It’s widely expected that poor Marty will finally get his dues this year for directing The Aviator, a good flick and a more Oscar-friendly film than 2002′s Gangs of New York, but still not a patch on his best.By the new century, the Academy’s ability to get it wrong with Best Director is almost a standing joke among cinephiles. The Academy’s track record gets more ignominious in later years. In 1968, Carol Reed triumphed for Oliver! over Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1980 Robert Redford bests Scorsese in the Ordinary People vs Raging Bull punchout, while Redford’s sopfest takes home Best Picture too.Long overlooked, Akira Kurosawa goes home with nothing for himself for Ran in 1986 (though the movie won Best Costume Design), while Sydney Pollack takes the prize for Out of Africa. Kevin Costner is voted Best Director in 1990 for Dances With Wolves over always-a-bridesmaid Scorsese for GoodFellas. Look at some of the names who have won that prize over the years (in some cases when competing against the powerhouses above) and you start to wonder if they really do get too much sun in Hollywood. Starting in 1927/28, Lewis Milestone (a good director, admittedly) beat Charlie Chaplin (competing with The Circus) for Two Arabian Knights, not a movie that history remembers fondly, if at all.

Hitch’s scary shockers, now considered densely layered masterpieces, were for years considered just too entertaining, too popular, for a voting body that prefers worthy liberal humanist, issue-heavy fare such as Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement (Best Picture winner in 1947), about anti-Semitism, or Delbert Mann’s Marty (winner in 1955) which illustrates that working-class people have feelings too. A recent poll by Turner Classic Movies appointed Hitchcock the “Most deserving director to have never won an Oscar”, which might have been the sort of backhanded compliment that would have amused Hitch.It’s often in the Best Director category where the Academy makes the most embarrassing decisions in retrospect. It’s no great surprise that in 1965, when Godard released two of the best-ever flicks – gangster-movie deconstruction Pierrot le fou and the postmodern sci-fi film Alphaville – the Academy chose to honour Robert Wise for that crowd-pleaser The Sound of Music.On the other hand, the fact that the unclassifiable Alfred Hitchcock never won Best Director only goes to show how middlebrow the Academy’s taste has been over the years. And if not, Christopher Smith could always have a quiet word with the producer of EastEnders.’Creep’ is released today. Pop quiz: what do the directors Stanley Donen, Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, FW Murnau, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir and Orson Welles all have in common? Apart from the obvious fact that they’re all masters of the craft of film-making, all nine directed films that feature in the top 10 list of best movies ever made, as voted on by international critics every 10 years, in film magazine Sight and Sound’s prestigious 2002 poll.

You just look into them and think, if you want to start a revolution anywhere in the world, then I’ll go with you. When he speaks about Che it’s like he’s speaking about Jesus. On the way out I asked him who in the world today is the political equivalent of Che Guevara. And he thought about it for a bit and said Nelson Mandela.”Then, half way through preproduction, Malick decided he didn’t fancy it any more, and relinquished the picture to Steven Soderbergh Potente still speaks of him adoringly, though.

“He was a fatherly friend to me while I lived in Los Angeles. He is shy and sweet and well-mannered.”Potente might still one day see that unwieldy name next to Malick’s, spelled out in lights on a Hollywood marquee. The old man told her Bunke’s extraordinary story – how she received an offer of marriage from the president of Bolivia; how she wrote to Guevara begging him to extricate her from the situation with an assassination; how she fled to the jungle where she stayed with the rebels until she was killed in an ambush.”This guy’s in his seventies He has eyes like nobody I’ve ever seen before. “Things that on first sight don’t appear to have anything to do with the project, but he was building an ambience that helps you make the film.”Malick also introduced her to a former associate of Guevara and Bunke who lives in exile in California. “We would do things like sitting down and listening to Wagner for a day, and discussing our responses to it,” she recalls. I don’t want to provide free entertainment.”In February 2004, the legendary director Terrence Malick cast her opposite Benicio Del Toro in Che – a biopic of the Cuban revolutionary leader – assigning her the role of Guevara’s fellow fighter, Tamara Bunke They spent weeks engaged in preparation and research. “We were,” he concedes, “very fortunate to get her.”Potente has a novel way of securing work with directors She pesters them until they say yes She begged Todd Solondz for a part after seeing Happiness “I totally stalked him,” she says.

Of course I was fucking disappointed! Why would I lie?”In Hollywood, she’s learnt to make careful choices about the men with whom she has lunch. “There’s a vast community of executives at studios who set up meetings with you not because they want to work with you but because they’re bored out of their minds, and they want to tell people that they’ve had lunch with the girl from Run Lola Run,” she says “I’ll only go if there’s a proper reason. “I’m in the movie for seven minutes and I had the lead in the first one. “He’s the sweetest little guy.” Her reward was a small role in Storytelling But not every plan has gone so smoothly.