In Contention: The Producers Guild Awards

By Josh Spiegel

January 13, 2009

Woohoo! An excuse to use a Syndrome picture!

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The Producers Guild Awards (PGA) nominees were announced on Monday, January 5th, and for the most part, there are very few surprises held here, unless you'd be shocked to see Batman rubbing elbows with Harvey Milk and Richard Nixon. Like most guilds, the awards are specific to the voters. In this case, the closest equivalent at the Oscars to the Producers Guild is Best Picture, as both award the producers of the movies that have been nominated.

For Best Picture of the Year, the nominees are The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and Slumdog Millionaire. Again, there are few surprises here, as four of the nominees also showed up at the SAG nominations for Best Ensemble. At the SAGs, the fifth nominee was Doubt instead of Dark Knight. I guess the producers weren't fans of Catholic school.

This week also brings the announcement of the Directors and Writers Guild nominations. Though there's certainly room for surprises, it's likely that at least four of these films will show up there, too. The only question is if The Dark Knight will make it with writers and directors. The PGAs (nothing to do with golf, I promise), however, are much more likely to leave out one of the Best Picture nominees at the Oscars in their own ceremony, the sneaks!




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In the past five years, the PGAs have correctly predicted only two winning films, last year's No Country For Old Men, and 2003's The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Over the past ten years, the PGAs have correctly predicted five winners. Though the winning percentage is often in question, their nominations are not so unreliable: over the past five years, four of five PGA nominees have also been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, each year. Interestingly, in the five years before that (1998-2002), the PGAs correctly nominated three of five nominees each year. In fact, only three times in the past 20 years have the PGAs ever gotten all five nominees correct, from 1992 to 1994; in two of those years (1993 and 1994), the PGAs and Oscars chose the same nominees and winner.

One thing worth noting is how frequently eclectic the Producer's Guild can be. In 2004, their fifth nominee was Disney-Pixar's The Incredibles, a movie which did not, unfortunately, show up as a Best Picture Oscar nominee. In 2001, two of their nominees were Shrek and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone! They are obviously either big fans of family films or let their kids fill out their ballot every once in a while.

What this means for the nominees of the upcoming PGAs, announced on January 24th, isn't a whole lot. The race among movies is now for that fifth slot. The conventional Hollywood wisdom is that Frost/Nixon is sliding into the fourth spot, having now shown up at two major guilds. The fifth spot certainly favors The Dark Knight, but Doubt and WALL-E are not completely out of the hunt yet. Right now, though, the folks at Warner Bros. must be thrilled to have Dark Knight in their pocket, especially considering the expansion of the film into thousands of theaters the day after the Oscar nods, January 23rd. Who's up for an IMAX field trip?


     


 
 

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