ONTD

We love a tight awards race as much as the next blog, and this season is certainly shaping up to be one of the most exciting in recent memory. Still, we worried that some of the best films of the year are suddenly being reduced to office pool favorites and long-shots in some sort of celluloid horse race. What about their content, their message? What about the creative visions that brought these stories to the big screen?

Even as the prizes are being tallied up, we noticed what a diverse group of contenders are in play for the best picture and best director races. How can such varied storytelling all have hit a collective nerve with audiences and critics alike? To help figure that out, The Times invited five top directors -- Kathryn Bigelow ("The Hurt Locker"), James Cameron ("Avatar"), Lee Daniels ("Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire"), Jason Reitman ("Up in the Air") and Quentin Tarantino ("Inglourious Basterds") -- to talk to us about their films, their struggles bringing them to the screen, their growth as directors, even the state of filmmaking itself.


This is the exact seating arrangement for the last roundtable they did with THR. And does QT look like he has a crush on KB in this or am I seeing things?


'The scene I had to cut'

Film fans like to watch movies and opine on what should or shouldn't have made the final cut. But sometimes a movie's harshest critic is the person who made it. In this clip from our Envelope Directors Roundtable, filmmakers reveal the scenes they loved but had to let go. Whether it's a startling group-therapy moment in "Precious" or a Hans Landa bon mot in "Inglourious Basterds," these scenes are often strikingly good -- and yet they'll never see the light of day.






Sequels and board games vs. original work

Hollywood may be bombarded by sequels, franchises and toy adaptations -- yet many of the year's most acclaimed films derive from little else besides their makers' imaginations. Five of the directors who've succeeded in creating something wholly original this season contemplate why Hollywood continues to be enamored by decades-old properties, with James Cameron taking the sternest tone. "You can make money on a movie that's not based on something else," he said. The drive for profits "is not an excuse for people to constantly be whining about how the business is failing and we have to do all this commercial stuff in order to pay the payments on our corporate jets."







The challenges of marketing a film

Marketing campaigns may not be the first thing one thinks of when imagining the creative lives of some of the country's most well-known auteurs. But directors behind this season's biggest movies wrestle to a surprising degree with the issues of selling a movie -- whether it's Quentin Tarantino finding parts of the process "inspirational" or directors like Lee Daniels, Jason Reitman or James Cameron understanding that these Faustian bargains can help expose their film to a wider audience. Hear how these directors feel about one of moviedom's trickiest balances.





How does it feel to have your new movie so close on the box office heels of your last movie, which happens to be the highest-grossing film of all time? Click on the video below to see what Cameron had to say


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