The Producer’s Guild of America Awards have traditionally always been the best predictor for the Academy Awards, typically held about a month later. 17 of the last 24 winners have gone on to win the Oscar (that’s about a 70% success rate), and the nominees for the PGA Awards also typically match the Oscar nominations, although the PGAs sometimes nominate blockbusters over prestige pictures; films like Skyfall and The Heat have been up for Best Picture in the past.
So for those of you looking to shore up your Oscar bets, you’ll be disappointed to learn that – for the first time in history – there has been a tie for Best Picture. Both 12 Years a Slave AND Gravity – the obvious front-runners for the Best Picture Oscar – won the PGA Best Picture. Add to this the fact that American Hustle won Best Picture at the SAG awards, and predictions become all the murkier (although I would say that American Hustle is a SAG-adored acting powerhouse rather than usual Best Picture material, and can be counted as an anomaly).
There are only three film categories at the PGA awards, and the other winners were perhaps not surprises. Frozen – the ultra-popular, Broadway-ready Disney hit – won Best Animated Feature. Just a brief aside, but I wonder why the superior Tangled was not as lauded as this. As for The Wind Rises, well, the PGA only nominates American films, and The Wind Rises is Japanese. Frozen, then, had no real competition from films like Epic and The Croods. Although Monsters University – also superior to Frozen – finally got a Best Animated Feature nomination (it was shut out of the Oscars), but was snubbed again. Blustery, operatic teen angst will win over silliness and wit every time, I guess.
The winner in the Best Documentary Feature category was, perhaps unexpectedly, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. Other films, like the food scare doc A Place at the Table, and artist portraits like Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, weren’t nearly as popular in this largely obscure category. The only real star documentary films from 2013 were The Act of Killing and 20 Feet from Stardom. The former is, again, not American, and the latter… who knows? These are producers doing the nominating and the voting, so a high profile and a big profit margin are typically awarded over obscure quality.
I have my own theories as to how the PGA’s unprecedented tie will effect the Oscars, but they are oblique and indecisive justifications. I think we can all agree on one thing, though: It’s nice to see that two films can be equally great.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
