Precursor: 67th Directors Guild Awards (2014)

Posted

February 8, 2015

Wesley Lovell

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The conversation has changed. First, I’m a bad site host for falling asleep before I got the winner announced and boy am I ever sorry I did. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won Best Director from the DGA in a surprise upset over heavy favorite Richard Linklater. Birdman now completes the triple-crown of guild precursors taking DGA, PGA and SAG ensemble awards.

Since SAG’s inception (being the baby of the bunch), only one film has won all three prizes and not taken the Oscar. That was the first year SAG handed out its ensemble award in 1995. Apollo 13 won all three prizes and then lost to Braveheart at the end of the night. That means in 19 prior years, there have been 8 perfect Triple Crowns and only 1 of those hasn’t matched the Oscar for Best Picture. That gives Birdman a terrific leg up in the race, which means either the PGA/DGA/SAG precedent goes down in defeat to the more lengthy Best Editing-Nomination-Required precedent, or the oldest correlation precedent goes down after 34 years of prescience.

Splits are a little more common at the Oscars in recent history. Since 1998, the Academy’s Best Picture/Director prize has split between two films 6 times. That’s more frequently than in the prior 30 years combined (1966-1997 only saw 4 splits). Prior precedent suggests never to bet against the split, but the Guild Triple Crown winner has been involved in two of the six splits (2012 when Ben Affleck wasn’t nominated for the Oscar and 2002 when Roman Polanski made a surprise win for The Pianist). So, in cases of splits, the PGA/DGA/SAG winner won Best Picture and a different director won Best Director. So, if there’s a split, Birdman would be the more likely choice to take Best Picture with Linklater taking Best Director.

Which flies in the face of another precedent. Through 1995, Best Director at the Oscars and the DGA matched perfectly nearly every time, failing only about once per decade. Since then it’s been more frequent. It happened in 2000, 2002 and 2012. It still calculates to once per decade with an extra one in the 00’s thrown in. Since this decade has already seen one, you could assume it won’t happen again, but that would be a bad assumption these days. If Inarritu doesn’t win Best Director, another strong precedent goes down.

The Awards

Best Director

Alejandro G. Inarritu – Birdman (RU:Wesley, RU:Peter, RU:Tripp, RU:Thomas)

Directors Guild of America Data

Year Founded: 1936
First Awards: 1948 (67)

Comments

One response to “Precursor: 67th Directors Guild Awards (2014)”

Peter J Patrick

February 8, 2015

Records are made to be broken. I’ve never believed that the lack of an editing nomination is a detriment to winning the best picture Oscar. The fact that Birdman did not receive one suggests either that the film is/was? not universally loved by the voting members of that branch or that they were simply more impressed with the editing of the five films they nominated.

I think Inarritu’s DGA win gives him a leg up on the Best Director Oscar. Fans of both films, could do a Best Picture/Director split in either direction. My choices to win are Boyhood/Boyhood, but I would nevertheless welcome a Boyhood/Inarritu win if only to put a kibosh on all this statistical advantage talk. On the other hand, if Birdman loses Best Picture, it will re-enforce the belief that you can’t win Best Picture without an editing nomination. If it loses, though, I think it will because people are misreading the tea leaves. Birdman may very well have won the PGA because it was a more conventionally produced film than Boyhood and more in line with the majority of the membership. It may well have won the SAG award for Best Ensemble because it had more actors interacting at the top of their game. All of this adds to the suspense of the opening of the last envelope on Oscar night.

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