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And quietly, over the weekend, The Big Short also won the Best Comedy Film prize from the American Cinema Editors (ACE) guild. That ever important guild has nominated the eventual Best Picture winner every year going back to 1980, and this year Spotlight was not even nominated. Mad Max took the Best Drama Film prize from ACE, and it will be a hard call between those two for the Best Editing Oscar. The bottom line is that the strong guild support for The Big Short means that the SAG win is a bump but not really a barrier along its road. It also means that Mad Max is most likely this year’s Gravity; it will sweep the technical races but will be unlikely to come out on top.

Given the results of the SAG, here are our updated Best Picture power rankings. I’ve moved Spotlight back to the top but this will shift constantly over the next four weeks.

Predicting the Directors’ Guild.

In a close race like this, the DGA may have the final say. Or not. Many think that the clear directorial movie here, Mad Max, will net a win for George Miller. I suppose Alejandro González Iñárritu could win for the epic The Revenant, but he just won last year, so it doesn’t seem right. Alternatively, the guild could seek to lay a claim in the Spotlight/The Big Short divide and award one of the two directors. The fact that both are normally “for hire” directors and not auteurs hurts them less with the guild, which has a lot of TV and commercial directors, than it could with the stuffy directors’ branch of the Academy. If either of those two win, then you probably have your Best Picture winner. If Mad Max wins, we are in mostly uncharted territory.

I'll go with the consensus and predict George Miller for Mad Max. And also because every time I've predicted The Big Short for a prize, Spotlight takes it, and vice versa. It's that kind of (frustrating) season for a prognosticator. So let's see what happens if I pick a third choice.

In the chart below I trace back the last few years. Bold years indicate the beginning of the preferential ballot, so those matter more. There hasn't been a three way split between SAG/PGA/DGA in a long while. In 2006, PGA and SAG went to Little Miss Sunshine, the irrelevant Globes for Babel, and DGA for The Departed. But in that year, the “Martin Scorsese is Due” narrative overwhelmed everything else, and Marty won handily. No such thing is going on this year.

But you will notice from the below chart that in every year when PGA and SAG have disagreed, the PGA winner has come out on top. That is key. Indeed, PGA and SAG seem to split every other year - 2009, 2011, and 2013 below. 2015 too, of course.

Oscar Precursors and Then Some
	PGA	SAG	DGA	BAFTA	Oscar Director	Oscar Picture
2006	Little Miss Sunshine	Litte Miss Sunshine	The Departed	The Queen	The Departed	The Departed
2007	No Country	No Country	No Country	Atonement	No Country	No Country
2008	Slumdog	Slumdog	Slumdog	Slumdog	Slumdog	Slumdog
2009	The Hurt Locker	Inglorious Basterds	The Hurt Locker	The Hurt Locker	The Hurt Locker	The Hurt Locker
2010	The King's Speech	The King's Speech	The King's Speech	The King's Speech	The King's Speech	The King's Speech
2011	The Artist	The Help	The Artist	The Artist	The Artist	The Artist
2012	Argo	Argo	Argo	Argo	Life of Pi (Argo not nominated)	Argo
2013	12 Years A Slave/Gravity	American Hustle	Gravity	12 Years a Slave	Gravity	12 Years a Slave
2014	Birdman	Birdman	Birdman	Boyhood	Birdman	Birdman
2015	The Big Short	Spotlight	?	?	?	?

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