DGA Nominations Further Muddle Oscar Race : Movies: Directors Guild remembers spring/summer films for its top award but forgets Spike Lee and Paul Mazursky.

The ad line that Universal Pictures has been using in its Oscar campaign for Phil Alden Robinson’s “Field of Dreams,” a fantasy baseball-theme picture released last spring, is “Remember the feeling.” Enough members of the Directors Guild of America remembered to give Robinson the feeling of being a nominee for the DGA’s 1989 best-director award.

Enough members also remembered “Dead Poets Society” and “When Harry Met Sally,” two early summer releases, to put their directors--Peter Weir and Rob Reiner--on a list that also included previous DGA winners Woody Allen (“Crimes and Misdemeanors”) and Oliver Stone (“Born on the Fourth of July”).

Weir was a previous DGA nominee in 1985 for “Witness.” Reiner was nominated for the 1986 “Stand By Me.” Allen won the award in 1977 for “Annie Hall” and was a subsequent nominee for both “Manhattan” in 1979 and “Hannah and Her Sisters” in 1986. Stone won in 1987 for “Platoon.”

The DGA, the bulk of whose 9,000 members are not feature-film directors, has had a spotty record of presaging the full list of nominations made by the directors branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But it has been nearly perfect in aligning its winner with the eventual Oscar winner. Only three times in the 41-year history of the DGA awards has the guild’s winner not gone on to win the Academy Award as well.

For weeks, veteran Oscar watchers have been calling this one of the most wide-open races in years, and Tuesday’s announcement, made by 1988 winner Barry Levinson (“Rain Man”), did little to put it into focus. Previously honored directors Spike Lee (winner of the L.A. critics’ best-director award for “Do the Right Thing”), Paul Mazursky (the New York winner for “Enemies, a Love Story”), Kenneth Branagh (the National Board of Review’s pick for “Henry V”), and Gus Van Sant (“Drugstore Cowboy,” selected by the National Society of Film Critics) were all left off the DGA list.

A number of other directors of well-reviewed films who were overlooked by the DGA (“Driving Miss Daisy’s” Bruce Beresford, “The War of the Roses” ’ Danny DeVito, “Glory’s” Ed Zwick, “sex, lies, and videotape’s” Steven Soderbergh, “Music Box’s” Costa-Gavras) are still in the running for Oscars.

Of this year’s DGA slate, only Oliver Stone seems certain to be among the academy’s best-director nominees. Oscar nominations will be announced Feb. 14; balloting closes Friday.

In the meantime, the DGA nominations underscore the changing release patterns of major studios and undermine the conventional wisdom that films released before the fall are forgotten by winter.

“Field of Dreams,” the story of a corn farmer who builds a baseball field for his father’s post-World War I idols, then watches the flanneled ghosts play ball, opened in March, a month that had traditionally been better for teen-age high-jinks movies than for those aimed at adults. It played all the way through the most competitive summer in history and grossed more than $62 million.

The movie seemed to strike a nerve with audiences, especially men tweaked by memories of their own relationships with their fathers, and enjoyed the kind of word-of-mouth that made such films as “Chariots of Fire” and “Peggy Sue Got Married” easy to remember at awards time.

“Dead Poets Society” fits the same mold. The movie, about a free-spirited English teacher at a conservative prep school, was a risky summer entry by Disney’s Touchstone division but easily held its own and has grossed more than $94 million. The DGA nomination bodes well for both Weir and the film’s star, Robin Williams, in the Oscar race.

Rob Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally,” a romantic comedy about a couple who seem to prove the notion that friendships between men and women are sooner or later subverted by sexual attraction, was an instant box-office hit, propelled by the most talked-about scene of the year (Meg Ryan’s faked orgasm in Katz Deli) and has taken in $92 million.

Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” divided critics and audiences but found enough fans within the DGA. A funny-sad meditation on the relativity of sin in God’s eyes, it has faced the usual resistance from moviegoers to Allen films--particularly those that veer into the epistemological zone. “Crimes and Misdemeanors” has grossed just $17 million and was pretty much ignored by critics groups.

Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July,” adapted from the autobiography of Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, is on a roll at the box office (it grossed more than $30 million during its first month in release) and seems the odds-on favorite to dominate the Oscars. Stone is that rare film maker who, in one of Hollywood’s most timid eras, has managed to both make films with heavy social themes and turn studio executives lightheaded with their box-office success.

The DGA’s nominations figure to be more populist than the academy, which in turn figures to be more populist than critics. There are 270 feature-film directors in the academy’s directors branch, while the DGA membership includes directors of film and TV dramas and their assistants, directors of TV news and sports programs, unit production managers and stage production managers.

The DGA will announce its nominees in TV categories next week. All 9,000 members vote on the final ballot and the winners will be announced by Levinson at the guild’s annual dinner March 10 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills.