His financial crisis documentary Inside Job took home the Academy Award for Best Documentary earlier this year, but now director Charles Ferguson is moving into the realm of fact-based drama for HBO. Deadline reports he will be at the helm of a new film about WikiLeaks founder and headline grabber Julian Assange. HBO is working with BBC on the project which will use Raffi Khatchadourian’s New Yorker article, No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency, as the source material. The article itself follows Assange and WikiLeaks operatives as they embark on their mission to leak a 38-minute classified video taken inside the cockpit of a U.S. Army Apache Helicopter. With as much attention as Assange has gotten in the news recently, the film should certainly be of interest to viewers. Can I suggest Neil Patrick Harris to play Assange?

Uh-oh, The Social Network.  Heading into January, it seemed like the Academy Awards were yours to lose.  But things have been rocky since your (admittedly meaningless) Golden Globes domination.  The Producer’s Guild chose The King’s Speech, shortly before that movie racked up 12 Oscar nominations to your 8.  Now the Director’s Guild has followed suit and selected The King’s Speech‘s Tom Hooper in the Feature Film category for their 63rd annual awards.  Since 1948, the Academy and the DGA have only disagreed on Best Director six times.  I believe Oscar night now unofficially belongs to you, The King’s Speech.

Hit the jump for the full list of winners, including Martin Scorsese for directing the pilot of Boardwalk Empire.

Earlier this week, the Directors Guild of America named its nominees for Best Director.  Now they’ve named their nominees for Best Documentary Director.  And the nominees are:

• Lixin Fan for Last Train Home
• Charles Ferguson for Inside Job
• Alex Gibney for Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
• Davis Guggenheim for Waiting for “Superman”
• Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger for Restrepo

Among the notable snubs were Banksy for Exit Through the Gift Shop and Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story.  It’s possible that the DGA’s nominees will be the five Oscar nominees as well, but I honestly don’t see what’s so spectacular about Client 9.  Obviously, I’m biased towards Exit Through the Gift Shop, but I think it’s the more enduring and thought-provoking work.  Winners will be announced Saturday, January 29th. [TheWrap]

In 2008, the stock market took a bit of a stumble that resulted in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and trillions of dollars.  The aftermath left many people wondering just what the hell happened.  Inside Job, the newest political documentary from Oscar-nominated director/producer Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight) “traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia” and uses Matt Damon’s narration to do so.  Check out the trailer after the jump.