Out of all the names in contention for this year's Best Director Oscar, Chazelle's is easily the least well known. After his debut feature failed to gain much attention, Chazelle had to make a short version of Whiplash, based on a scene from the actual movie, in order to gain funding for the feature film version of Whiplash. While these humble origins may sound like the stuff Independent Spirit Awards are made of, not Oscars, a very similar road to Oscar glory was taken by the then unheard of Benh Zeitlin and his film Beasts of the Southern Wild back in 2013. Both Beasts of the Southern Wild and Whiplash started their long awards season marches in January, in the high altitudes of Park City, Utah. While both films were well received at Sundance, the popularity of these movies grew overtime as their undeniable crowd pleasing abilities slowly grew from one audience to the next. One advantage Whiplash has that Beasts of the Southern Wild did not is that Whiplash is semi-autobiographical. Chazelle originally wanted to be a jazz drummer in high school and was part of a jazz band at school, but realized he didn't have the talent to make it thanks to a particularly sadistic instructor who served as the inspiration for the unforgettably twisted jazz teacher, Fletcher, played to perfection by J.K. Simmons. Drawing artistic inspiration from your own life is something that fellow artists usually appreciate and the impeccably paced film, which almost seems to mimic the rhythms of a jazz song, is an accomplishment of directing if there ever was one. Many pundits currently view Chazelle as a dark horse candidate that may be able to slip into the fifth spot if he is lucky. Given his lack of name recognition, this analysis is certainly understandable, but Whiplash is a film that is simply too popular and beloved for Chazelle to slip through the cracks.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
