DGA as kingmaker

There's been a lot of talk about whether The King's Speech is going to sweep or split the Oscars. In many ways, it's a year unlike any other -- and I don't just mean King's Speech and Social Network. I mean King's Speech taking on Inception across the techs, taking on True Grit, taking on The Fighter in supporting categories. This is a year for battles.

And then it hit me. If David Fincher had just won the DGA, this would be a completely different event. We wouldn't be trying to figure out if Fincher's BAFTA win means anything, it would be used by many to predict The Social Network winning Best Picture. There are still plenty of people who think Fincher will win the Oscar. I'm not one of them. If he does, I'll be all the happier for it, as it will probably single-handedly cause me to lose my Oscar pool, but over the nine years I've been following the race, there are only two times the DGA has let me down -- 2002, when The Pianist came out of nowhere, and 2005, when Crash came out of nowhere.

Splits simply aren't easy to predict.



The DGA has only failed to match Oscar six times. A film that wins DGA, PGA, and SAG has only lost Best Picture once.

Imagine if Fincher won the DGA? Social Network would have the Globe, the DGA, and all the critics behind it. It would be almost a play-for-play repeat of 2006, where Little Miss Sunshine won the PGA and SAG, but The Departed won the DGA and the Oscar. There's also this: no film has won the Golden Globe, the National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Circle and gone on to lose the Oscar. It makes more statistical sense to bet on The Social Network to win Picture and Director. And believe me, I want to.

I want to believe the Academy is going to do something stunning on February 27th. But let's face it, The King's Speech has roared to life. Harvey Weinstein's campaign is nowhere close to as dirty as his Gangs of New York ploys, where he begged them to give Scorsese an Oscar. The film had 10 nominations; it won nothing. The King's Speech is all about emotion and triumph and heart and spirit. It's a "yay" movie.

But that doesn't mean it'll be The King's Sweep next Sunday. You'd have to be silly to count Inception out after the guilds have gone gaga for it, even without the Editing and Director nominations. You'd also have to be silly to count out The Social Network. I'm currently predicting it to win three -- screenplay, editing, score -- but it's not unprecedented for it to come back and win five.

I know, we're talking in circles at this point. That's okay, this is a year that deserves to be talked about. When the dust settles, we'll use our hindsight vision to figure out how and why it all went down.

I just keep coming back to that crazy DGA win. You can think about it however you want -- Tom Hooper's a TV director and the DGA's majority is TV directors. He still won. If Fincher had won, my ballot would have Social Network winning Picture and Director. But Hooper won, and as best as I've been able to tell, the Directors Guild should not be questioned.