61st Annual Directors Guild America Awards Tonight

by amyjudd | January 31, 2009 at 08:25 pm

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The 61st Annual Directors Guild of America Awards takes place tonight at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles.

The nominees this year are Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire, David Fincher for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Ron Howard for Frost/Nixon, Christopher Nolan for The Dark Knight and Gus Van Sant for Milk.

The DGA has been dishing out awards since 1948, making this the 61st annual DGA Awards ceremony.

The DGA is effectively the union for all film and TV directors, and consists of roughly 13,000 members. According to my colleague Tom O'Neil, the majority of the members work on the TV side of the business, and only 8,000 or so live in the Los Angeles area, with the rest scattered across the country. DGA members are not allowed to receive DVD screeners of films, so they must actually take the initiative to see the films at industry screenings or their local Cineplex, which would seem to give an inherent advantage to early and commercially successful releases over films that came out late in the season and screened primarily in art-house theaters.