Coppola, Costner, Scorsese in DGA Showdown : Movies: Levinson and Tornatore are also nominated for the film directors’ Achievement Award. Scorsese and his ‘GoodFellas’ have won out in other heats.

It’s not the first, and it likely won’t be the last time that Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Costner and Martin Scorsese will meet in competition this year. The three directors were among five nominated Wednesday for the annual Directors Guild of America Achievement Award for motion pictures.

Coppola was nominated for “The Godfather Part III,” Costner for “Dances With Wolves” and Scorsese for “GoodFellas.” They were joined in the competition by Barry Levinson (winner of the prize for 1988’s “Rain Man”) for directing “Avalon,” and by Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of “Cinema Paradiso,” the Italian film that won the 1989 Oscar for best foreign-language film. Tornatore is eligible for this year’s guild award because his film was released in the United States in 1990.

Nominations by the guild’s 9,300 film and television members often are a preview of the Oscar race for the best director. On only three occasions in the guild’s 43-year history of awards have its choices differed from the winner of the best director Oscar given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

As a result, most Hollywood insiders are betting that Coppola, Costner and Scorsese will meet again when Oscar nominations are announced Feb. 13.

So far, it’s been Scorsese who has cleaned up in awards for best direction and best picture among the Los Angeles, New York and national critics associations for his gangland drama “GoodFellas.” Scorsese has been nominated twice by the guild--for the 1980 film “Raging Bull” and the 1976 film “Taxi Driver”--but never won.

It was first-time director Costner who beat out Coppola, Scorsese and others when his American Western, “Dances With Wolves,” won Golden Globe prizes Jan. 19 for best direction and best picture, awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.

In all the competitions to date, Scorsese and Costner have faced Coppola, the highly regarded director whose tumultuous career and personal finances resemble a roller coaster ride of artistic successes and flops. Coppola’s nomination for “Godfather III” is the San Francisco-based director’s fifth time as a guild nominee. He has collected the directors’ guild prize twice, for his “The Godfather” in 1972 and “The Godfather Part II” in 1974 (for which he also won the Oscar).

In its nominations, the guild ignored many of the directors of 1990’s biggest box-office hits and concentrated on films that were released at the end of the year. Only “Cinema Paradiso,” a valentine to the love of film that became an unusually popular foreign-language film, was an early 1990 release.

Among the directors whom some insiders anticipated might have been guild nominees were perennial nominee Woody Allen for “Alice,” Penny Marshall for “Awakenings” and Barbet Schroeder, whose “Reversal of Fortune” was widely endorsed by critics.

Film and television prizes will be announced March 16 at a dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The guild’s television nominations are expected in early February.