The Die is Cast: Inarritu wins DGA

The Directors Guild of America has spoken, naming Alejandro G. Innaritu's Birdman the best directed film of 2014, echoing the preference of both the Producers and Screen Actors Guilds.

That's the game, right? The only movie to collect that triumvirate of awards and not win Best Picture was Apollo 13. I suppose some could argue that with Oscar voting having just opened and with well over a week before the polls close, there's enough time for a backlash to take effect. However, backlash is always more of a media reaction to the awards race, and doesn't really reflect any shifting opinions within the industry. If Birdman somehow loses Best Picture, and it might, it'll be because some other option was always more popular within the Academy the whole time, not because voters suddenly decide they dislike it on account of its awards success thus far.

I, for one, can't complain about this. Birdman is one of the year's best, and what a refreshing change of pace it'll be to see a comedy win the Academy's top honour.

But that still doesn't quite settle things in Best Director...

One Category at a Time: Documentary

Since the Academy opened up voting in Best Documentary Feature to the entire membership two years ago, the results of that change have been immediately transparent. In the past, when only the small turnout of members at official screenings could cast a ballot, the winning documentary would usually be one that tackles a "serious" subject. But with the first two winners under this new regime being relatively lightweight music docs (Searching for Sugar Man and 20 Feet from Stardom), it seems to suggest that this category will now always lean the way of populist crowdpleasers so long as every Academy member has a say.

Of course, there's no guarantee that such an audience hit is going to be nominated every single year, just as there's no guarantee that the buzziest title will be one dealing with feathery subject matter. You need look no further than this year's frontrunner for proof that doc-lovers can still flock to movies that bill themselves as Important with a capital 'I'.

Review - Citizenfour

We meet our hero holed up in the Mira Hotel, in Hong Kong. At first glance he seems an unlikely hero; Gaunt, unimposing, wearing a nervous smile that threatens to trivialize what he has to say. Until then, he was only known to documentarian Laura Poitras by his online alias, 'citizenfour'. Within a week his true moniker, Edward Snowden, would become a household name, and the revelations he brought to light in that hotel room in the summer of 2013 continue to reverberate through the public consciousness.

He is the central figure of Poitras' much-talked-about documentary Citizenfour, her first-hand account of Snowden -- then a 29 year old data analyst with the National Security Agency -- exposing the defamed intelligence service for spying on millions of Americans, and then some. His whistleblowing has since caused him to take political asylum in Russia where he remains to this day, knowing well that he would be arrested on sight should he ever again set foot in the United States.