Predicting the DGA

The Directors Guild are a far better precursor for the Best Picture Oscar that the PGA are. In fact they are better at predicting Best Picture than they are at Best Director.

I am completely under the impression (perhaps deluded) that Christopher Nolan is a lock for ‘The Dark Knight’.
I am also pretty sure that David Fincher and Danny Boyle are locks for their respective films.

The final two are going to be interesting. The DGA has no animate category, so they may want to reward the director of the best reviewed films of the year and give Andrew Stanton and nod for WALL-E. Animation is not an easy thing to direct. If it were there would be a lot more quality animated films out there, and there are not.

Perhaps they will want to reward a smaller film, and give a nod to Mike Leigh or Jonathan Demme for their wonderful, but difficult to pull off films.
Or will critical darlings Gus Van Sant and Darren Aronofsky a nod? I am not convinced (or rather I need it not to be so for the sake of dying of boredom with this years race) that Ron Howard is going to garner a nod here.

In ranking I predict

1 - Christopher Nolan – ‘The Dark Knight’
2 – Danny Boyle – ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
3 – David Fincher – ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’
4 – Gus Van Sant – ‘Milk’
5 - Andrew Stanton – ‘WALL-E’

And the rest

6 – Darren Aronofsky – ‘The Wrestler’
7 – Ron Howard – ‘Frost/Nixon’
8 – Mike Leigh – ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’
9 - Jonathan Demme – ‘Rachel Getting Married’