DGA nominations announced

We wouldn’t want their job (or would we?).

Having trawled through the many great films of 2009, the Director’s Guild of America has finally whittled their list of nominees down to five. Whew.

No real surprises here, of course. But these nominations do give us a good indication of what we can expect the Academy to come up with when they reveal their own Oscar candidates.

Without further a-do, here’s the list of DGA contenders:

Kathryn Bigelow - The Hurt Locker
James Cameron - Avatar
Lee Daniels - Precious
Jason Reitman - Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds

So, Cameron’s decade long tussle with Avatar has obviously caught someone’s attention (really, who can ignore the sound of $1bn in box office ker-chings?), while Bigelow’s Hurt Locker has been receiving well-deserved plaudits from every corner of the film universe.

Nice to see Tarantino back in the running as well, his long-gestating Basterds filled with the filmmaker’s requisite visual zaniness.

But who we’d really like to see win is Lee Daniels with Precious . A devastating drama filled with sensational performances (Daniels even managed to get some magic out of Mariah Carey), this one really deserves a bit of loving. Something tells us it might get some.

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Josh Winning has worn a lot of hats over the years. Contributing Editor at Total Film, writer for SFX, and senior film writer at the Radio Times. Josh has also penned a novel about mysteries and monsters, is the co-host of a movie podcast, and has a library of pretty phenomenal stories from visiting some of the biggest TV and film sets in the world. He would also like you to know that he "lives for cat videos..." Don't we all, Josh. Don't we all.