Martin Scorsese won the top honour from the Directors Guild of America for his mob saga The Departed, moving him a step closer to finally receiving Hollywood’s biggest filmmaking prize at the Academy Awards.Scorsese was chosen as filmmaker of the year by his peers on Saturday, his first win at the guild awards after six previous nominations. The guild winner usually goes on to win the best-director Oscar.The self-deprecating Scorsese said he was pleased at the apparent success of the film but that he only became convinced it was doing well when the studio called with box-office revenues from the first couple of weekends.“If you look at the graph at the spikes at where the picture is doing really great figures, it’s like looking at a veritable map of the American underworld,” such as Boca Raton, Florida, Scorsese said. Adapted from the Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs, The Departed stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a cop who is undercover in a Boston crime outfit, Matt Damon as a mob mole who has infiltrated the police, and Jack Nicholson as the merciless gang leader pulling everyone’s strings.It has become Scorsese’s biggest commercial hit, and critics praised it as a welcome return to the vivid, bloody crime genre whose modern conventions the director helped pioneer in such films as Taxi Driver and Goodfellas.“I started watching his work when I was 15 years old,” said DiCaprio, who has starred in Scorsese’s last three films and introduced the director to the guild audience earlier in the evening. “It was like entering a seamless cinematic reality.”The Departed marked Scorsese’s sixth nomination for best director at the Academy Awards. A sixth loss at the Oscars would put Scorsese in the record books as the filmmaker with the most nominations without winning. But many awards watchers feel this is Scorsese’s year, labeling him the front-runner for the February 25 Oscars. A Directors Guild win helps give him the inside track.The other guild nominees were Bill Condon for the musical Dreamgirls, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris for the road-trip tale Little Miss Sunshine, Stephen Frears for the British palace saga The Queen and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for the multinational ensemble drama Babel.The other Oscar nominations went to Clint Eastwood for the World War II epic Letters From Iwo Jima and Paul Greengrass for the September 11 docudrama United 93.Scorsese was coy backstage when asked if it was his year to win at the Oscars. “I don’t know. It’s good to have a nomination, especially for this picture.” -DAVID GERMAIN
