#OscarsSoUnpredictable | Iñárritu Wins DGA Award for The Revenant

“Wait for the guild awards,” we said. “You’ll know what film the Academy favors when they give out the guild awards,” we said. Ha! How wrong we were.

Hollywood seems completely split on the Best Picture frontrunners this year. Usually, by now, one (or at the most two) motion pictures will have seemed to build momentum as the Academy Awards loom nearer and nearer on the horizon. Birdman will have started amassing one award after another. The same goes for Argo and The Artist and The King’s Speech and so on. This year the attention seems completely scattered: The Big Short won the Producers Guild Award, Spotlight won the top Screen Actors Guild Award, and now Alejandro González Iñárritu has just won the Directors Guild Award (DGA) for The Revenant.

20th Century Fox

This marks the very first time that a director has walked away with the top DGA prize two years in a row (although other directors have won it twice in non-consecutive years, like Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, David Lean and Steven Spielberg). Iñárritu won last year for Birdman, which also won him a Best Director Oscar in the weeks that followed. But this year the guilds, the members of which often overlap with the members of the Academy, are honoring so many different films it’s hard to say whether or not Iñárritu is a frontrunner.

He PROBABLY is, since the DGA and the Oscars usually go hand in hand (the last twelve DGA Award winners also went on to collect an Oscar statue), but it’s not like every guild in the land is touting their love for The Revenant, a film that has some supporters and some detractors, and faces stiff competition from several other, quality, crowd-pleasing, expertly crafted films.

Also: Alex Garland Talks ‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Dredd’ on The B-Movies Podcast

Other DGA Award winners announced this weekend – in the feature film categories – include Ex Machina filmmaker Alex Garland, who took home the guild’s first-ever “First-Time Feature Film Director” award, and Mathew Heineman for directing the documentary Cartel Land.

Top Photo: 20th Century Fox

William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.

 

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