Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing

Quick facts for kids Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film
The 2024 recipient: Sean Baker
Presented by	Directors Guild of America
Country	United States
First awarded	1948
Currently held by	Sean Baker for Anora (2024)

The Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures is a special award given each year by the Directors Guild of America (DGA). This award celebrates the best movie director of the year. It's a big honor because it means other directors think your work is amazing!

Steven Spielberg has won this award 3 times and has been nominated 13 times, which is more than any other director. He's also the first director to be nominated in six different decades! Another director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, won the award two years in a row, in 2015 for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and in 2016 for The Revenant. Sometimes, two directors share the award if they worked together on a film. This happened for West Side Story (1961) with Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, for No Country for Old Men (2007) with Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, and for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) with Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.

Predicting the Oscar's Outcome
Winners and Nominees
- 2020s
Directors with Multiple Wins
Directors with Multiple Nominations
See also

Predicting the Oscar's Outcome

This award is often a good hint for who will win the Academy Award for Best Director, also known as the Oscar. Most of the time, the director who wins the DGA Award also wins the Oscar for Best Director.

However, there have been a few times when the DGA winner didn't win the Oscar:

In 1968, Anthony Harvey won the DGA for The Lion in Winter, but Carol Reed won the Oscar for Oliver!.
In 1972, Francis Ford Coppola won the DGA for The Godfather, but Bob Fosse won the Oscar for Cabaret.
In 1985, Steven Spielberg won the DGA for The Color Purple, but he wasn't even nominated for the Oscar that year.
In 1995, Ron Howard won the DGA for Apollo 13, but he also wasn't nominated for the Oscar.
In 2000, Ang Lee won the DGA for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but Steven Soderbergh won the Oscar for Traffic.
In 2002, Rob Marshall won the DGA for Chicago, but Roman Polanski won the Oscar for The Pianist.
In 2012, Ben Affleck won the DGA for Argo, but he wasn't nominated for the Oscar. However, his movie Argo did win Best Picture.
In 2019, Sam Mendes won the DGA for 1917, but Bong Joon-ho won the Oscar for Parasite.

Winners and Nominees

Many talented directors have been honored with this award since it started in 1948. For example, Joseph L. Mankiewicz won the very first award in 1948 for A Letter to Three Wives. He won again in 1950 for All About Eve.

Here are the winners and nominees from the 2020s:

2020s

Year	Winners and nominees	Film
2020 (73rd)	Chloé Zhao	Nomadland
	Lee Isaac Chung	Minari
	Emerald Fennell	Promising Young Woman
	David Fincher	Mank
	Aaron Sorkin	The Trial of the Chicago 7
2021 (74th)	Jane Campion	The Power of the Dog
	Paul Thomas Anderson	Licorice Pizza
	Kenneth Branagh	Belfast
	Steven Spielberg	West Side Story
	Denis Villeneuve	Dune
2022 (75th)	Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert	Everything Everywhere All at Once
	Todd Field	Tár
	Joseph Kosinski	Top Gun: Maverick
	Martin McDonagh	The Banshees of Inisherin
	Steven Spielberg	The Fabelmans
2023 (76th)	Christopher Nolan	Oppenheimer
	Greta Gerwig	Barbie
	Yorgos Lanthimos	Poor Things
	Alexander Payne	The Holdovers
	Martin Scorsese	Killers of the Flower Moon
2024 (77th)	Sean Baker	Anora
	Jacques Audiard	Emilia Pérez
	Edward Berger	Conclave
	Brady Corbet	The Brutalist
	James Mangold	A Complete Unknown