DGA nominations announced

Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

The Directors Guild of America has released its nominations, and though the list is pretty much free of surprises, it has to count among the stronger fields in recent DGA history.

The nominees chosen by the Directors Guild of America, via The Huffington Post:

Ben Affleck – Argo
Kathryn Bigelow – Zero Dark Thirty
Tom Hooper – Les Miserables
Ang Lee – Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg – Lincoln

This is a particularly tough field this year, with only Affleck, Bigelow, and Spielberg as sure-things, going into the race. Hooper and Lee were fighting to take those last two spots, facing stiff competition from potential nominees such as Quentin Tarantino for “Django Unchained”, David O. Russell for “Silver Linings Playbook”, Benh Zeitlin for “Beasts of the Southern Wild”, Paul Thomas Anderson for “The Master”, and Michael Haneke for “Amour”.

I know if this translates 5-for-5 with Oscar, come Thursday morning, I won’t complain. Might be a little predictable, sure, but I’ve been Oscar-watching for well over a decade. It’s just what they do. That said, a perfect 5-for-5 match has only happened twice since 2000, so expect one of the nominees above to miss out on an Oscar nomination Thursday morning. However, the race is all the more interesting since, to my knowledge, this is one of the few times (or possibly even the first time) that DGA nominations have been announced after Oscar ballots have already been turned in. More than ever, the nominees above may not reflect whose name gets called when Seth MacFarlane and Emma Stone take the stage to announce who’s up for a little golden guy.

Who do you think might fall just short of Oscar? And who will get the nod instead?