It's no secret that awards season is in full swing. After the IFP Gotham Awards kicked off the film-feting a week ago and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences revealed Kevin Hart as their host for the 91st Academy Awards in February, the next shoe to drop were the nominations for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's 76th annual Golden Globe Awards (airing on Sunday, January 6th, 2019).
Produced by Dick Clark Productions, the Golden Globes are viewed as a pretty strong prognosticator of the Oscars, with one caveat being that the Globes have separate lead categories for Comedy/Musical and Drama (the Oscars do not segregate based on genre), meaning that there were 20 lead actors with nominations this morning and not what will ultimately be 10 at the Academy Awards.
Keep that in mind when perusing this list (will Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda receive Oscar nominations for their roles in Mary Poppins Returns? Not likely. Could Vice dominate at the Academy Awards like it did with today's Globe nominations? Possibly) and let us know down in the comments which films you still need to catch up with. Below is the complete list of theatrically-released feature films being honored.
Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language “Capernaum” “Girl” “Never Look Away” “Roma” “Shoplifters”
Best Original Score – Motion Picture Marco Beltrami (“A Quiet Place”) Alexandre Desplat (“Isle of Dogs”) Ludwig Göransson (“Black Panther”) Justin Hurwitz (“First Man”) Marc Shaiman (“Mary Poppins Returns”)
Best Screenplay – Motion Picture Alfonso Cuaron (“Roma”) Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara (“The Favourite”) Barry Jenkins (“If Beale Street Could Talk”) Adam McKay (“Vice”) Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie (“Green Book”)
Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture Mahershala Ali (“Green Book”) Timothee Chalamet (“Beautiful Boy”) Adam Driver (“BlacKkKlansman”) Richard E. Grant (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) Sam Rockwell (“Vice”)
Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture Amy Adams (“Vice”) Claire Foy (“First Man”) Regina King (“If Beale Street Could Talk”) Emma Stone (“The Favourite”) Rachel Weisz (“The Favourite”)
Best Motion Picture – Animated “Incredibles 2” “Isle of Dogs” “Mirai” “Ralph Breaks the Internet” “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy Christian Bale (“Vice”) Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Mary Poppins Returns”) Viggo Mortensen (“Green Book”) Robert Redford (“The Old Man & the Gun”) John C. Reilly (“Stan & Ollie”)
Best Original Song – Motion Picture
“All the Stars” (“Black Panther”) “Girl in the Movies” (“Dumplin’”) “Requiem For a Private War” (“A Private War”) “Revelation’ (“Boy Erased”) “Shallow” (“A Star Is Born”)
Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama Glenn Close (“The Wife”) Lady Gaga (“A Star Is Born”) Nicole Kidman (“Destroyer”) Melissa McCarthy (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) Rosamund Pike (“A Private War”)
Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy Emily Blunt (“Mary Poppins Returns”) Olivia Colman (“The Favourite”) Elsie Fisher (“Eighth Grade”) Charlize Theron (“Tully”) Constance Wu (“Crazy Rich Asians”)
Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama Bradley Cooper (“A Star Is Born”) Willem Dafoe (“At Eternity’s Gate”) Lucas Hedges (“Boy Erased”) Rami Malek (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) John David Washington (“BlacKkKlansman”)
Best Director – Motion Picture Bradley Cooper (“A Star Is Born”) Alfonso Cuaron (“Roma”) Peter Farrelly (“Green Book”) Spike Lee (“BlacKkKlansman”) Adam McKay (“Vice”)
Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy “Crazy Rich Asians” “The Favourite” “Green Book” “Mary Poppins Returns” “Vice”
Best Motion Picture – Drama “Black Panther” “BlacKkKlansman” “Bohemian Rhapsody” “If Beale Streat Could Talk” “A Star Is Born”
I read somewhere that there are only two best-case scenarios for a great screenplay—either it meets the expectations of the audience or it doesn’t. Either they sigh in relief or gasp out loud in shock.
Giving your audience what they want shouldn’t be difficult for a practiced writer. A character has a desire, and they achieve it at the end of the story. Boom! Expectations met!
But there’s something oddly satisfying about not meeting those expectations in a screenplay, leaving the audience shaken in disbelief.
Many compelling screenplays use something called misdirection—it's sneaky, it's intelligent, and it takes viewers somewhere unexpected. It's all about planting subtle clues that seem insignificant until a revelation forces us to reconsider everything.
Let’s examine how this narrative tool, when used thoughtfully, can transform straightforward storytelling into something more complex and satisfying.
What is Misdirection?
Misdirection is distracting the audience to mislead them, preventing them from getting on to your scheme of actions, until you finally reveal the truth. In essence, it is a style of storytelling, where the “audience proposes, filmmaker disposes.”
In misdirection, a filmmaker manipulates information, character(s), and their timing in the narrative while building the conflict, until everything falls into place to reveal an unexpected resolution that does not match the audience’s expectations.
Many times, the audience is also purposefully misdirected by exploiting their biases, prejudices, and gullibility.
Why Would Any Filmmaker Misdirect Their Audience?
A story is as interesting as its narration. Be it a bedtime story or Nolan’s Inception, if the narrative is linear and flat, it may be less engaging to your audience.
Misdirection is one of the finest tools that acts like a hook to your story. Misdirecting elements are thought-provoking, working with the audience’s psychology to throw them off guard.
Fiction gives you the freedom to alter realities, but even while misdirecting, it is important that the dots connect effectively by the end of the story. Information shouldn’t be irrelevant and without context.
How Do You Misdirect Your Audience?
You can use any story element to misdirect the audience, but the most commonly used are characters, sound, props, plot points, strategic information reveal, and the time of the incident of any event.
Examples of Misdirection in Great Films
Gone Girl by David Fincher
Misdirection by unreliable narrator
This is one of those stories that is completely narrated in misdirection.
The film opens through husband Nick’s (Ben Affleck) perspective, who becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), on their fifth marriage anniversary. As the investigation and media frenzy take over, we are let into the lives of our two main characters and led to believe that Amy might actually be dead.
We learn about their failing marriage and Nick’s extramarital affair. Thus, when Nick lies through his teeth about his loving relationship with Amy to the police, he instantly becomes an unreliable narrator in the story.
Thus, even though his alibis are believable, you cannot trust him and can’t take his word. Rather, you, with the police, start suspecting him.
This automatically shifts all your trust to Amy instead, even though you know even less about her than Nick. Wonderfully, you have begun rooting for her now.
What you might not realize is that you have been misdirected to dislike Nick as a character, so that you automatically take Amy’s side right from the beginning, until it is revealed that Amy is alive and purposefully in hiding.
This is one of the many misdirections in the film.
By regulating how the audience judges the characters, their morality, and their intentions, a filmmaker often shatters the expectations of the audience with misdirection to give them a more surprising resolution than expected.
The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan
Misdirection by character
Just by establishing a character in a certain way and revealing information about them strategically, a filmmaker can determine the character’s impression on the audience.
This is what M. Night Shyamalan does in The Sixth Sense. The magician of misdirection keeps both the characters and the audience engaged, looking for the ghost, all the while narrating the events through the ghost’s perspective!
The beauty of a nuanced misdirection lies in the clues left throughout a film’s events, leaving you both frustrated and delighted at the same time that you didn’t pick up on them!
Money Heist by Álex Pina
Misdirection by sound
In the Spanish drama series, Money Heist, the makers use a powerful misdirection but with a genius twist. This misdirection is not only for the audience per se, but for the main character—the Professor (Álvaro Morte), too.
In the Season 2 finale of the drama series, the Professor and Raquel (Itziar Ituño), the love of his life and newly minted partner-in-crime known as “Lisbon,” are sprinting through a dense, shadowy forest. The air crackles with urgency as police hounds close in, their shouts breaking the eerie silence of the forest.
Eventually, they are forced to separate, with a radio as their only mode of communication. Raquel ends up taking refuge in a barn, but not for too long. The police arrive, and she is completely surrounded. A gun to her head, she is ordered to compromise the Professor, but she’s steel-willed and denies the police any information.
All the while, the Professor is on the radio with her, frightened and worried, begging her to tell them everything in exchange for her life. The Professor frantically runs through the forest to reach Raquel, when… bang! A gunshot rips through the radio.
The Professor stops dead, the forest swallowing his anguished cry. But as the episode races to its close, the fog clears. The shot? A cruel ruse. She’s alive and in police custody. The Professor’s despair was their bait, and he bit—hard.
What I love about this particular sequence is that the filmmakers don’t use misdirection as a generalized cliff-hanger of “what happens next.”
Instead of revealing that Raquel is alive in an upcoming episode of the next season, they make a choice to reveal it at the tail end of the same episode.
Raquel is a crucial character in the series at this point, so to lose her in the narrative would have been a huge plot twist. At times, thrillers do go for the cheap surprise, whether it makes sense or not. But in Money Heist, the reveal elevates the value of the misdirection because now the audience knows things are going to change forever—for better or worse.
Final Destination 5 by Steven Quale
Misdirection by props
The sequence leading up to Candice’s fall in Final Destination 5 is a series of brilliantly crafted misdirections that keep us on the edge of our seats until the mishap finally happens.
The misdirections also seem to be symbolic, as the death of poor Candice (Ellen Wroe) is a sharp irony. Throughout the scene, we keep worrying about the loose screw in her gymnastic apparatus but how she is killed by it in the end is absolutely unexpected—just how a nuanced misdirection should be.
Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock
Misdirection by casting
Killing the heroine halfway through the film was a risky but brilliantly used misdirection by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, especially considering the film dates back to the ‘60s.
An actor’s face value is as important as their acting skills. Big actors usually have strong plot armor and are expected to survive the story.
In Psycho, when a star like Janet Leigh is killed off midway through the movie, the audience is thrown off guard and does not know what to assume, whose story to follow, or what to expect next. This amplifies the shock factor of the plot twist.
Misdirection can turn your story into a fun experience with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. When done well, a reveal should prompt viewers to think, "Of course! How did I miss that?" rather than, "That came out of nowhere!"
The audience hates being deceived. So, not meeting audience expectations doesn’t mean you lie and fill the screenplay with deceiving information, revealed in an untimely way, aiming for a plot twist in the climax that feels isolated and seemingly unmotivated.
Also, be careful not to clutter your narrative with forced misdirections.
For a better understanding, check out the examples in the article—how each misdirection is a strategic literary device, not just a stylized form of storytelling.
