pga Tagged Articles at Cinematical

As further proof that it's Slumdog Millionaire's world and we're all just living in it, Danny Boyle won the Directors Guild of America prize Saturday night. Slumdog, nominated for 10 Oscars, was already named best picture by the Producers Guild of America, and it could still win a Writers Guild award, too. Oh, and then there are the Oscars, where it's the front runner to win Best Picture.

All of the guilds are fairly good predictors of the Oscars (the guilds' memberships overlap quite a bit with the Academy voters), but none more so than the DGA. In the guild's 61 years of prize-giving, all but six recipients have gone on to win their respective Oscars. So if I were a betting man, I'd put money on Boyle's name being announced on Oscar night.

But with Slumdog now having won the PGA award and the DGA award, surely you are asking yourself: How often has the same film won both awards? And does that mean it's bound to win the Oscar for Best Picture, too?

The short answer is yes. In the 19 years that the PGA has given out awards, it has matched the DGA award 13 times. And of those 13 double-winners, 10 have gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. (The three exceptions were Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, and Brokeback Mountain.) Ergo, if I'm a betting man, I'm looking at Slumdog.

In other DGA award news, Ari Folman won the documentary prize for Waltz with Bashir, which is nominated for an Oscar, too ... but in the foreign-language category, not documentary. So you're on your own for predicting that one.

Fans of a certain cave-dwelling rubber-fetishist have cause to celebrate: The Dark Knight has been nominated for best picture by the Producers Guild of America, whose nominations tend to reflect the Oscars very, very closely. The other four nominees are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and Slumdog Millionaire.

The Producers Guild of America has officially existed since 1962, when separate groups for TV and film merged, but the PGA didn't start giving out awards until 1990. Since then, the PGA best picture winner has matched the Oscar winner 12 out of 19 times. They lined up last year (No Country for Old Men), but conflicted for three years in a row before that. So whichever film wins the PGA award on Jan. 24 has a reasonably good chance -- but by no means a slam-dunk -- of winning the Oscar, too.

But the more immediate question is whether The Dark Knight will even be nominated for the Oscar. The other four PGA nominees are likely Oscar candidates; it's The Dark Knight that's had the big ol' question mark next to it in people's guesses and predictions. A comprehensive list of past PGA nominees is hard to come by, even at the guild's own website, but Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil has done some number-crunching. He reports that of the 95 Best Picture Oscar nominees between 1990 and 2008, 72 were also PGA nominees. Statistically speaking, that means The Dark Knight now has about a 75% chance of getting an Oscar nomination.

Hollywood's neverending love affair with itself just keeps on rolling, as now the Producer's Guild of America has announced its list of 2007 film nominees. And the nominees are: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. Surely the most notable exclusions are Atonement and Sweeney Todd, since both films took Best Picture honors at last night's Golden Globes disaster atrocity ceremony. The PGA does not often sync up with the Academy. Last year, they selected Little Miss Sunshine and the Oscar went (rightly) to The Departed. In 2006, they selected Brokeback Mountain and the Oscar went to Crash. In 2005, they picked The Aviator and the Oscar went to Million Dollar Baby.

No guesses as to which film they'll select this year, but don't count out There Will Be Blood. As a friend of mine recently remarked: "Producers will definitely relate strongly to the story of a relentless misanthrope who sacrifices everything in his quest for money and power." The PGA nominated Bee Movie, Ratatouille, and The Simpsons Movie as nominations for its animation award. Their nominated documentaries are: Body of War, Hear and Now, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, Sicko, and White Night Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The winner of the PGA's Darryl F. Zanuck Producer of the Year award is announced February 2nd, and will not be televised. Still, if the host announces the winner at his or her kitchen table while eating a large bowl of breakfast cereal, it will be a more exciting event than last night's Billy Bush cringe-a-thon. Yikes.