DGA Nominees

The nominations for the 64th annual Director's Guild Awards have been announced. Shortlisting here is one of the surest signs of industry support and future Oscar nominations for both directors and the films.

• Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris
• Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist
• David Fincher for The Girl with dragon Tattoo
• Alexander Payne for The Descendants
• Martin Scorsese for Hugo

Who This Helps: Fincher and that girl with the tattoo. It's surging at the right time despite audiences not falling in love with it.
Who This Hurts: Spielberg who the DGA usually loves. If he didn't place here that's big trouble for War Horse.

The 64th Annual DGA Awards will take place on Saturday, January 28, 2012 in the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland in Los Angeles. Just four days after Oscar nominations are announced, someone will win this super coveted prize. And that remains a very big deal. The DGA, like so many other awards-giving bodies, is proud of their Oscar predictive status. They're official bragging rights go like so:

The DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film has traditionally been a near perfect barometer for the Best Director Academy Award. Only six times since the DGA Award's inception has the DGA Award winner not won the Academy Award:

Spielberg has 6 Oscar nominations and 2 wins for directing. He's even more popular with the DGA with 10 noms and 3 wins for the same filmography..1968: Anthony Harvey won the DGA Award for The Lion in Winter while Carol Reed took home the Oscar® for Oliver!. 1972: Francis Ford Coppola received the DGA's nod for The Godfather while the Academy selected Bob Fosse for Cabaret. 1985: Steven Spielberg received his first DGA Award for The Color Purple while the Oscar® went to Sydney Pollack for Out of Africa. 1995: Ron Howard was chosen by the DGA for his direction of Apollo 13 while Academy voters cited Mel Gibson for Braveheart. In 2001 Ang Lee took home the DGA Award for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, while the Oscar went to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic. In 2003 Roman Polanski received the Academy Award for The Pianist, but the DGA Award went to Rob Marshall for Chicago.

Looking over that list it's clear to me (though your take may vary) that when Oscar differs from the DGA it's a toss up as to whether or not it's an improvement. A toss up leaning Oscar's way.

P.S. The nominations for television, documentary and commercial directorial achievements will be announced tomorrow. 

Related Page: Best Director Oscar Predictions which will obviously need to be updated now. Predicting awardage during a blissfully volatile awards season, is like making your bed every morning. A beautiful cozy bed that you can't wait to sleep in again. Loving this year!

 

'War Horse': Stage vs. Screen

Kurt here. I am not, by any stretch, an authority on theater, and it's only recently that I've been able to collect a good number of playbills. But I can say, without hesitation, that the Broadway production of War Horse is the best thing I've ever witnessed on stage. I saw the show last Sunday, three days before I caught Spielberg's big-screen translation. In technical terms, the play is flawless, so staggeringly well-executed that, at intermission, my partner and I just gave each other wide-eyed, open-mouthed looks. The story, as expected, is one of very typical structure, with a found-and-lost-and-found-again relationship between and adolescent boy (Albert) and an almost preternatural stallion (Joey). But the stagecraft, while clearly taking some inspiration from Julie Taymor's The Lion King (and, perhaps, the Daniel Radcliffe incarnation of Equus), feels wildly extraordinary, at once awesome and minimalistic in its design.

I've decided that what makes the play so potent, beyond its meticulously made yet intentionally haggard horse puppets, and its ripped-from-the-pages-of-history projection screen of a backdrop, is its fierce, unannounced insistence on getting in your space, nearly assaulting you when it's time for stagehands to hurriedly crisscross the performance space with barbed wire, line the aisles with pennant strings to prep for a recruitment scene, or pilot a massive, makeshift tank across an implied, strobe-lit battlefield (another highlight is an ultra-stylized, oversized bullet that's carried from the crowd and spun like a drillbit before striking a key character on stage).

And how does Spielberg's version measure up to all this? I did my best to not allow my first War Horse experience to make me biased against my second, and it's true that the two works are very different beasts. I was, however, keeping score as I basked in the orange glow of Spielberg's impossible skies, for this equine weeper's path to the screen yields a lot of pluses and minuses. Let's take a look (spoiler alert!) at how Spielberg bettered the material, and how he fell short of the merits of its past life.

Peter Mullan and David Thewlis

PLUS: Albert's Father

In the play, Albert's father, Ted Narracott is an irredeemable, profoundly hateable character (seriously, like please-shoot-him-right-now hateable). A drunk and alleged military deserter, he makes a pile of horrid choices—including impulsively selling Joey—and never considers for a moment how they will impact his son...

Fathers, Tradition, Human Animal Bonding after the jump

Click to read more ...

John Williams Heading Toward Oscar Nomination #46

John Williams © Chad Batka, New York TimesIn the long history of the Academy Awards, only one man can claim more nominations than composer John Williams. And that man, long gone, is now less a man and rather more like a symbol, a legend, an industry, a way of life. 

John Williams never opened a theme park and his name is decidedly less distinctive that "Walt Disney" but he's also inextricably embedded in our popular culture. In a very literal way John Williams has scored our collective dreams and adventures for over a half century now. Though the movies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are hardly his only playground in terms of beloved movies, they're probably the scores that people think of first. (The fan tribute video below provides a thorough overview of just that.)

After an unusually long break from features the much celebrated composer is now back at work. He's got three new Spielberg movies on the way (The Adventures of Tintin, War Horse, Lincoln) and he could be celebrating his 80th birthday in February as a 46 or even 47 time Oscar nominee. Take that, Streep, with your piddly 16 nominations!

Tribute to John Williams, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas from whoispablo on Vimeo.

Do you think John Williams (45 nominations / 5 wins) will finally break his nomination tie with Oscar's other most awarded composer Alfred Newman (45 nominations / 9 wins) this January. Either War Horse or TinTin could do it. But will it be both? 

Related
Oscar Predictions - Aural Categories
Recent New York Times Interview
Awards Daily posted pieces from the Tintin score

How Long Has It Been Since You've Seen "Close Encounters"?

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind turns 34 this month. On a whim recently we put in the 30th anniversary edition Blu-Ray* and gave it a spin. I hadn't seen the movie since I was a kid and my memory of it was hilariously incomplete and childlike.

a production sketch shown on the special edition DVD

I remembered, for example, the oft repeated five musical notes that always made me nostalgic for that old light-up Hasbro game "Simon Says" and I remembered all the glowing lights and alien children at the end. My third most vivid memory was Richard Dreyfuss's mashed potato replica of Devil's Tower in Wyoming (a shape to which all the characters are drawn). Strangely I had zero recall of the far more narratively pronounced massive sculpture he builds inside of his house of the exact same structure. Funny the things you remember. The mashed potatoes must have stuck in my child brain because little kids play with their food but they're fully aware that adults aren't supposed to.

To my great astonishment, given decades of familiarity with Spielberg films, the movie is miraculously open ended. It's also open sided and open fronted which is to say that there are dozens of emotional entry points and next to nothing in the way of force-feeding or exposition. You can feel whatever you want to feel about it all the way through without the director telling you how you should be feeling (aside from free-form "wonder" which he expects and earns) or explaining any of those feelings away. In short, were his filmography a bookshelf, this would a lonely inkblot nestled between dozens of how-to instructional textbooks. 

Oscar History and 70s Nostalgia after the jump

Click to read more ...

Spielberg Buried In Gold

Remember a couple of weeks ago when we noted how crowded the Lifetime Achievement field is getting already for 2011? Well, add another huge name to the list:  Steven Spielberg, who already has three Oscars, a Thalberg, 3 Golden Globes and a Cecil B DeMille, 4 Bafta honors of varying sorts, 2 NBR honors, an honorary Cesar, 11 Emmys of different types, 3 DGAs and a lifetime achievement, at least 1 award from every critics organization, and dozens upon dozens of other prizes will be adding to his trophy collection in January. He will be honored by the Producers Guild of America with the David O. Selznick award on Saturday January 21st, 2012 three days before the Oscar nominations are announced. (Just in case War Horse isn't Oscar worthy?)

This will be the 8th time Spielberg has been feted by the PGA. He's won 4 times competively and received 3 additional special honors from that guild. If you melt down all his statues to form one big one how big would it be? Bigger than a mechanical shark named Bruce that's for sure! Maybe even bigger than a T-Rex?

In other lifetime achievement style honors...
We forgot to mention that Glenn Close's first tribute of 2011 (we're betting more will follow) happened over Emmy weekend at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

She looks happy.

Little known fact: All gold plated statues contain gooey centers filled with endorphin rushes, chocolate, and melatonin.