This coming awards season just got a little more complicated.
The studio is already apparently gearing up for a big campaign for the long-awaited Denis Villeneuve adaptation of Dune, with a Venice premiere secured before its October 22 release, and has other potential awards contenders on the calendar including the Will Smith vehicle King Richard and Clint Eastwood’s latest, Cry Macho.
This shift may not, conversely, dramatically affect streamers, which even last season mostly maintained a practice of releasing Oscar-nominated films exclusively in theaters first.
This year, four of the DGA’s five best-director nominees went on to equivalent Oscar nominations, and all five of the represented films—including Aaron Sorkin’s Chicago 7, which the Academy’s directing branch snubbed—were nominated for the best-picture Oscar.
Like next year’s Oscars, the 2022 DGA Awards will consider films released between March 1 and December 31, 2021—a shortened window due to the expansion in eligibility for this year’s awards.
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