The awards season norm has seen the nearly annual occurrence of at least one difference between the Best Director Oscar and DGA Award nominees lineups. In only five of the 73 years of the DGA Awards have the Guild nominations exactly mirrored their Academy Award counterparts.
This time around directors Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Vinterberg are in line with that predominant history. Vinterberg this week earned a Best Director Oscar nod for Another Round (Samuel Goldwyn Films). Sorkin, who didn’t make the directorial Oscar cut, earned a DGA Award nomination for The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix).
Four of the five directors vying for the DGA Award and the Outstanding Achievement in Directing Oscar are in sync this year: Lee Isaac Chung for Minari (A24); Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman (Focus Features); David Fincher for Mank (Netflix); and Chloe Zhao for Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures).
On the flip side of tradition, if Vinterberg were to win the directing Oscar, he wouldn’t be aligned with but rather bucking history. Only eight times has the DGA Award winner not gone on to win the Oscar. That happened most recently last year when Sam Mendes won the DGA Award for 1917 while Bong Joon Ho scored the Oscar for Parasite.
Even though he didn’t garner a Best Director Oscar nomination, Sorkin added to his Academy Award pedigree this year as The Trial of the Chicago 7 scored a total of 6 nods–including one for Sorkin for Best Original Screenplay. This marked the fourth career Oscar nomination for Sorkin who won the Best Adapted Screenplay honor in 2011 for The Social Network. He was a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominee again in 2012 and 2018 for Moneyball and Molly’s Game, respectively.
Sorkin stated, “It took fourteen years to make The Trial of the Chicago 7 and I’m thankful for all of them. We thank the Academy for recognizing so much individual achievement this morning, but our biggest thanks is for including our film among the extraordinary movies nominated for Best Picture. We learned a lot of hard lessons last year, but a nice one was that people will find a way to go to the movies, even if they can only go as far as their living rooms.
“Chicago 7 is a very modern period piece,” he continued. “It takes place in 1968 but it’s about today. It’s a Valentine to the patriotism of protest, and to the courage of ordinary people who stand toe-to-toe with power. Jerry Rubin called the trial ‘the Academy Awards of protest.’ Well this is the Academy Awards of Academy Awards, and it’s an honor to be nominated.”
Chicago 7 is based on the 1969 trial of seven defendants charged by the federal government with conspiracy and more, arising from anti-Vietnam War protests which turned violent as demonstrators clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. While Sorkin’s film was in an on-again, off-again mode over the years, it came together and wound up debuting last October on Netflix–at a time when it’s subject matter spanning such issues as police brutality and social justice had become all the more relevant as protestors gathered across the country in 2020 after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 has a stellar cast including Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron-Cohen, respectively, as revolutionary counterculture activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis as Alex Sharp (Hayden and Sharp were members of Students for a Democratic Society), John Carroll Lynch as conscientious objector David Dellinger, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as lead prosecutor Richard Schultz, Mark Rylance as defense attorney William Kunstler, Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman, and John Doman as Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell.
Meanwhile Another Round, directed and co-written by Vinterberg, centers on four friends, all teachers at various stages of middle age, who are stuck in a rut. Unable to share their passions either at school or at home, they embark on an audacious experiment from an obscure philosopher: to see if a constant level of alcohol in their blood will help them find greater freedom and happiness. At first they each find a new-found zest, but as the gang pushes their experiment further, issues that have been simmering for years come to a head and the men are faced with a choice: reckon with their behavior or continue on the same course. Heading the cast is Mads Mikkelsen who portrays a once brilliant but now world-weary shell of a man.
Vinterberg teamed with regular collaborator Tobias Lindholm to pen the script which delves into the euphoria and pain of an unbridled life.
The recognition for directing Another Round marks the first career Oscar nomination for Vinterberg.
Sorkin’s DGA nod is his first as well. Chicago 7 marks his second directorial turn, the first being the aforementioned Molly’s Game.
More history
In contrast to the familiar history between the Best Director Oscar and DGA Award, brand new ground–as earlier reported in SHOOT–has been broken spanning both competitions. For the first time, two women–Fennell and Zhao–scored DGA Award nominations in the marquee feature category in the same year. The same precedent was then set again by Fennell and Zhao in this year’s Best Director Oscar category.
On the strength of her work on Nomadland, Zhao is also the first woman of color to garner a Best Director Oscar nod. She is also the first to do so for the DGA’s major feature honor.
Additionally, Zhao just became the most nominated woman in a single year in Oscar history. She has tallied a total of four Academy Award noms for Nomadland, the others coming for adapted screenplay, editing and as a producer in the Best Picture category.
This is the 12th installment of a 16-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies and on SHOOTonline.com, with select installments also in print issues. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards gala ceremony. The 93rd Oscars will be held on Sunday, April 25, 2021.
