Practicalmadness

As it's become clear that nobody's going to play my little Oscar Nominees guessing game, I don't imagine that it'll hurt anything if I tell you that Polanski (The Pianist), Scorsese (Gangs of New York), Stephen Daldry (The Hours), Peter Jackson (The Two Towers) and Rob Marshall (Chicago) have all been nominated for the Directors Guild of America awards, which will be awarded on March 1.

The guild awards are the best predictor of who is going to win the Oscar, as they are nominated and voted upon by more or less the same group of people who vote on the Oscars.

The Golden Globes are run by the Hollywood Foreign Press, most other major awards are selected by critics and other know-it-alls -- in any case, people with little or no connection to the industry. The Oscars, on the other hand, are considered more authoritative because they are by the American film industry, for the industry, like the guild awards. How authoritative they may be for you as an individual depends on how much you like Ron Howard movies.

At the risk of giving all you Oscars Game players (yeah, all none of you) a leg up, my prediction (assuming that at least four of these five are nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, as is often the case) is that everyone but Scorsese and Polanski will be effectively out of the game.

Scorsese might win because he's one of the great American filmmakers who has been embarrassingly overlooked in the past. I mean, the Oscar that was rightly Scorsese's for GoodFellas went to Kevin Costner, for chrissakes. In fact, I'd say Scorsese is the most likely pick, even though Gangs of New York is considered to be far from the man's best work.

However, Roman Polanski may slip in under the Holocaust rule: not only is his film a very highly-regarded, well-reviewed true story about the Holocaust, but Polanski is himself a Holocaust survivor and, like Scorsese, one of those great directors who came to prominence in the 70s who as yet has not won an Oscar.

The winner of the DGA Award almost always wins the Oscar for Directing. However there have been more exceptions to this rule in the past ten years than in the fifty years before that, so we'll have to wait and see.