On Saturday evening, the Directors Guild of America will present its 62nd annual DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film to one of the following five nominees:

• Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”)
• James Cameron (“Avatar”)
• Lee Daniels (“Precious”)
• Jason Reitman (“Up in the Air”)
• Quentin Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”)

Before I share the name of the nominee who I am projecting to win, allow me to share a few important factoids about the DGA:

• The DGA, which consists of roughly 13,500 members, is effectively the union for all film and TV directors.
• The majority of members work in TV, not film, and only 8,000 or so live in the Los Angeles area, with the rest scattered across the country.
  
• Members are not allowed to receive DVD screeners of films, so they must actually take the initiative to see the films at industry screenings or their local Cineplex, which would seem to give an advantage to early and/or commercially successful releases over late-releases and/or art-house fare.
  
• The DGA has been dishing out awards since 1948. Over the past 61 years, the DGA Award winner and Academy Award winner for best director have corresponded on all but six occasions:
  • 1968 DGA honored Anthony Harvey (“The Lion in Winter”); AMPAS honored Carol Reed (“Oliver!”)
  • 1972 DGA honored Francis Ford Coppola (“The Godfather”); AMPAS honored Bob Fosse (“Cabaret”)
  • 1985 DGA honored Steven Spielberg (“The Color Purple”); AMPAS honored Sydney Pollack (“Out of Africa”)
  • 1995 DGA honored Ron Howard (“Apollo 13″); AMPAS honored Mel Gibson (“Braveheart”)
  • 2000 DGA honored Ang Lee (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”); AMPAS honored Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”)
  • 2002 DGA honored Rob Marshall (“Chicago”); AMPAS honored Roman Polanksi (“The Pianist”)
• The film directed by the DGA winner has gone on to be named best picture by the Academy (AMPAS) on all but 13 occasions, making it one of the most accurate precursors out there:
  • 1948 DGA honored “A Letter to Three Wives”; AMPAS honored “Hamlet”
  • 1951 DGA honored “A Place in the Sun”; AMPAS honored “An American in Paris”
  • 1952 DGA honored “The Quiet Man”; AMPAS honored “The Greatest Show on Earth”
  • 1956 DGA honored “Giant”; AMPAS honored “Around the World in 80 Days”
  • 1967 DGA honored “The Graduate”; AMPAS honored “In the Heat of the Night”
  • 1968 DGA honored “The Lion in Winter”; AMPAS honored “Oliver!”
  • 1981 DGA honored “Reds”; AMPAS honored “Chariots of Fire”
  • 1985 DGA honored “The Color Purple”; AMPAS honored “Out of Africa”
  • 1989 DGA honored “Born on the Fourth of July”; AMPAS honored “Driving Miss Daisy”
  • 1995 DGA honored “Apollo 13″; AMPAS honored “Braveheart”
  • 1998 DGA honored “Saving Private Ryan”; AMPAS honored “Shakespeare in Love”
  • 2000 DGA honored “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”; AMPAS honored “Gladiator”
  • 2005 DGA honored “Brokeback Mountain”; AMPAS honored “Crash”

PROJECTION

Maybe this is foolish in light of last Saturday’s ground-shattering PGA win for Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” and of the apparent groundswell of enthusiasm for a female to finally win the best director Oscar, but I am betting my chips on a Cameron victory. Of his fellow nominees, only Tarantino had ever been so much as nominated by the DGA before this year, whereas he was not only nominated but won 12 years ago for “Titanic” (1997). Moreover, with the exception of Tarantino’s, none of his fellow nominees’ films have been widely seen — as I mentioned above, it’s up to DGA members to get to theaters, since screeners are not sent to the full membership — and even Tarantino’s has made only about one-sixth of what Cameron’s has. Several of these nominees faced hardships en route to realizing their directorial visions — Bigelow spent weeks on the border of Iraq, in the middle of Ramadan, in sizzling heat, with her entire body covered because she is a woman; Daniels had to cobble together funds from all sorts of unlikely people and places to get his film made and distributed — but none has a narrative as compelling as Cameron’s. He spent a lifetime dreaming up his film; helped invent the complex technology necessary to fully realize his dream; convinced a major studio to give him an unprecedented amount of money and resources to implement the technology; spent four years at work on the film; and earned rave reviews and unprecedented box-office numbers for his efforts. While Bigelow’s smaller-scale film is also extraordinary and a strong threat to win, I suspect that fellow directors, as much as anyone, will appreciate and want to recognize Cameron and the Odyssian journey that was the making of “Avatar.”

Photo: James Cameron on the set of “Avatar.” Credit: 20th Century Fox.

RELATED READING: Sasha Stone of AwardsDaily.com has composed an in-depth primer for the DGA Awards in which she identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each of this year’s nominees. She projects a Bigelow win.