One Battle After Another director Paul Thomas Anderson has won the DGA Awards‘ top prize — Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film — which marks a highly significant Oscar predictor.
“It’s an honor, President Nolan,” he told DGA president Christopher Nolan, to loud laughter from the audience Saturday at the Beverly Hilton.
This was Anderson’s third DGA nomination. Most recently, he was nominated for Licorice Pizza in 2021 and, before that, for There Will Be Blood in 2007.
Ever since the first DGA Awards ceremony in 1948, the winner of its Theatrical Feature Award has predicted the Best Director Oscar winner in all but eight instances. This makes the DGA Awards a major bellwether for Oscar. Add to that, the DGA Theatrical Feature win and Oscars Best Director has matched every year for the past five.
Anderson referenced Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, saying, “It’s like we’re all here for a reason, some cosmic thing brought us to this room, and it was that call to the mountain. It’s that feeling that we all love making sh*t and we need to do it. We need to do it or it’s an addiction, I’m not quite sure.”
Paul Thomas Anderson and team accept the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film for ‘One Battle After Another’ on Saturday at the DGA Awards
Kevin Winter/Getty Images for DGA
On a more somber note, Anderson paid tribute to his close friend, producer and longtime first AD Adam Somner, who died in 2024 from thyroid cancer.
“Obviously we are up here, minus one,” Anderson said. “A lot of people in this room know our hero, our man, Adam Somner. Steven [Spielberg] knows him. His wife Carmen [Ruiz de Huidobro] is here.”
Anderson continued, “He took this work so seriously, and did not take himself seriously at all. And that was a great gift… He made us feel safe. Think about this work that we do, how dangerous it can be, really dangerous. And to be to get through a film and no one get hurt, be safe, have an amazing experience is because of a great AD, and he was the best.”
Choking up a little, Anderson went on, “I wish everyone in this room the love that I had with him, may you be blessed with a relationship that I had with him, and if you have one already, hold them close, remind them that you love them. He would love this. He’d be so f*cking happy.”
Adam Somner
Getty Images
Last year, the big DGA win went to Anora’s Sean Baker, who went on to win the Directing Oscar and the film took Best Picture. Two years ago, Christopher Nolan won at the DGAs ahead of picking up Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for Oppenheimer.
Other nominees in this same DGA category tonight Ryan Coogler for Sinners, Chloé Zhao for Hamnet, Guillermo del Toro for Frankenstein and Josh Safdie for Marty Supreme.
Coogler is only the fifth Black director ever to be recognized in this DGA Awards category. The last was Spike Lee for BlacKkKlansman in 2018. But no Black filmmaker has ever won this top DGA prize.
Zhao won this DGA top honor in 2021 for Nomadland (which also earned Best Picture and Best Director at Oscar) and now, with this Hamnet nomination, she joins Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion and Greta Gerwig as the only women to earn multiple DGA nominations.
In 2018, Del Toro won the DGA top film prize for The Shape of Water, while this was Safdie’s first DGA nomination.
