Scorcese wins Directors Guild award

LOS ANGELES – Martin Scorsese won the top honor Saturday from the Directors Guild of America for his mob saga “The Departed,” moving him a step closer to finally receiving Hollywood’s biggest filmmaking prize at the Academy Awards.

Scorsese was chosen as filmmaker of the year by his peers, his first win at the guild awards after six previous nominations. The guild winner usually goes on to win the best-director Oscar.

The self-deprecating Scorsese said he was pleased at the apparent success of the film but that he only became convinced it was doing well when the studio called with box-office revenues from the first couple of weekends.

“If you look at the graph at the spikes at where the picture is doing really great figures, it’s like looking at a veritable map of the American underworld,” such as Boca Raton, Fla., Scorsese said. “Vegas, forget about it, it was amazing.”

“The Departed” has become Scorsese’s biggest commercial hit, and critics praised it as a welcome return to the vivid, bloody crime genre whose modern conventions the director helped pioneer in such films as “Taxi Driver” and “Goodfellas.”

Walter Hill won the guild’s directing honor for TV movies for the Western “Broken Trail.”

Other TV winners included Richard Shepard for comedy directing on the pilot episode of “Ugly Betty,” Jon Cassar for drama directing for an episode of “24,” and “Chicago” filmmaker Rob Marshall for musical variety directing for “Tony Bennett: An American Classic.”