Producers Guild nominations give Oscar boost to familiar contenders

Just one day after the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) decided to allow voters an extra 24 hours to submit their ballots for this year’s Oscar nominations, the equally prestigious Producers Guild of America (PGA) made their own unexpected move and released their nominations 24 hours earlier. While the Guild didn’t give a reason why they upped their timetable, Hollywood certainly wasn’t complaining as the nominations gave a big boost (at an opportune time) to a number of the year’s top contenders!

View slideshow: Producers Guild Award nominees

For the first time in recent years the big studios have a legitimate chance of winning Best Picture. You actually have to go back to 2008 and “Slumdog Millionaire” to find the last time one of the original major studios walked away with the award and back to 2006 and “The Departed,” to find the last time they did it without an art-house co-distributor as a partner. Overall five of the ten nominated films this year are from one of the majors with that number jumping to seven if you include the two 20th Century Fox offshoots (Fox Searchlight and Fox 2000).

Among today's nominees are all the usual suspects including frontrunners “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Lincoln” and “Argo,” along with critical favorites “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Django Unchained” and “Les Miserables.” Art house hits are also well represented with “Life of Pi,” “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” while the biggest shock of the list is “Skyfall.” With its nomination, the mainstream action thriller becomes the first ever James Bond movie to be nominated for the PGA awards and gives it a huge boost into the Oscar race.

Notable omissions among the pack include “Flight,” “Amour,” “Hitchcock,” “The Impossible” and “The Dark Knight Rises.” While many never really considered “Rises” a Oscar film, you have to remember the PGA did nominate “The Dark Knight” in 2008 and the outcry over the film being snubbed by the Academy Awards later in the year is widely credited with eventually leading the group to expand the Oscar field from 5 to 10 contenders.

So how accurate are the PGA’s in predicting the eventual Oscar winner? Actually they are one of the strongest barometers as since the group started handing out awards 22 years ago in 1990, they have been in lock step with their Academy brethren all but 7 times. In fact of the 7 times they've differed they actually went with the expected frontunners (i.e. “Saving Private Ryan” and “Brokeback Mountain”) the majority of the time and were probably as genuinely shocked as the viewers of the annual Oscar telecast were during those years when a dark horse took the prize.

The full list of this year’s nominees is below and the winner will be announced on January 26th.

The Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures

“Argo” (Warner Bros.)
Producers: Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Grant Heslov

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Producers: Michael Gottwald, Dan Janvey, Josh Penn

“Django Unchained” (The Weinstein Company)
Producers: Reginald Hudlin, Pilar Savone, Stacey Sher

“Les Misérables” (Universal Pictures)
Producers: Tim Bevan & Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward, Cameron Mackintosh

“Life of Pi” (Fox 2000 Pictures)
Producers: Ang Lee, Gil Netter, David Womark

“Lincoln” (Touchstone Pictures)
Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg

“Moonrise Kingdom” (Focus Features)
Producers: Wes Anderson & Scott Rudin, Jeremy Dawson, Steven Rales

“Silver Linings Playbook” (The Weinstein Company)
Producers: Bruce Cohen, Donna Gigliotti, Jonathan Gordon

“Skyfall” (Columbia Pictures)
Producers: Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson

“Zero Dark Thirty” (Columbia Pictures)
Producers: Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Megan Ellison