Martin Scorse is now officially closer to winning the Best Director Oscar than he’s ever been. We mean it this time. Honest. Truly-ruly. See, no fingers crossed or nuthin’. We can say this, because last night he won another award – for best feature – from the Director’s Guild Of America, and he’s been nominated for it almost as many times as he has the Academy Award.
The Departed shut out the man with the funnest name to pronounce in showbiz, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, nominated for Babel, along with Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls, Stephen Frears’ The Queen, and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris for Little Miss Sunshine.
Steven Spielberg presented the award to Scorsese, who in his speech paid tribute to a bunch of genre directors, and was generally as humble and loveable as you’d expect. Winning this award puts the odds of winning the biggest prize, at the end of this month, considerably further in Scorsese’s favour, because the winner of the DGA award has gone on to win the prize 52 times in 58 years.
Other winners on the night were Walter Hill for his TV movie Broken Trail (the last time he won was for the pilot of Deadwood, so this might be one to look out for), Jon Cassar for 24, and Richard Shepard took the TV comedy award for Ugly Betty. In the documentary stakes, it was Lithuanian filmmaker Arunas Matelis who came out on top for Before Flying Back to Earth. Well done all.