Steve McQueen has gained his first directors guild nomination for his grim historic saga 12 Years a Slave, securing the British director’s place as a top contender for an Academy Award.
Other first-time nominees were Alfonso Cuaron for his lost-in-space odyssey Gravity, and Paul Greengrass for his Somali pirate thriller Captain Phillips.
Past nominee David O. Russell received a bid for his con-artist tale American Hustle. He was nominated in 2010 for his boxing drama The Fighter.
Martin Scorsese earned his 11th nomination for his high-finance extravaganza, The Wolf of Wall Street. Scorsese won a Directors Guild of America award in 2006 for the crime tale The Departed and again in 2010 for his work on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.
Scorsese was honoured with the DGA lifetime achievement award in 2003.
If McQueen wins this year for 12 Years a Slave, he would become the first black director to earn the guild’s feature film accolade.
”To be included in such an amazing group of filmmakers and also to be honored by my peers makes me feel very humble and proud,” he said in a statement.
John Singleton was the first black director to be nominated for the award for Boyz n the Hood in 1991, and Lee Daniels was nominated in 2009 for Precious.
In 2013, the guild elected TV director Paris Barclay as its first African-American, openly gay president.
