It’s another sunny day for Damien Chazelle’s Los Angeles musical La La Land and Barry Jenkins’ coming-of-age tale Moonlight on the long journey to the Oscars.
After winning the top film awards at the Golden Globes, Damien and Barry both scored their first nomination for a Directors Guild Award, further enhancing the likelihood of an Oscar nod.
The guild’s nominees for outstanding directorial achievement for a feature film also included Manchester By The Sea director Kenneth Lonergan, Lion director Garth Davis and Denis Villeneuve of Arrival.
Garth is also nominated for best first feature along with Nate Parker for Birth Of A Nation.
Other first feature nominees include Dan Trachtenberg for 10 Cloverfield Lane, Tim Miller for Deadpool and Kelly Fremon Craig for The Edge Of Seventeen.
While the DGA nominees for feature film achievement rarely match up exactly with nods for the Academy Award, the guild choices can be a formidable predictor of the eventual Oscar winner.
With nearly 16,000 members, including television and commercial directors, the guild often selects a more populist lineup when compared with the selections of the nearly 400 members of the directors’ branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Last year, Alejandro G Inarritu picked up the feature film award for The Revenant before going on to win best director at the Oscars.
Voting for Oscar nominations closes on Friday, and nominees will be announced on January 24.
With nominations from the Producers Guild this week, La La Land, Moonlight and Manchester By The Sea appear to be the front runners.
Winners of the 69th annual Directors Guild awards will be announced at a dinner in Los Angeles on February 4.
