Which Mexican Director Will Wow DGA?

The wonderful Sasha Stone over at OscarWatch is thinking about the rapidly approaching DGA announcement. She asked me for my predictions so why not share them with you as well? I went with the following men:

• Alfonso Cuarón Children of Men
• Clint Eastwood Letters From Iwo Jima
• Stephen Frears The Queen
• Alejandro González Iñárritu Babel
• Martin Scorsese The Departed

Of course now that I've sent them I'm having doubts. It's kind of backwards logic but I'm more hopeful that Cuarón can slip into the eventual Oscar directing shortlist than the guild shortlist for his exceptional work on Children of Men. It's strange but the DGA shortlist is usually more indicative of where Oscar's Best Picture list will be than it's Director's list. So I probably should've replaced Cuarón with Dreamgirls' Bill Condon. I'm still angry at Universal for sitting on Children of Men rather than releasing it early enough for it to properly build. Movies that improve with age and second viewings warrant earlier releasing. This is not a complicated concept. Movies that blow their wad right away like oh, say, Dreamgirls need the safety of December.


One has to wonder how much mileage Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth in particular can get when they're essentially competing with each other for last second "oh this is cool" attention. In many cases they're even sharing media stories with Babel which is already firmly established as a big Oscar contender. The 'Three Amigos' story of this friendly trio of acclaimed Mexican filmmakers makes for a great press angle but won't it divvy up the votes too much for a true impact?

I hope that the movie studios have noticed that the movies doing particularly well this year in precursors: The Departed, The Queen, Babel and Little Miss Sunshine all opened by October. It'd be nice if December was free of this mad rush of last minute Oscar releases and we could all just enjoy the holidays and maybe see favorite movies again without the pressure to see a million new ones. It'd be nice if awards bodies really had time to think their choices through. It'd be nice if money grew on trees, I had an unending supply of chocolate and Clive Owen was my personal loveslave

As for my own awards


Don't look so worried, Clive. There'll be some action for Children of Men --it improves so markedly on second viewing I'm ready for a third. The 7th annual FiLM BiTCH Awards start in force tomorrow.

previous related posts:
The Three Amigos -Cuarón, Iñárritu, Del Toro
Catblogging: Children of Men -Clive Owen loves the putty tats.
Oh Guillermo JA reveals the masturbatory weirdness of the Pan's Labyrinth auteur