The star-studded film about the 2008 housing crisis – starring Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Steve Carell – surprised at the Producers Guild Awards on Saturday night, taking the top movie prize.
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We’ll see how it all turns out on February 28, the night of the Oscars. The last time there was a divergence was when The Departed took the Best Picture Oscar and Little Miss Sunshine won the PGA award.
The PGA ceremony followed a momentous week in Hollywood when outrage about the Academy Awards’ second straight year of all-white acting nominees, as well as some glaring omissions in the best picture nods, led to calls for a boycott of the Oscar show and then on Friday, sweeping reforms announced by the motion picture academy.
The non-profit PGA is a trade group representing USA film and television producers.
The Big Short beat out heavyweights Spotlight, Mad Max and The Revenant in the awards ceremony which has picked the eventual Oscar best picture victor over the last eight years.
“The Big Short” producer Dede Gardner acknowledged the issue during her acceptance speech for the evening’s top award.
Shonda Rhimes, creator of television drama “Grey’s Anatomy”, also addressed the need for greater diversity, while Producers Guild of America president Gary Lucchesi said the industry must “make a conscious decision to challenge the status quo”.
The 6,000 or so members of the PGA (almost the same number as the motion picture academy) rank the ten Best Picture nominees. The changes will not impact this year’s Oscar voting. Unless you’re going to ignore the conventional wisdom and go your own way – which, come to think of it, is exactly what a character in The Big Short might do – it would look foolish at this point to place a Best Picture bet on anything other than McKay’s surging finance comedy.
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Gardner told the crowd, “We have privilege in our hands as storytellers”. As I’ve noted here before several times, only two movies this season – The Big Short and Spotlight – have checked off all the boxes that a Best Picture victor usually requires, including real-world thematic resonance, a SAG nomination for the film’s cast, at least one Oscar nomination for its actors, and nominations for the film’s editing and screenplay. The documentary “The Hunting Ground” received the Stanley Kramer Award and Lady Gaga performed the song “Til It Happens to You” from the film. And Star Wars: The Force Awakens director presented the Visionary Award to VFX house Industrial Light & Magic, with which he collaborated on Star Wars.
