BEST DIRECTOR (get the full chart here)
As I’m sure most of you know, a win from the DGA pretty much means a win at the Oscars, and history has shown a directorial win at the Oscars typically leads to a Best Picture win. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but in the past 20 years there have only been five instances when the two awards didn’t match up:
- In 2006 Picture went to Crash and Director went to Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain)
- In 2003 Picture went to Chicago and Director went to Roman Polanski (The Pianist)
- In 2001 Picture went to Gladiator and Director went to Steven Soderbergh (Traffic)
- In 1999 Picture went to Shakespeare in Love and Director went to Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan)
- In 1990 Picture went to Driving Miss Daisy and Director went to Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July)
However, my predictions don’t necessarily respect that tradition.
BEST PICTURE (get the full chart here)
To be perfectly honest, should Bigelow take the DGA award I’m not sure I will be able to keep The Hurt Locker out of my #1 slot, but for now the box-office power and award steam goes to Avatar, which is currently the #3 film at the domestic box-office needing only another $28 million to pass The Dark Knight and move into #2. Avatar is also likely to pass Titanic for the worldwide box-office crown very shortly. To say the film hasn’t made an impact on the industry and viewers would be simple ignorance, but is it enough to propel it to anything more than just a slew of technical awards? We’ll have to wait and see.
That does it for my Oscar predictions for now, you can check out the complete charts by visiting The Contenders or clicking on any one of the following links to get started. Each opens in a new window so just close the window to return to this post.
Stay tuned in as tomorrow I will be asking for your Screen Actors Guild Award predictions and I will be here once again this Saturday with a live blog and winners from the event and hopefully the server will be able to handle the influx of visitors that basically shut down the site for 26 minutes during the Golden Globes.
Remember to bookmark The Contenders and/or subscribe to the Contenders RSS Feed for continuous awards updates.
