DGA Award highlights

 

Nobody pulled a faux modest stutter-step speech like Julian Schnabel did last year, causing no one to counter with a drunken "Get on with it!" a la Sean Young.

Doesn't mean there weren't a few highlights at the DGA Awards on Saturday night. Among them:

"The Wire" and director Dan Attias finally got some awards love for the show's final season, specifically the "Transitions" episode where Proposition Joe took a bullet to the brain. Not that he's been keeping track or anything, but Attias couldn't help but notice that the critically beloved HBO show "has been inexplicably ignored by the TV academy and all the major guilds until tonight."

Oh, snap.

Backstage, Attias said he didn't know if the now-ended drama series was too complicated to snag awards. "We never pandered to viewers," he said. "We made it novelistic to those who committed the time."

The show won out over Emmy and Golden Globe darling "Mad Men," ABC's "Lost" and HBO's "In Treatment."

A loving tribute to legendary film critic Roger Ebert -- with two standing ovations -- who received an honorary life membership to the DGA. "You're one of us now," Oliver Stone said via taped message. And from Clint Eastwood: "Welcome to the club."

From Ebert's speech, delivered by his wife, Chaz: 

"We are born into a box of space and time, and the movies come closer than any other art form in giving us the experience of walking in someone else's shoes. They allow us an opportunity to experience what it would be like to live within another gender, race, religion, nationality or period of time. They expand us, they improve us, and sometimes they ennoble us."

And a win for "The Office" and Paul Feig in an awards season sea of "30 Rock" kudos. Feig, recognized for the cringe-inducing and high-larious "Dinner Party" episode, chatted backstage about being a workhorse of the NBC schedule, with Sunday night's one-hour post-Super Bowl slot and lots of supersizing.

"We're doing 29 episodes this season, which is amazing. That's like 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' " Feig said of the old-school way of churning out lots of episodes. "We feel like we're very much in the zone."

We couldn't agree more.

Go here for more DGA details and a complete list of winners.