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Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won the Directors Guild of America Award last year for Birdman. He also won the Best Director Oscar last year. And now I’m worried that he’s going to repeat. Maybe I’m utterly alone here, but I absolutely loathed Birdman and I’m avoiding The Revenant like the torture-p0rn plague that it is. Inarritu is a technically brilliant director and there are so many shots and setups that I don’t even understand. But his films are beautiful nothingness – they’re severely plot-challenged and at the end of the day, why should I care? Why would any of us care?

Anyway, Inarritu won the DGA Award this weekend for The Revenant. The guild awards – whether it’s the SAGs, DGAs, WGAs – are some of the best indicators for who will win the Oscar. And so Inarritu made history by being the first director to win two DGA Awards in a consecutive years, and he might make history by being the third director to win two Oscars in row in the same category (John Ford was the first, winning in 1939 and 1940, then Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1949 & 1950). This is something that hasn’t happened in more than 65 years. So will it happen? That’s the thing… even though the DGA just upped Inarritu’s chances significantly, I do wonder if the Academy is just looking for a reason to give Best Director and Best Picture to any film other than The Revenant. It feels like The Big Short is coming up, as is Spotlight.

When Inarritu won, he apparently “fought back tears” and talked about his late father. He said, in part: “I never expected to win this award, truly. I’m… paralyzed. Tough men don’t cry, that’s what Ridley Scott said today.” He also spoke about what it’s been like for him to be embraced as a Mexican director, and how “this embrace is going to a whole country.” After his win, he even slammed Donald Trump for Trump’s plan to “build a wall”: “The power of this country is diversity. Building a wall betrays that.” You can read more about the winners and the DGAs here at Variety.

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Photos courtesy of WENN.
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