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15 Directors More Worthy Of Awards Than Ben Affleck

Look, I like Ben Affleck. I’m happy for his success. I loved Argo. He did a bang-up job on it and deserves immense credit for helming a terrific movie. I thought Gone Baby Gone was a real accomplishment and one of the best movies of its year, and he has continued to produce quality work since then, even though I still consider that one to be his greatest work so far. But honestly, best director of the year? And best film of the year? There has been too much talent this year that naturally had to be overlooked. Any list of five directors was going to leave out some enormously skilled filmmakers who did great work this year. To prove it, here’s a list of directors whose work I would argue is more deserving of a Golden Globe statue or Oscar write-in vote than that of our dear Mr. Ben Affleck.

[h2]15: Joss Whedon[/h2]
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Ok, this one may be a bit of a stretch, but The Avengers was another movie the seemed impossible to make work, and the evil wizard that is Joss Whedon made it work. It’s a movie that was just about as awesome as Argo. Enough said.

By now hopefully my point is clear. I don’t mean to slag Ben Affleck’s fine work this year, but rather to point out that there are a number of artists who pumped out extremely high quality work that could just as easily been recognized by awards voters as being at the top of their class. There will always be great work excluded from recognition because that’s the nature of the business and the nature of human existence, but if we’re going to write a piece of work like Argo in stone as The One, that does a disservice to productions that were simply better, not to mention the many titles from 2012 that were on an equal level to this film. It was an extraordinary year and deserves an extraordinary beacon of a movie to represent the quality of material produced. I’m just not convinced Argo and Ben Affleck are the right choice to play that role.

What do you think? Were there other directors you thought were overlooked this award season? Do any of the ones listed here just seem like ridiculous choices to recognize? Have your say in the comment section below.