And the Oscar . . . it could go to an Outsider

It is also true of the teenage girl played by Saoirse Ronan in Joe Wright’s Atonement, an outsider to the adult world she doesn’t understand, whose lies push the adults themselves out of their cocoon. And it is equally true of a more contemporary teenager, the eponymous lead in Jason Reitman’s Juno, played by Ellen Page, who discovers that the perfect insiders, the prospective parents for her baby, are hardly more comfortable in their world than she is.

The outsider stamp is branded on not one but all three leads in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men.

The down-and-out welder (Josh Brolin) whose discovery of a briefcase full of drug money sets him on a journey of violence and terror; the veteran cop (Tommy Lee Jones) whose moral ruminations have little place in this amoral universe; and the implacable assassin (Javier Bardem) whose indefinable accent and indescribable haircut make him even more of an outsider than the blue-collar guy he’s pursuing.

“All these movies seem to have this individual who is an outsider,” notes Russell Smith, one of the producers of Juno,” which will compete for four awards at the Oscars on Sunday.

“They are real studies about outsiders trying to deal with the complicated life that we have — whether they’re driven by greed, like the (Brolin) character in No Country for Old Men, or whether they’re like this young girl, Juno, just trying to make her way through her problems.”

If these pictures place outsiders at the heart of their stories, that is hardly surprising, given that outsiders themselves have made the films.

There are no veterans of the Hollywood establishment behind this year’s best picture or best director lineup: no Clint Eastwoods or Steven Spielbergs or Martin Scorseses. Instead, we have a group of filmmakers tilting at the system, who could represent the next wave of Hollywood filmmaking.

Four of the director nominees are at the very beginning of their careers: This is Gilroy’s first time directing, Reitman’s second, Julian Schnabel’s third (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and Anderson’s fifth. Only the Coen brothers — once quintessential outsiders — are veterans, a notion that might tweak their anarchic sense of humor. And even Atonement, the only picture nominee that didn’t garner a directing nomination, was helmed by a sophomore filmmaker. Contrast that with last year, when veterans Eastwood (Letters From Iwo Jima) and Stephen Frears (The Queen) competed in the director category with Scorsese, the eventual winner for The Departed.

There’s another striking feature of this year’s lineup. In contrast to the majority of last year’s nominees, many of this year’s directors also wrote their own screenplays, including Gilroy, Anderson and the Coens themselves. And all (except for Reitman) had approval of the final cut.

“These were final-cut pictures, and there were not a lot of other hands on them,” notes Gilroy. “Julian’s picture is his picture; you’re certainly not going to mess with the Coens; and there is little more bespoke than There Will Be Blood, which is auteur filmmaking at its apex.”