Best Director, 1929-30

Awards presented November 5, 1930
(Films released from August 1, 1929 through July 31, 1930 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Douglas Fairbanks, left, presents the Oscar to Lewis Milestone for All Quiet on the Western Front 
In sober truth, I would have preferred to go with Lubitsch here because he is in my pantheon of directors whose films I can always watch with unlimited pleasure: Hitchcock, Hawks, Preston Sturges, and ... oh, well, there may be one or two others. And I admire the dedication with which King Vidor made Hallelujah. Instead of the plodding, reliable Robert Z. Leonard, I threw in Howard Hughes and Hell's Angels on my nominee list because the film shows what a megalomaniac with all the money in the world can do when he decides to produce and direct. But I'll go with the Academy's choice of Lewis Milestone because he made the first Oscar-winning talking picture that still looks today like a real movie, and not just an experiment with sound. Milestone had already won an Oscar, for "comedy direction" of Two Arabian Knights, which was produced by the man who first hired him as a director: Howard Hughes. (In fact, Milestone is said to have directed some of the scenes in Hell's Angels.) He was never really a major director, though he made some good movies, including the first version of The Front Page in 1931, for which he received another nomination, and Of Mice and Men in 1939. He ended his career working as a TV director in the late '50s and early '60s, though he was called on to replace Carol Reed as director of the ill-fated Mutiny on the Bounty remake in 1962. He constantly refereed the battle between Marlon Brando and Richard Harris on that film, while also dealing with Brando's determination to take over as director of it. 
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