Tom Hooper gets DGA grand prize for The King's Speech

Tom Hooper (centre) directing Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth on set of The King's Speech

Tom Hooper received his first big price last night for his new sensational film The King's Speech. The English director won the most anticipated award at the 63rd Annual Directors Guild of America Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film.

This victory makes Hooper the front-runner to win the Oscar for Best Director at the end of February. In the history of the Academy Awards, the winners of the DGA Award and the Oscar for Best Director have been different only six times. Last time this happened in 2003 when Rob Marshall won the DGA Award for Chicago but lost the Oscar to Roman Polanski for The Pianist.


This was Hooper's first DGA nomination for a feature film. He won against two other first time DGA nominees, Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan and David O. Russel for The Fighter. However, there were also two previous nominees competing for the award this year as well. Christopher Nolan was nominated for the third time for Inception after having previously been in the running for his work on Memento (2002) and The Dark Knight (2009). For the fifth nominee in the Feature Film category, David Fincher, this was the second nomination in the same category. He was also nominated in 2009 for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.