Brow Beat

Iñárritu’s DGA Award for The Revenant Is a Historic Win

Alejandro G. Iñárritu at the Director Guild Awards on February 6, 2016.

Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images

Alejandro González Iñárritu won big at Saturday night’s Directors Guild of America awards ceremony: The director, who just last year took home the top prize for Birdman, became the first filmmaker in history to win back-to-back Feature Film awards when he also won for The Revenant. In the 66 year history of the Oscars, only 14 films have failed to take home Best Picture after winning the feature prize at the DGA.

Iñárritu joins a very small but notable group of filmmakers to have won the award twice, including Clint Eastwood, Ang Lee, and Frances Ford Coppola. He is, however, the first and only director to win twice successively.

If Iñárritu manages the coup of winning two consecutive Oscars—for either Best Director or Best Picture—it would be a historic victory in a year of controversy. Iñárritu is one of only two Mexican filmmakers to have won an Academy Award, and the only one to have won Best Picture. Now, come Oscar night, Iñárritu’s film about white frontiersmen may prove to be the Academy’s only hope for color.

Read the full list of DGA winners here.