In an Oscar season that weirdly parallels the Republican primary (where a volatile crop of Oscar contenders surge and fall behind a coasting front-runner), the Director’s Guild just came along to shake things up even further. The DGA nominations were announced today, and they included two sure shots (The Artist’s Michel Hazanavicius and The Descendants’ Alexander Payne), two safe bets (Hugo’s Martin Scorsese and Midnight in Paris’s Woody Allen), but what of that fifth slot? Many believed it would go to Steven Spielberg for War Horse or even the revered Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life, but nope, it went to David Fincher for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a film that many Oscar pundits had written off last month. Expect those predictions to be revised now that Dragon Tattoo has clinched the trifecta of DGA, PGA, and WGA nods; still, this trophy appears to be Hazanvicius’s to lose.
