Eastwood wins major pre-Oscar award
Eastwood, 74, beat out the other favourite for Saturday's award, Martin Scorsese, who has been nominated six times for the DGA best film directing award--including for films Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980)--but never won.
Scorsese's film The Aviator, a biography of billionaire Howard Hughes, has received 11 Oscar nominations, the most of any film. Million Dollar Baby got seven, as did Finding Neverland, a drama about how Peter Pan came to be written.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. "This is a surprise. ... I got to say this is a real pleasure. I am as pleased as punch," Eastwood told a black tie audience after receiving the award. Earlier in the evening, Scorsese had received a standing ovation from the Directors Guild audience, leading some to think he was the evening's favourite.
This year's battle for the top Oscars is seen largely as a contest between the two veteran directors. Scorsese has never won an Oscar but Eastwood has a best director's Academy Award for his 1992 Western Unforgiven.
While important barometers of how Academy members are thinking in the run-up to the Oscars, the craft guilds awards are by no means infallible. Fifty of the last 56 winners of the DGA award have gone to win Oscars, but two of those failures were in the last five years.
In the DGA's other major film award for the evening, the prize for best documentary went to Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni for their tale of nomadic life in Gobi desert, The Story of the Weeping Camel. Among the documentaries it beat for the award was Michael Moore's controversial anti-Iraq war film Fahrenheit 9/11, which has fared poorly this awards season. It received no Oscar nominations.