Talk:Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film

RfC: Indication of other awards

Should we host indicators of prominent awards in articles about other awards, in cases where the two awards are not mentioned by a reliable source listing both? For instance, indicating Academy Awards in other film awards articles, or indicating Emmy Awards in other television awards articles, or indicating Tony Awards in other theatre awards articles. Of course, the two awards would always be supported by two separate groups of sources – the combining of the two awards is the question here. Binksternet (talk) 22:12, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Example:

• ‡ – indicates a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director.
• Sam Mendes ‡ – 1917

Straw poll

• No. I think the practice of listing another award on a particular awards page is WP:OFFTOPIC and irrelevant. Binksternet (talk) 22:12, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
• Yes, at least for this article. This is the most notable of the DGA awards precisely because it is a major Oscar precursor, usually awarded a few weeks before the big award. Indeed, the fact these indicators convey -- the strong (though imperfect) correlation between this award, Best Director, and Best Picture -- is part and parcel of its notability, and thus not WP:OFFTOPIC. (As compared to, say, the Palme d'Or article where it could arguably be off-topic.) As these are facts that leave the conclusion to the reader, it does not violate WP:SYNTH as it does not create a new thesis from those facts, the heart of SYNTH. Arguably the Predicting Oscar’s Outcome section could violate SYNTH as a thesis without adequate external references, but merely pointing out a strong correlation is not SYNTH. Read WP:NOTSYNTH, especially WP:NOTSYNTH#SYNTH is not summary. --RBBrittain (talk) 00:25, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

I now see where the Palme d'Or article has a footnote marking the three winners of that award to also win the Academy Award for Best Picture. However, that particular correlation has a notability of its own as both the Palme d'Or and the Best Picture Oscar are "best film" awards. In that case, the lack of correlation suggests (but does not state, thus no thesis) that Cannes and the Academy have vastly different views on what a "best film" should be. As such, it further supports my position that listing a relevant correlation is neither OFFTOPIC nor SYNTH. (OTOH, listing the correlation between this award and the Palme d'Or probably would be off-topic.) --RBBrittain (talk) 00:34, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

Across many articles, I have been removing the characters †, ‡ and § which indicated other award nominations and wins. My reasoning was that the indicators were a violation of WP:SYNTH. RBBrittain reverted this, pointing to WP:NOTSYNTH. I still think it is introducing a new idea, the new thesis that a film won both awards and that the two awards are relevant to each other. If we look at sources for each award, only very rarely do they talk about how the two awards are relevant to each other. The synthesis lies in leading the reader to think they are relevant to each other. Binksternet (talk) 22:12, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Surely this is missing the context of the Predicting Oscar’s Outcome section of the article. The only given source for this section does not seem to verify anything claimed, but I imagine reliable sources do exist documenting a supposed pattern. If this award is a lesser-known one often discussed in the context of predicting the Oscars, then the footnotes are appropriate. If not, get rid of both that section and the footnotes. In other cases, I agree that in general such footnotes are not appropriate—though I don't agree that it violates SYNTH, only that it's off-topic. — Bilorv (talk) 22:35, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

The underlying articles themselves are reliable sources for the correlation between this award, Best Director & Best Picture. The "Predicting Oscar's Outcome" section may border on original research, but 67 of the 72 films whose directors have won the DGA over the last 71 years (both 1948 & 1949 winners competed as 1949 films at the Oscars) have gone on to win either Best Director or Best Picture; 50 of them have won both. (1917 was only the fifth DGA-winning film that failed to win either Oscar, joining The Lion in Winter, The Color Purple, Apollo 13 & Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; of those five film's directors only Anthony Harvey never won an Oscar, with Steven Spielberg & Ang Lee each winning Best Director twice since their snubs.) And only once in those 71 years have the DGA, Best Director & Best Picture gone to three different films, in 2000 (DGA to Lee for CTHD; Best Director to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic; Best Picture to Ridley Scott's Gladiator). Thus, even after considering (a) the 1949 & 1950 DGAs were awarded after the Oscars and (b) the connection has weakened in the last decade or so since Best Picture went to more than five nominees, the correlation between the awards alone suggests the strength of the DGAs in predicting the traditional "top two" Oscars for far longer than the PGA Awards (only since 1989), the SAG Awards (only since 1995), and the WGA Awards (also began in 1948-49 but its categories did not fully mirror the Oscars until 1984), not to mention the other guilds. --RBBrittain (talk) 15:48, 16 December 2020 (UTC)