They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don’t They?
Race Over? The Big Short Wins Producers Guild
By J. Don Birnam
January 26, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Analyzing the Producers Guild.
The Producers Guild Awards are considered the best harbinger of the Best Picture race for obvious reasons. Since their inception in 1989, the winner of the PGA has won the Best Picture Oscar all but seven times. More important, since the dawn of the preferential ballot for Best Picture voting, the PGA also moved to preferential balloting and has matched the Oscar every single time. No other guild or precursor can say that, so The Big Short’s win is that important.
Can something else win? Sure. Rules are meant to be broken and have been broken over the past few years, but it is hard to bet against the PGA result because of the preferential ballot, which is the same as what the Academy uses. As I have explained here and here in past years, the basic concept of the preferential ballot is that voters rank the nominated movies instead of voting for one. The movie that is ranked #1 in half plus one ballots, wins, and if no movie has that total, you start looking at people’s #2 and #3 choices etc., until one crosses the threshold.
What it means is that consensus movies win - movies that everyone can like. From the get go, Spotlight would seem to be that movie. But Boyhood was a critically revered movie last year, and Birdman was considered divisive. Yet, Birdman won both the PGA and of course the Oscar. What likely happened was that people respected and liked Boyhood but a lot of people loved Birdman and even those that didn’t love it respected an aspect of it. The same could be happening this year between The Big Short and Spotlight.
Still, over the course of the next few weeks, you will read a lot of Oscar prognosticators trying to tell you that The Big Short could lose. We need to stay interested as we live these awards over the next few weeks (the Oscar race can get very predictable very fast) and we need readers interested as well. That’s the honest truth. And, to be fair, until The Big Short wins another guild, it is not yet a mortal lock. If it wins the Directors Guild, forget it, game over.
Another scenario that could develop would be similar to the one that occurred the last time that the PGA winner did not win the Oscar. In 2006, Little Miss Sunshine won PGA, Babel won SAG, and The Departed won DGA. In the end, of course, The Departed swept the Oscars. But that year the “it’s Marty’s year” narrative took hold. And again, back then there was no preferential ballot.
This year, the narrative is, if anything, that The Big Short is a movie urgent and relevant to our times. Spotlight is urgent to a now somewhat more remote social issue. What is funny is how much the Academy can swing back and forth between rewarding movies that make them seem like they live in La-La-Land (The Artist, Argo, The King’s Speech), and movies that in some way speak urgently to the time (The Hurt Locker, Birdman).
Of course, The Big Short hasn’t won a single Academy Award yet. But it likely will. Oh, and, just like that, Brad Pitt would win his second Best Picture Oscar, after his win for 12 Years a Slave.
Predicting the Screen Actors Guild.
So does that mean that the SAG award results are over? Not so fast. You may recall that SAG nominated The Big Short, Straight Outta Compton, Beasts of No Nation, Spotlight, and Trumbo for Best Ensemble. With SAG voting still going on, will the membership look at the PGA result and want to “me too” it? That is the most likely scenario at this point - and The Big Short is a true ensemble movie - so you can probably expect to see that on Saturday.
But it remains to be seen whether the SAG membership wants to shoot their own salvo over the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and thumb their nose at the Academy by selecting Beasts or Compton. I don’t actually expect that to happen - the SAG membership is too disperse and likely not of one mind on the whole kerfuffle. And Trumbo was not widely seen and is just along for the ride.
The only question is whether Spotlight’s campaign for the SAG, which has been their strong play all along by portraying themselves as an ensemble piece, will work. But for all the star power that Spotlight has with Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton etc., The Big Short has plenty to give back with Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Steve Carell, etc.
I expect the outcome to be close, but I do think The Big Short will prevail here and have all the momentum going into the final month of the race.
The other SAG acting races seem easier to call. I simply cannot see Leonardo DiCaprio losing at SAG to either Michael Fassbender or Bryan Cranston. DiCaprio is too popular; people everywhere want him to win the Oscar. The SAG membership will do its part to get him there. The same goes for Brie Larson in lead actress - Cate Blanchett has won here before and Saoirse Ronan’s performance is too muted. Room is, perhaps of all the Best Picture nominees, one of the most popular, as the TIFF win in September proves. They will want to reward the newcomer and the movie.
Best Supporting Actress at SAG ended up matching Oscar except that SAG nominated Helen Mirren for Trumbo and the Academy gave it to Jennifer Jason Leigh. If Alicia Vikander really is going to win the Oscar, as many of us think she will, this is where she has to start. Losing the Globe did not help her, and if Kate Winslet wins here again, watch out. I would love to see Rooney Mara’s subtle performance rewarded, but I’m not counting on it.
Finally, the Supporting Actor race is the one head scratcher of the bunch. SAG did not nominate Mark Ruffalo or Sylvester Stallone, which will hurt Stallone’s chances in February. This is a hard one to call because they may seek to reward Elba after his Oscars snub, could shore up The Big Short’s win by giving it to Bale, the best performance of the movie, or they could recognize the famed talent of Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies. I’d like to see Rylance win, but I do wonder if The Big Short has all the momentum. Bale by a nose?
New Academy Membership Rules
Last week, I gave my own view of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. Shocker: that did not quell it. Indeed, it raged on to the point of boycotts and culminated with the Academy announcing drastic measures on Friday to address the problem. Essentially, they will amp up recruiting of women and minorities with a very aggressive goal of doubling their numbers by 2020.
But the really significant change was a sort of Trojan horse that came along with these rules - lifetime membership is now over unless you are nominated for or win an Oscar, or you can credential your membership for three straight decades by proving involvement in the movie industry.
The real import of this change goes way beyond the minority problem - it’s going to change the tenor of the entire Academy. The L.A. Times’ analysis of the Academy is worth reading in full. It detailed that over half of the membership had not been active in the movie industry in over a decade. That’s a huge problem in some ways. The people voting for the awards are the ones who made movies in the 1970s. It’s why their tastes can be so off and stale sometimes.
On the other hand, it seems somewhat unfair to not grandfather in the individuals who were active for three decades in the past, but are retired and no longer there. Perhaps they’ll address that.
Overall, one wonders if these drastic rule changes are a disproportionate overreaction to a problem that does not begin or end with the Academy - it is the problem of Hollywood at large - or whether they are a measure that the Academy long wanted to adopt, and the controversy was the easy way to backdoor it. I, for one, continue to applaud the Academy’s efforts in this area, and they have now become the leader of the pack in Hollywood, as they should be. This is why that institution has persisted and become vibrant over the nearly nine decades of its existence. The racial composition of the Academy is the same as the racial composition of the guilds and the industry at large - it is not reflective of the racial composition of America, but neither is Hollywood is a whole.
The changes may also mean a more interesting and fun job for those of us who try to predict the awards. As you’ve heard me say many times before, the Oscars have gotten incredibly predictable with the explosion of precursor awards that make everything a fait accompli by the time the envelopes are open. Now, with a constantly shifting Academy membership, it will be much harder to discern what “their” tastes are, or to look to history and statistics to make guesses.
One can hope, at least.