Best Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Alejandro González Iñárritu is nominated for three Oscars this year for Birdman: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture. He was previously nominated for Best Director and Screenplay for Babel in 2006.

“I try to stay away from irony, which I personally don’t like. Irony is a great tool to deal with things. It’s an intellectualization, a way to go above things, which can work. But I think that, in the last 50 years, pop culture has been a victim of an excess of irony, and anything earnest or truthful or emotional isn’t cool anymore. Every institution has collapsed. And if there’s nothing, if everybody agrees that the way to approach it is with a degree of irony, there is nothing else. I’m seeing this in my kids. They consume such an amount of irony that nothing is really worth it. Irony became the head that bit its tail and then there is no way out. So, I prefer humor to reconcile with the things that are wrong, the trials of life. When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it’s absurd. But it’s tragic at the same time.” –Alejandro González Iñárritu to Elvis Mitchell, Interview, October 2014

To read the full interview, click here.