The DGA (Directors Guild of America) have announced the nominees for their Best Director of the Year honor. It’s a pretty solid list too. The nominees are:
Paul Thomas Anderson – There Will Be Blood
Tony Gilroy – Michael Clayton
Sean Penn – Into the Wild
Ethan and Joel Coen – No Country for Old Men
Julian Schnabel – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
It’s hard to complain about any of these nominees. Personally, I would drop Penn (I liked Into The Wild, but wasn’t that enamored with it), Tony Gilroy and Julian Schnabel… and in their place put Jason Reitman for Juno, Ben Affleck for Gone Baby Gone and Brad Bird for Ratatouille. But that’s just me.
As for the 5 nominees, to me the winner is clearly Paul Thomas Anderson. The way in which “There Will Be Blood” was told, the use of every sense possible to tell the story (There isn’t a word of dialog for about the first 10 minutes of the movie… it’s amazing) and the power in which he told it was nothing short of breath taking. That’s not a knock on any of the other nominees at all… it’s just that Anderson was superb.
