1917 is now the Best Picture favorite
Well there you go! Just when I was thinking Once Upon a Time in Hollywood could be the frontrunner, Sam Mendes’s 1917 sneaks up behind everybody and takes the frontrunner status to itself. The Producers Guild Award is the most important predictor for Best Picture these days, because it uses the same kind of preferential voting system the Academy does, and it’s the only guild that votes that way (it also has roughly the same size membership). This makes 1917 the heavy favorite to win Best Picture in a few weeks, and Sam Mendes likely to win director for the second time (although I think he still has something of a fight with Bong Joon-ho over that one- we’ll have to see what the DGA does next week). In other news, Toy Story 4 becomes the solid frontrunner in animated, while for the third year in a row, the PGA for documentary goes to a movie that was completely snubbed by the Academy’s documentary branch altogether.
PGA WINNERS 2020
Feature Film: 1917
Animated Film: Toy Story 4
Documentary Film: Apollo 11
