by Nathaniel R
Last night Guillermo del Toro took his expected win at the Directors Guild Awards. Next stop: the 90th Academy Awards where he's also expected to claim his trophy. No one else in the Best Director field has enough momentum or goodwill to upset him, particularly given that the DGA prize is historically super predictive of the eventual Oscar win. They only seem to stray when they're making a "statement"...
As in 'you didn't even nominate him for Director? We'll show you by giving him the win!' (see: Ron Howard for Apollo 13 and, recently, Ben Affleck for Argo.) The Best Picture statue, as we've seen in recent years, is now a harder-get given that it's a preferential rather than a straight "most votes". In this still fairly new system, splits between Director and Picture are more frequent. Nevertheless The Shape of Water isn't particular divisive so its path to Oscar's #1 prize is probably clearer than La La Land's was as that year's nomination behemoth.
The acting Oscar wins are feeling locked up at this juncture, too, (Oldman, McDormand, Rockwell, Janney) but we still have a dozen plus other Oscar categories to wonder about. How many Oscars can Shape of Water win exactly since it doesn't feel quite as passionately beloved as other frontrunners have? At this moment we're guessing it takes just 5 of its 13 bids: Picture, Director, Cinematography, Production Design, and Score.
The GET OUT team celebrates Jordan Peele's "first time feature director" win
ALL DGA WINNERS
Feature - Guillermo del Toro, Shape of Water
First-Time Feature - Jordan Peele – Get Out
Documentary Matthew Heineman – City of Ghosts
Television Drama Reed Morano – The Handmaid’s Tale, “Offred”
Television Comedy Bethany McCarthy-Miller – Veep, “Chicklet”
Television Mini-Series Jean-Marc Valée – Big Little Lies