And the Oscar for best director goes to…

The 97th Academy Awards will be announced later today but, while Rakewell will keep an eye on the red carpet and hopes the best nominees will win, your roving correspondent feels relatively detached about the results.

What prompts us to wax lyrical, however, is a set of unusual candles honoring cinematic icons. Flicker, a venture formed out of ‘a passion for film and the art of lighting’ has created five portrait busts of five of the greatest film directors of all time: Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Spike Lee and Agnès Varda. Each has been cast in soy-paraffin wax, in a colour to suit some aspect of their oeuvre. Hitchcock, for example, is a lurid green signifiying ‘unease and intrigue’, while black represents the ‘depth and complexity’ of Kurosawa. Rakewell finds them all compelling, but the careful modelling of Agnès Varda’s fringe puts the French director just a hair’s breadth ahead of the rest of the illustrious pack.

Akira Kurosawa gets the wax treatment. Photo: courtesy Flicker

It seems important to note that none of these leading lights immortalised in wax ever won an Oscar for their directorial efforts and, for Spike Lee, even a nomination was slow in coming (not until BlackKlansman in the 2019 Awards). If any of the unsuccessful nominees for Best Director feels like having a meltdown tonight, we hope they will take a longer view and think more laterally about what it means to make an impression.