LOS ANGELES, Jan 10, (Agencies): Filmmakers Woody Allen, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne and France’s Michel Hazanavicius were nominated for Directors Guild film awards on Monday — a honor that is often a key indicator of Oscar success.
Hazanavicius, 44, scored his first Directors Guild of America (DGA) nomination for his black and white silent movie about old Hollywood, “The Artist”, which has wowed critics since its premier at the Cannes film festival in May.
The French director joined US veterans Scorsese and Allen, who were nominated for their work on 3D family film “Hugo” and comedy “Midnight in Paris,” respectively.
Fincher scored his third DGA nomination for the US version of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s thriller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, while Payne notched up his second nod for dysfunctional family drama “The Descendants” starring George Clooney.
The DGA has a strong track record of foreshadowing the eventual winner of the best director Oscar, and the Academy Award for best movie also goes to the winner of best director. Since 1948, there are only six occasions when the DGA award winner has not gone on to win the corresponding Academy Award. The DGA hands out its award at ceremony in Los Angeles on Jan 28 in Hollywood, and it will be hosted this year by former “Frasier” star Kelsey Grammer.


“The Adventures of Tintin” and “Boardwalk Empire” were the leaders in the film and television categories for the 10th annual Visual Effects Society Awards, the VES announced early Monday.
The VES honored visual effects work in 11 different feature film categories and a dozen other categories honoring television, commercials, special venues and video games. The nominees were chosen on Saturday by VES members who attended special screenings in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney, Vancouver and Wellington, New Zealand.

Multiple
Steven Spielberg’s “Tintin” received six nominations in the four categories devoted to animated film, with three of the five noms in the Outstanding Created Environment in an Animated Motion Picture category.
The live-action films “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” received five nominations each, but neither captured multiple nominations in any category.
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “Rango” each received four, while “Hugo” and “Puss in Boots” received three.
In Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture, the category with by far the biggest overlap between VES nominees and Oscar VFX nominees, the contenders are “Harry Potter,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Transformers,” “Captain America: The First Avenger” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.”
All five are included in the 10 films still in the running for Oscar nominations.
In the television categories, “Boardwalk Empire” received four nominations to three for “Game of Thrones.”
The VES Awards will take place on Feb 7 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and will air on the ReelzChannel. Comics icon Stan Lee will receive the VES 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award, and visual effect pioneer Douglas Trumbull will receive the Georges Mlies Award.


Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut about the Bosnian war and a drama made by and starring her ex-husband Billy Bob Thornton will feature at the Berlin film festival next month, organisers said Monday.
Jolie will present her harrowing drama “In the Land of Blood and Honey” out of competition after winning praise in Bosnia for its unflinching take on the brutal 1992-1995 conflict, filmed in local languages with a home-grown cast.

Premiere
It will screen on the opening weekend of the February 9-19 event, organisers said in a statement. Thornton, who won a screenwriting Oscar for his own first outing as a feature film director, 1996’s “Sling Blade”, will premiere his latest feature “Jayne Mansfield’s Car” in the competition for the Golden Bear top prize.
The Russian-US co-production, set in the 1960s, is about two clashing families and stars Robert Duvall and Kevin Bacon as well as Thornton, whom Jolie divorced in 2003 after three scandal-tinged years of marriage.
Other entries unveiled Monday include director Alain Gomis’s French-Senegalese production “Aujourd’hui” (Today), German art-house favourite Christian Petzold’s “Barbara” and Italian brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani with “Caesar Must Die”.
German-Norwegian picture “Gnade” (Mercy) by Matthias Glasner and Franco-Swiss drama “Sister” by Ursula Meier starring Lea Seydoux from Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and Gillian Anderson will also vie for the Golden Bear.
Rounding out the list were German-Greek production “Meteora” about a monk led into temptation by a nun, Portuguese drama “Tabu”, Hungarian feature “Just the Wind” and “Home for the Weekend” by German auteur Hans-Christian Schmid.


“Vertigo” leading lady Kim Novak isn’t keeping quiet about her disdain for “The Artist.” The 78-year-old actress said in a statement released by her manager Monday that she feels violated because music from the Alfred Hitchcock film is used in the French black-and-white homage to the silent-film era. Novak said “The Artist” filmmakers had no reason “to depend on Bernard Herrmann’s score from ‘Vertigo’ to provide more drama.”
Emotions
“My body of work has been violated by ‘The Artist,’” Novak said. “This film took the love theme music from ‘Vertigo’ and used the emotions it engenders as its own. Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart can’t speak for themselves, but I can. It was our work that unconsciously or consciously evoked the memories and feelings to the audience that were used for the climax of ‘The Artist.’”
Novak, who played the dual role of both a suicidal trophy wife of a rich San Franciscan and a morose working girl opposite Stewart in in the 1958 thriller directed by Hitchcock, said that even though Herrmann was given “a small credit at the end,” she believed “this kind of filmmaking trick to be cheating.”