HE is taking exception to the Directors Guild of America having included Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington‘s Restrepo among its 2010 nominees, but not Amir Bar Lev‘s far superior The Tillman Story. The DGA also nominated Last Train Home, Inside Job, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Waiting for Superman.

I wrote the following about Restrepo last June in a piece called “Afghanistan Bananastan“:

“The kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — ‘get it done,’ ‘fill up more sandbags,’ ‘ours not to reason why’ and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?”