DGA Loves Scorsese And Everyone Else You’d Expect It To

Now that awards season is speeding like a dynamite-filled train into the nuclear power station that is the Oscars, all kinds of obscure groups are popping up to throw awards at films while vainly trying to prove they have a spec of influence in Hollywood.

But some groups do have influence, because they're the ones who make the films in the first place. Groups like the Directors Guild Of America (DGA) which announced its nominations yesterday. The DGA awards are a big deal because they historically have a clever habit of predicting the Best Director Oscar. So with that in mind we can safely say that Martin Scorsese will win big at the Oscars. Or Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Or Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. Or that Dreamgirls bloke. Or the man that made The Queen. Hopefully that's cleared things up for you.

Oscar-watchers get a bit jumpy during awards season, as they frantically try and absorb all the different results of all the different award ceremonies to try and see who'll win at the Oscars. This means they have to listen to nonsense like the National Board Of Review and the National Society Of Film Critics as well as more important groups like The Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild. One of the most important awards of all is the Directors Guild Of America award, which announced its nominations yesterday.

The DGA is important because it's made up of people who make the films, not the puppets who act in them or the cattle who watch them, and also because there has only been a difference between the winner of the DGA award and the winner of the Best Director Oscar six times in 58 years. And the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars usually go hand in hand, too.

As for the nominations for the DGA award, the only real surprise is the inclusion of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, first-time directors of Little Miss Sunshine, who seemed about as surprised as anyone else when they got the news, according to Reuters:

Dayton and Faris, two music-video auteurs whose first feature film centres on a dysfunctional family rushing across the country in a broken-down Volkswagen van to get their young, plucky daughter to a beauty contest, said they were in a "state of shock" over their nomination. "We always told our cast that 'Little Miss Sunshine' was about not looking at life as a contest, but seeing it more as a dance. So I can say that we are really enjoying this dance," Dayton told Reuters.

Bloody hippys. But the rest of the DGA nominees are just as you'd expect them to be. Veteran Oscar shunee Martin Scorsese is the favourite to win the DGA award this year for his loving and tender portrayal of Jack Nicholson's strap-on cock in The Departed, while Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu picked up a DGA nomination for Babel, the film that teaches the viewer important life-lessons about how going overseas will end up with your wife dead and a Japanese girl you've never met trying to kill herself. Rounding out the DGA nominees are Stephen Frears for his ability to make Helen Mirren look dull and humourless in The Queen and Bill Condon for making a tubby girl look better than Beyonce in Dreamgirls.

And nothing again for Ben Affleck. Result.

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Scorsese Nominated For Directors Guild Award – Reuters