the Hollywood of the moment. Leave aside Steven Spielberg's famous line — "suppose one summer every blockbuster flops; what happens then to the Hollywood studios that live off blockbusters?" — and you can still find the critic Roger Ebert's attack on The Avengers: "The Marvel movies are mostly alike, and The Avengers gives us more of the same. There has to be a threat, heroes called up, villains played over the top, character flaws laid bare. And at the end there has to be an hour of computer effects, big machines swinging at each other, producing enormous destruction and explosions and rolling fireballs."

That may explain why The Atlantic was so delighted with this year's nominations and awards, and called it the year of the auteur. The box office numbers say audiences are not yet on the auteur film's side, but by the logic of the market that outcome is not impossible.

In 2017 the traditional Hollywood blockbuster did poorly. The rebooted Spider-Man, DC's heavyweight Justice League and The Fate of the Furious all failed to match the films before them. The year's biggest box-office surprise was instead It, a horror film made for $35 million, which took $327 million in North America — more than Thor: Ragnarok or Logan.

As the whole American box-office market shrinks — North American box office fell 2.7% in 2017, and admissions dropped 6.2% — these auteur films may find new chances on internet streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, and those chances would in turn give a set of new production and distribution outfits more room of their own.

This is not wishful thinking. In the 1980s, cable television and home video appeared and became a new source of income for the studios. "By 1987, more than half of the major companies' income came from video rental and sales. Before long, income from video would reach twice that of theatrical release."

Film History: An Introduction goes on: "Since even an ordinary film could now earn millions of dollars from video sales, the distribution of independent and low-budget films grew rapidly." Directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Barry Levinson and Oliver Stone got their chance this way.

Compared with theatres, cable television and home video could carry far more films. With richer choice, audiences were likelier to pick the auteur films that had once been niche, and to form a long tail worth having. The internet, clearly, can offer audiences an almost unlimited range of choice, and with it more room for the auteur film to live.

Amazon has worked with directors such as Todd Haynes and Richard Linklater and made a large number of mid-budget films. Manchester by the Sea, a Best Picture nominee in 2017, was an Amazon production. Netflix has ambitiously announced a plan for 80 original films, and what it has backed so far runs in every direction — Death Note, from the Japanese manga; Okja, by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho; even Orson Welles's last film, The Other Side of the Wind.

Perhaps this is where the auteur film's spring really is.

Cover image from The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Phantom Thread.