Last month, it was announced that Peter Weir had been awarded an Honorary Academy Award. The 78-year-old Australian director has been nominated for Best Director on four occasions, but never got the gong, in spite of a slew of critical and box office hits from the 1980s onwards.

Arguably Australia's finest director, Weir's output has declined in recent years, but his legacy remains as important as ever. Here's why his Oscar is both deserved and appreciated.

Gallipoli

Gallipoli
Roadshow Film/Paramount

Weir cut his teeth on a variety of low-budget projects in the 1970s, including the horror comedy The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and the critically acclaimed Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). But it was with the 1981 war film Gallipoli that Weir came to wider attention. The plight of Australian and New Zealand troops during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 was formative in the national identity of both nations, yet remained largely unknown elsewhere except to First World War historians. Weir's film changed all that, evoking All Quiet On The Western Front in its depiction of a generation of young, naive men joining the armed forces to fight a war whose horrors were barely imaginable.

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The project attracted several luminaries of Australian television and cinema, including Bill Hunter (Muriel's Wedding, Finding Nemo) and Bill Kerr, who would go on to appear for Weir in 1982's The Year of Living Dangerously. But it was the appearance of a 25-year-old Mel Gibson in a starring role that set the film apart. With several years of apprenticeship on the hit Australian period drama The Sullivans under his belt, Gibson had already achieved his cinematic breakthrough with Mad Max (1979). But portraying the callow and headstrong Frank Dunne in Gallipolli called for a far more naturalistic performance. Weir secured just that, setting the scene for Gibson's successful sojourn into Hollywood, and making Gallipoli one of the finest expressions of Australian cinema.

The Truman Show

jim-carrey-truman-show
Paramount Pictures

Dead Poets Society may have better name recognition, but 1999's The Truman Show was an equally impressive display of Weir's directorial skills, netting an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA for Best Director. Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, an insurance salesman living in the apparently perfect environs of Seahaven Island. Unbeknownst to him, however, everyone around him — including his work colleagues, his best friend (Noah Emmerich), and even his wife (Laura Linney) — are actors, and Seahaven Island is nothing more than a studio set constructed inside a vast dome. Truman is, in fact, the star of the world's biggest, most involved reality TV show, and doesn't know it.

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The dystopian possibilities of the scenario are obvious, but Weir chose to film it as a comedy-drama instead. The risky decision paid off, with Weir deriving much Socratic humor from Truman's unwitting participation in product placement or small talk with neighbors that is as schlocky as it is staged. As Truman begins to smell a rat, Weir concentrates on the series' showrunner, Christof — the character's name, and his momentary hesitation on the phrase "I am the creator" in the final act, is a not-so-subtle reference to his delusions of grandeur — played by Ed Harris in one of his finest performances.

The Truman Show pushes the idea of the bending of reality to its logical twentieth-century extreme, and while the premise may not resonate today in the way it did in a pre-VR world, the notion of an individual's life being held up to public scrutiny without their knowing is as hilarious — and as sinister — today as it was then.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
20th Century Fox

This 2003 swashbuckling epic stars Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, and James D'Arcy as the captain, surgeon, and lieutenant aboard the HMS Surprise, a warship plying Pacific waters during the Napoleonic era. When a French warship is spotted, a game of cat and mouse ensues that culminates in a bloody battle at the film's conclusion.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World showcased Weir's remarkable attention to detail — most of the scenes on board ship were shot not in the studio, but on a full-scale replica — and was nominated for ten Academy Awards including a fourth Best Director nomination for Weir, winning two (and would, by common consensus, have won more had the film not come out in the same year as Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). It comes as no surprise to find a prequel was reported as being in development in 2021; and while the retired Weir will not come back to direct it, there can be no more resounding acknowledgment of the regard in which this remarkable movie is held.