Mitchell, who turns 50 this September, has been hailed as the closest thing British theatre has to a genuine auteur: a director with a strong, uncompromising vision of how theatre should be.
Spielberg's underlings have yet to be announced but you can expect the usual quota of one huge Hollywood star, one auteur only the most cinephilic have heard of and at least two women.
It is a joy to see The Grand Budapest Hotel do so well in the Globes, with nominations for best comedy/musical, best actor for Ralph Fiennes and best director for that remarkable and singular auteur, Wes Anderson.
But today is a new day, and Amazon has announced in a press release that the famed auteur and director of Annie Hall, Manhattan and Scoop will be making an original program for the Amazon Prime Instant Video streaming service.
To make things even more unlikely, it's been written and produced by Ben Jacobs (AKA experimental pop auteur Max Tundra) and it's fantastic: an icy synthpop number that incorporates skittish beats and lyrical references to David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest and Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, while retaining the playfulness of the duo's original hits.
The second is The Assassin from the great Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose best director award for The Assassin honours a film-maker who has a hard-won reputation for brilliance and for artistry; the purest artistry, perhaps, to be rewarded at Cannes this year.
Germany's greatest living documentarian, feature film-maker and former Klaus Kinski wrangler has parlayed his cult auteur status into some juicy acting gigs.
Factor in a voter-galvanising appearance in Salem later this month by Michael Moore, a Bush-bashing auteur, and the Democrats' nerves may start to calm.They already know that, within hours of that surprising survey's appearance, Mr Kerry had performed more than adequately in the first of his three debates with Mr Bush.
Trainee fashion gurus can catalogue a decade of adjustments to Harry's school uniform, while proponents of the auteur theory can measure the impact of four different directors on almost identical material.In the first two films, Chris Columbus established the series' systematic, scene-by-scene method of transferring J.K. Rowling's novels to celluloid.
The French are only slightly less irresponsible, with a say-do gap of 55%.Like a horror-movie auteur, MasterCard is building the dread slowly.
It is as though the auteur tradition has been fused with the industrial approach to film-making that was common practice in Hollywood before the war.Harry Potter and the multiple revenue streamsIn 2000 Ms Rowling said her "worst nightmare" was that her hero would end up on the side of fast-food containers.
