Guild makes Clint’s day

Clint Eastwood collected a best director accolade.

In an important pre-Oscar film industry award, the Directors' Guild of America named Clint Eastwood best director at the weekend for his bittersweet female boxing drama Million Dollar Baby.

The 74-year-old Eastwood beat the evening's other favourite for the award, Martin Scorsese, who has been nominated six times for the guild's 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 received seven, as did Finding Neverland, a drama about how Peter Pan came to be written.

"This is a surprise ... I've 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 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 movie, the Western Unforgiven.

The Academy Awards are announced on February 27 but before then, several industry groups such as the Directors' Guild announce their awards. The Aviator was named best picture of the year by the Producers' Guild last week.

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 past 56 winners of the Directors' Guild Awards have gone on to win Oscars, but two of those failures were in the past 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 in this awards season. It received no Oscar nominations.

- REUTERS