January 17, 1996
DGA President Gene Reynolds and the 48th Annual DGA Awards Committee Chairman Howard Storm will announce the Guild's five nominees for outstanding directorial achievement in motion pictures during 1995 at a 9:00AM news conference on Monday, January 22, 1996 in Theater 2 of the Guild's National Headquarters Building, 7920 Sunset Blvd. DGA Award winners will be announced at the 48th Annual DGA Awards banquet on March 2 at the Century Plaza Hotel.
Only three times since 1949 has the winner of the DGA Award not gone on to win the Best Director Oscar. For nineteen years, the Guild was a perfect barometer of the Oscar winner.
(The 1949 Oscar was won by first DGA Award winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "A Letter to Three Wives." A conflict in Oscar and DGA Award periods of eligibility that was subsequently corrected in 1950 put the Mankiewicz film up against second DGA winner Robert Rossen's "All the King's Men.")
The first time after 1949 that a DGA Award winner didn't win the Oscar was in 1968 when Anthony Harvey took home Guild honors for "The Lion in Winter" while Carol Reed's "Oliver!" was the Academy's choice. Four years later, voters of the two organizations disagreed a second time when the DGA's choice of Francis Ford Coppola for "The Godfather" was rejected by Oscar voters in favor of Bob Fosse for his direction of "Cabaret."
After another dozen years of agreement between Guild and Academy voters, DGA members selected "The Color Purple" directed by Steven Spielberg as the outstanding directorial achievement of 1985 wh ile Oscar voters preferred Sydney Pollack's work on "Out of Africa."
DGA television nominees and special award recipients will be released early in February.