Like Shrek would say, onions and ogres have layers, but so do good movies, and these layers have the power to make or break a film’s success.

“The director is, in my opinion, the most important factor in making a film great,”  John Cotter, junior who started LZHS’s cinema club, said. “But there are also many other great factors, such as cinematographers, who choose camera angles and work with the lighting coordinators, the acting, and the editing, which if done right and done with a lot of effort, can make a film so much better. There’s also composers, producers, and so many more.”

These men and women behind the curtain are the wizards of the whole film, according to Cotter. To attribute to these remarkable works, award shows such as the Oscars call attention and praise the jobs the public may have never otherwise paid attention to.

This year’s Oscar winners include Birdman for Best Picture, Cinematography, and Directing, and Whiplash for Film Editing,  both of which, according to Cotter, are very deserving of their recognition.

“Whiplash is a great film with a fantastic screenplay, editing, [and] directing. It showed the road to greatness and how you have to be the best, and if being the best is really worth it. [In my opinion, it was] the best movie of 2014,” Cotter said. “Birdman is a film that satirizes the millennial generation and all the attention that everyone wants, and that’s one of the lesser interesting parts about it. The directing, cinematography, pure genius involved, and the fact that it is shot and edited to look like one shot is stunning, and it works.”

Another film that is critically acclaimed but did not bring home as many Oscars as expected was Boyhood, who Nicole Hu, senior and avid movie watcher, feels should have been a big winner of the night.

“Boyhood was very interesting,” Hu said. “The plot was good because it was so simple, a kid just going through his life and graduating high school, but it’s so relatable because everyone goes through that, and especially for me because [I’m] going through that right now.”

Not all great films need to have a great script, according to Cotter. In some cases, the work of the director makes up for the lacking intrigue of the script, which adds to the allure of the movie.

“There are many great films that maybe don’t have a great screenplay, but rather have a great director,” Cotter said. “One of the prime examples of this is a film called Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. In no ways is the screenplay bad, but the directing is so ambitious, creative, and well done that it becomes the clear highlight of the film.”