Wow, what’s with all the big announcements today? Space yourselves out, folks.
Anyway, this is one bit of news I’m very happy to pass on. 83 year-old filmmaker and producer Norman Jewison has been named the next recipient of the Directors Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He will accept the honor at the DGA’s awards ceremony on 30 January.
Jewison is the kind of artist for whom career achievement awards were invented — accomplished, versatile and hard-working across five decades in cinema, he’s rarely had the spotlight to himself. This despite having directed a Best Picture Oscar winner (“In the Heat of the Night,” 1967) and having amassed a career total of seven Oscar nods for such films as “Moonstruck,” “A Soldier’s Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.”
The Academy paid their respects to Jewison in 1999, with an Irving G. Thalberg Award, so the DGA (who have nominated him thrice themselves) is playing catch-up here. Nice to see. Press release excerpt after the cut.