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The Directors Guild of America will announce the inaugural nominees for the First-Time Feature Film Award tomorrow. DGA board members approved this new category in October 2014 and Steven Spielberg announced it at the February 2015 award ceremony.
Because some DGA voters belong to the Oscars’ directing branch, this may give newcomers the boost that they need to clinch an Oscar nomination. Consider Damien Chazelle, director of last year’s Best Picture nominee Whiplash, which won three Oscars and earned Chazelle a nomination for screenwriting. He must have been close to an Oscar nomination for Best Director, especially since he was a nominee in the equivalent BAFTA category. A First-Time DGA Award ballot would have increased his name recognition and gotten directors used to voting for him.
The academy is no stranger to nominating directorial debuts and has even awarded them, Sam Mendes (American Beauty, 1999) being the latest example, but years tend to pass between nominations. Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild, 2012) and Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, 2007) received the most recent citations.
The likeliest beneficiary this year is László Nemes, who is the only first-time director ever to have his film in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Son of Saul received the Grand Prix runner-up award and is favored to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Nemes himself ranks sixteenth on Gold Derby for a Best Director nomination.
Further down the list of directing contenders is fellow first-timer Alex Garland, who received three BAFTA nominations this week for writing and directing Ex Machina. That film overcame hundred-to-one odds on Tuesday to earn a Best Picture nomination from the Producers Guild, often considered the strongest predictor of Best Picture at the Oscars. No PGA nominated-film has ever been shut out by the Oscars and Ex Machina has surged in the Best Original Screenplay race; Garland is now favored to score the film’s sole Oscar nomination there.
Other DGA First-Time contenders include Joel Edgerton (The Gift starring Jason Bateman), Deniz Gamze Ergüven (French Oscar submission Mustang), Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl starring Kristen Wiig), John Maclean (Slow West starring Michael Fassbender), John Magary (The Mend starring Josh Lucas), Josh Mond (James White starring Cynthia Nixon), Naji Abu Nowar (Jordanian Oscar submission Theeb), Miroslav Slaboshpitsky (Ukrainian Cannes selection The Tribe) and S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk starring Richard Jenkins).
Reply"I don't even believe in god, but I'm going to thank her tonight."
Who do you think will be nominated this year and who do you think would have been nominated in past years? Will we see more first-time directors at the Oscars now? I am unclear on the eligibility of foreign films; I predict The Diary of a Teenage Girl, winner Ex Machina, The Gift, Mustang and Son of Saul.
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FIRST-TIME FEATURE FILM DIRECTOR NOMINEES
FERNANDO COIMBRA
A Wolf at the Door
(Outsider Pictures)
Mr. Coimbra’s Directorial Team:
Unit Production Manager: Clara Machado
First Assistant Director: Suzy Milstein
Second Assistant Director: Raquel Toledo
This is Mr. Coimbra’s first DGA Award nomination.
JOEL EDGERTON
The Gift
(STX Entertainment)
Mr. Edgerton’s Directorial Team:
Unit Production Manager: Luc Etienne
First Assistant Director: Michael J. Moore
Second Assistant Director: Matt Haggerty
Second Second Assistant Director: Dillon Neaman
This is Mr. Edgerton’s first DGA Award nomination.
ALEX GARLAND
Ex Machina
(A24)
Mr. Garland’s Directorial Team:
Unit Production Manager: Sara Desmond
First Assistant Director: Nick Heckstall‑Smith
Second Assistant Director: Ray Kenny
This is Mr. Garland’s first DGA Award nomination.
MARIELLE HELLER
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Ms. Heller’s Directorial Team:
Unit Production Manager: Molly Salz
First Assistant Director: Brian Benson
Second Assistant Director: Jerremy Stewart
Second Second Assistant Director: Alex Gilbert
This is Ms. Heller’s first DGA Award nomination.
LÁSZLÓ NEMES
Son of Saul
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Mr. Nemes’s Directorial Team:
Unit Production Manager: Gábor Szántó
First Assistant Director: István Kolos
Second Assistant Directors: Zoltán Gyovai, Edina Galgócz
This is Mr. Nemes’s first DGA Award nomination.
Eligible directors for this award must have released his or her first feature-length film theatrically in Los Angeles or New York in 2015. Foreign films are eligible and the director does not need to be a DGA member.ReplyCopy URL"I don't even believe in god, but I'm going to thank her tonight."
benutty and I predicted the same four nominees. The fifth is not even among the eleven possible contenders that I named. A Wolf at the Door is a Brazilian film that premiered at festivals in 2013 and was not selected as foreign-language submission to the Oscars. It has only 67 on Metacritic and was not nominated by a single American critics’ award; however, it did sweep what appear to be the Brazilian equivalent of the Oscars over the Oscar submission. So there are a ton of Brazilians in the DGA?
This is good news for Son of Saul over Mustang at the Oscars.
Love & Mercy was Bill Pohlad’s second feature film.
Very happy to see The Gift in here. Unlike the other contenders that I named, it was not nominated in a debut filmmaker category by a critics’ association, but I figured that the box office would carry it, since it actually had some.
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