Helen Mirren in The Queen (top); Brad Pitt in Babel (middle); Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé Knowles, Anika Noni Rose in Dreamgirls (bottom)
The Directors Guild of America has announced the five features nominated for the 2007 DGA Award.
The biggest surprise was the absence of the much-revered Clint Eastwood — for either Flags of Our Fathers or Letters from Iwo Jima, or both — winner of last year's DGA Lifetime Achievement Award. (In The Envelope, Tom O'Neil states that DGA members, who weren't able to receive screeners this year, didn't get a chance to check out Letters from Iwo Jima, which opened late in December.)
Also missing from the DGA list were Paul Greengrass, whose United 93 has been chosen best film of the year by a number of U.S. critics' groups (including the influential New York Film Critics Circle), and Guillermo del Toro, whose Pan's Labyrinth has been the U.S. critics' top choice for best foreign-language film. (The respected National Society of Film Critics selected it as their best film of the year, period.)
The five nominees — actually six — are:
- Bill Condon (Dreamgirls)
- Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine)
- Martin Scorsese (The Departed)
- Stephen Frears (The Queen)
- Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel)
Chances are that at least three of the five will receive Oscar nods (Scorsese, Frears, Iñárritu). Quite possibly, two of the following three directors — Eastwood, Greengrass, and del Toro (perhaps even Pedro Almodóvar, for Volver) — will displace Condon and Dayton/Faris. (See the DGA vs. the Academy.)
Thus far, only twice have co-directors received joint Academy Award nods: Robert Wise and choreographer Jerome Robbins shared a best director Oscar for the 1961 musical West Side Story, and Warren Beatty and Buck Henry shared a nomination for the 1978 comedy Heaven Can Wait.