Hollywood directors honour “King’s Speech”

LOS ANGELES, (Reuters) – “The King’s Speech” won a  key award from Hollywood directors yesterday, four days after  the British royals drama picked up a leading 12 Oscar  nominations.

The film’s director, Tom Hooper, was named winner of the  union’s prize for outstanding achievement in feature film at a  ceremony in Hollywood, beating a field that included another  Oscar favourite, “The Social Net-work” director David Fincher.

The Directors Guild of America race also included  Christopher Nolan for “Incep-tion,” Darren Aronofsky for “Black  Swan” and David O. Russell for “The Fighter.” The latter two  also received Oscar nominations, along with Joel and Ethan Coen  for “True Grit,” who were overlooked by the DGA.

Only six times in 62 years has the winner of the DGA prize  not gone on to claim the best director statuette at the Academy  Awards. The last mismatch was in 2003, when Rob Marshall won  the DGA prize for “Chicago” but lost at the Oscars to “The  Pianist” director Roman Polanski.

With four weeks until the Oscars are handed out in  Hollywood on Feb. 27, the race appears to be a tight one  between “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network.”

“The King’s Speech” was named best picture by the Producers  Guild of America last weekend, although that group’s track  record as an Oscar barometer is not as strong as the DGA’s.
“The Social Network” picked up the best film and directing  awards from the reliable Critics Choice Movie Awards and the  increasingly erratic Golden Globes.

“I love the fact that the whole award thing is getting more  unpredictable,” Helena Bonham Carter, co-star of “The King’s  Speech,” told Reuters. “This is going to make it more  interesting to everybody, I think.”

The film revolves around wartime monarch King George VI’s  struggle to overcome a crippling stammer. Bonham Carter, who  plays his wife, the future Queen Mother, received an Oscar  nomination along with Colin Firth as the king and Geoffrey Rush  as his unorthodox speech therapist.

Other DGA winners included the financial-meltdown  documentary “Inside Job,” directed by Charles Ferguson, as well  as episodes of the sitcom “Modern Family” and the period drama  “Boardwalk Empire” in the television categories.