The Directors Guild of America has blown off three directors who delivered two superb films — An Education‘s Lone Scherfig and A Serious Man‘s Joel and Ethan Coen — while nominating the director of a clearly divisive and problematic film — Precious helmer Lee Daniels — in large part (let’s be honest) because boomer-aged liberals in the DGA needed to put the west-of-Fairfax white-guilt factor to bed.

Are you going to stand there and look me in the eye and tell me Precious was a better directed film than An Education or A Serious Man? Don’t even reply because we know the answer and I don’t want to hear any bullshit equivocations.

I’m not totally dismissing Precious — it’s a moving, semi-decent film in portions — but I would strenuously argue that Tom Ford‘s A Single Man is a much more moving and accomplished work, and is surely more of a carefully finessed film from a visual-aesthetic viewpoint. A Single Man is Vanity Fair-level and Precious is Star magazine. Those red-carpet fantasy sequences with Gabby? I want to vomit.

The Daniels nomination is a political celebration of mediocrity by way of racial point-spreading. Nominate Daniels and you’re good to go. Don’t nominate Daniels and the word might get around that you’re a bit of a closet racist. Why risk it?

DGA members also nominated Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, James Cameron for Avatar, Jason Reitman for Up in the Air and Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds for its top feature award.