After the Critic's Choice, People's Choice and the Golden Globe Awards, Hollywood's award season is climaxing towards the final race for the finish and for the gold. But before the Academy Awards comes the Director's Guild Awards.

This year's Director's Guild Awards gave Clint Eastwood top medals for his boxing champ movie, Million Dollar Baby. Starting off by giving thanks to his wife and fellow actors, Eastwood's acceptance speech has a high chance of being performed once more during this award season as the DGA awards have become known to be quite an accurate marker of the Oscars®.

Only six times has the DGA award recipient for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film failed to grasp the Academy Award Oscar® for Best Director as well, which means the stars are lined in Eastwood's favor in comparison to his biggest contender, Martin Scorsese, who received a lifetime achievement honor from the guild two years ago. Scorsese, a four- time Academy Award nominee for Best Director but never a winner at the Oscars® , is hailed the sentimental favorite for his film, The Aviator, which received the Golden Globe for Best Drama, but broke even with Eastwood's Globe win for Best Director. Eastwood's win with the DGA puts him further as the leading directorial champ in this year's highly competitive filmmaking war, leaving the Oscars® as the last remaining battle between the two successful directors as both movies are nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.

Stars spotted on the red carpet included Aviator stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett, Ray stars Jamie Foxx, Regina King and Kerry Washington, presenters Mischa Barton, Teri Hatcher, Edward James Olmos, Halle Barry, and DGA Lifetime Achievement Award winner Steven Spielberg, among many others.

Showing that the DGA awards are much more down to earth than any other award show in Hollywood, Sideways star Thomas Haden Church was wearing a dapper suit with his favorite mud-stained work boots on plucked right out of his Texas ranch. "They keep me grounded," explained the nominee for Best Supporting Actor. Church said not to fret because he won't be sporting this same outfit twice at the Academy Awards. Hilary Swank, now a Calvin Klein lingerie spokes model, did reveal that she would be wearing one of the designers gowns to the Oscars®.

"I'm a Calvin Klein girl right now," she said.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see if the DGA's forecast for Million Dollar Baby will make a repeat win at the Oscars®--or if the sentimental favorite Scorsese or perhaps another underdog director such as Ray's Taylor Hackford will be able to give Eastwood's film a surprise knockout.