The race to win best picture at the Academy Awards remained the most volatile in years after Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won the top prize at the Directors Guild of America Awards for The Revenant in Los Angeles.
The Mexican filmmaker won the same award for Birdman last year on the way to winning best picture and director at the Oscars.
At a Hollywood awards season where the accolades have been spread around like prizes at a children's birthday party - The Big Short won at the Producers Guild Awards, Spotlight at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and Mad Max: Fury Road at numerous critics and technical awards - The Revenant claimed one of the key lead-ups to the Oscars on February 28.
It was not just a boost for the epic western's chances of winning best picture; it established Inarritu as favourite to win best director for the second consecutive year.
According to Variety, only 14 times in 66 years has the DGA winner not gone on to win best picture at the Oscars.
It has happened three times since the turn of the century, however - for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain and Gravity.
Given Alfonso Cuaron won best director for Gravity two years ago, it could be the third consecutive Oscars win for a Mexican director.
After bringing the film's cast and crew on stage at the DGA Awards, Inarritu said he did not expect to win and had not prepared a speech.
"I'm like a deer with flash and I'm paralysed," he said before thanking his wife and a daughter who is in Australia and mentioning meeting more than 120 Mexicans working in the kitchen serving hot food for the awards.
"That was the best party I had," he said. "Viva Mexico. That's not the people Donald Trump has described at all, let me tell you."
Inarritu beat George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road) Tom McCarthy (Spotlight), Adam McKay (The Big Short) and Ridley Scott (The Martian).
All bar Scott are nominated for best director at the Oscars, alongside Lenny Abrahamson (Room).
Speaking to the media after his win, Inarritu spoke forcefully about the hot topic since the Oscar nominations were announced - diversity.
"The power of this country comes from diversity," he said, as reported by Deadline Hollywood. "My country is a mixed-race country and comes mostly from Spanish.
"This country was impregnated by so many different races and the power of it relies on that. To try to build a wall and stop that is exactly to betray the power of this country, what has been absolutely outstanding, admirable and unique in the United States.
"It has brought so much incredible vital power of existence and ideas. To suddenly try to stop that by walls and big enemies not human beings. The enemy is stressed by ideology and to stop the flow of this incredible society built of so many people thinking and looking differently, it exactly betrays the foundation of this country.
"It's a cultural problem, not the problem of the Academy. It has to change."
Australian actor-writer-director Joel Edgerton was nominated for best first-time feature for the quietly charged thriller The Gift but the DGA award went to Alex Garland for sci-fi film Ex Machina.
David Nutter won the drama series award for Game of Thrones, while Dee Rees collected the TV movie-minis-eries award for Bessie, a bio-pic of pioneering blues singer Bessie Smith, while Matthew Heineman won the documentary award for Cartel Land, about the Mexican drug war.
