DGA & ASC Winners: La La Land and Lion

Last night was a huge night in Hollywood with three award events: The Directors Guild of America, American Society of Cinematographers, and the Annie Awards (which we'll get to later today). Which would you have attended if you had to choose?  La La Land continued its seasonal dominance but Lion unexpectedly roared, too.  

Some of the winners last night are names you'll recognize from different contexts. The list and comments are after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Podcast: "Silence" and "20th Century Women"

Nick and Nathaniel and special guest Chris Feil (who you read hear at TFE at least twice a week) talk new flicks in our post Golden Globe/DGA nominations world.

Index (43 minutes)
00:01 Globe & DGA intro...
04:00 Martin Scorsese's Silence 
18:31 Extremely wandering conversation alert: Silence, 20th Century Women, Paterson, Rogue One, new movie trailers...
27:00 The brilliant 20th Century Women
39:50 Aquarius, Demon, Pervert Park

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? Are you planning to watch Aquarius on Netflix?

Silence & 20th Century Women

Interview: Denis Villeneuve on "Arrival" and his Future with Sci-Fi

by Nathaniel R

Though awards season is a roller coaster of emotion each year, one of its purely happiest annual trends is the sudden recognition of talent that have been doing consistently fine work all along. This year's "it's about time!" contender is surely 49 year old French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. A famous director at home with six wins at Canada's own Oscars, "the Genies," people are still learning his name in Hollywood and beyond. His international breakthrough was Incendies (2010) about twin siblings journeying to the war torn Middle East. It was nominated for the BAFTA and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. Since that breakthrough his profile in Hollywood has steadily risen and he's shown a gift for directing movie stars, versatility with genre, and a particularly refined skill at building and maintaining tension at feature length which has provided thrilling moments in all of his recent films from Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), Sicario (2015), and on to his current biggest hit yet  Arrival (2016).

Today he received a DGA nomination for Best Director, the surest awards season sign that a movie will be a Best Picture contender at the Oscars. Our conversation follows...

Click to read more ...

DGA Nominations: Lion, La La, Manchester, Moonlight, and Arrival

The Directors Guild of America announcement was once the single most crucial nomination in understanding the Oscars to come. It famously meant "these films will be nominated for Best Picture"... more than it even meant "these films will be nominated for Best Director" statistically speaking. In ye olden times that would mean that your five strongest best picture contenders, given today's DGA nominations were La La Land, Moonlight, Lion, Manchester by the Sea and Arrival.

But that was in the days of 5 nominations. Times are different now and have been since 2009...

Click to read more ...

The DGA to Iñárritu... Again

Wide open race, people. Following The Big Short's win at PGA, Spotlight's ensemble prize at SAG, comes the Director's Guild Award for... The Revenant.

Getty Images

Bonafide three-way race for Best Picture which is not common. Whoever wins we'll know that it was close -- unless a sweep reveals otherwise. Hell, Oscar's Best Director competition is also fierce though the advantage goes to Iñárritu at this point.

TRIVIA!
Incidentally, this prize for Alejandro González Iñárritu is his second consecutive from his guild. Though several directors have won twice, a consecutive win has never happened before at the DGA. It has happened at the Oscars, though, and twice at that: John Ford won two in a row for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941). And not quite a decade later Joseph L Mankiewicz pulled off the same trick with A Letter To Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). Here's their interesting commonality. In both cases those consecutive wins did not come with consecutive Best Pictures. No director has ever helmed two consecutive Best Picture winners. If The Revenant comes out on top on Oscar night, Iñárritu will be the first to accomplish it in the Academy's 88 years. 

Do you think history will be made? (Final Picture/Director predictions are going to be tough this year.)

The complete list of DGA winners and some photos from the event are after the jump...

Click to read more ...