Coen Brothers Win DGA Award — Is ‘No Country’ a Lock for Best Picture?

Visibly thrilled, Joel and Ethan Coen collected top honors at the Directors Guild of America Awards for No Country for Old Men on Saturday night, beating out Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), Sean Penn (Into the Wild), and — somehow — Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). It was the Coens’ first win, and it bodes well for their Oscar chances, since the DGA, historically, has a 90 percent success rate in predicting the Academy Award for Best Director (and 73 percent of films winning Best Director have taken the Best Picture statue too). Factor in that No Country was already the odds-on favorite, winning more critics’ prizes than any of the films it’s competing with, and it’s increasingly hard to justify the price of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-night tuxedo rental, or the bill to have Julian Schnabel’s pajamas dry-cleaned.

Breaking from awards-show tradition, Saturday’s DGA ceremony actually seems to have been an exciting one. Variety’s Kris Tapley reports that Schnabel’s acceptance speech for his nomination was interrupted by an “extremely drunk� Sean Young. “Perhaps you’d like to finish my speech,� he told her, before stepping away from the podium. Alas, she was forcibly removed by venue security before she could oblige. Even sadder, the awards were not televised and, despite all the filmmakers in attendance, no footage has yet appeared on YouTube.

Coen brothers win top DGA honor [Variety]
Drama at the DGAs — Sean Young gets the boot? [Variety]