THE SEASON: SAG, PGA noms begin to clarify Oscar race; it may be time to jump on the Babelwagon
By Pete Hammond
In Munchkinland when The (Lollipop) Guild spoke Dorothy listened. In Hollywoodland when The Guild speaks, EVERYONE listens, at least during awards season because to put it bluntly the PGA, DGA, SAG and WGA - more than all the seemingly hundreds of critics groups awards and top-ten lists combined - are by far the best indicators of where Oscar is heading in any given year.
“Quite frankly they are the only things that matter (of the pre-Oscar indicators),” one prominent awards consultant told us yesterday. The reason obviously is that all these unions are made up in part of Oscar voters as well. Of course they all have an even larger contingent of TV people on their membership rolls but that hasn’t kept the strong correlation between a guild nom and an Oscar nom from occurring year after year. 2005’s eventual Oscar champ, “Crash,” was barely on the map just 12 months ago when the Producers Guild gave it a surprise Best Picture nomination and all the others followed suit.
Now with the PGA and SAG noms in, the race further tightens but what these nominations have told us is basically what we already know. Four Best Picture slots, most prognosticators seem to believe, will go to “Dreamgirls,” “The Departed,” “The Queen” and “Little Miss Sunshine” – and indeed they appear to be headed just that way. The coveted fifth slot, previously conceded to be a contest between the darker dramas like “Babel,” “Little Children,” “Letters From Iwo Jima” and (because of critical support) “United 93,” is now edging closer to a lock for – drumroll please – “Babel” following up its combined 14 Golden Globe and Broadcast Critics noms with a PGA Best Picture nod and its tie for a leading 3 SAG nominations including Outstanding Cast. The latter being the guild’s version of a Best Picture prize (won last year by “Crash”). Perhaps most surprisingly, Clint Eastwood’s dual achievement of “Iwo Jima,” and its counterpart “Flags Of Our Fathers,” was completely overlooked by both groups. Did it cancel itself out?
But before we all jump on the Babelwagon, we should note that in fairness to Universal’s struggling-to-be-seen, and star challenged “U 93,” it was expected to get no action from the actors and little from the PGA which loves big MONEYMAKING films more than a free meal at Mr. Wongs (ironically A&E’s TV movie, “Flight 93” WAS PGA-nominated in the television category). “United 93’s” major test comes with the WGA and, especially, DGA nomination announcements next week, where the two Emmy-nominated TV-movie versions of the infamous flight are also eligible in their respective TV-movie categories creating further confusion. How many versions of the same event can get recognized by one guild? Right now U’s April release has won several critics group Best Picture awards and hit more top-ten lists than any film other than “The Departed” and “The Queen;” both heavily favored to repeat their success with the Academy.
You have to hand it to Universal for giving it a whirl and throwing money at the thing. This week’s relentless advertising push in the LA Times (4 full page ads on both Tuesday and Wednesday proclaiming “U 93” as the “Best Picture Of The Year”) is fairly unprecedented for such an early release and middling box office achiever (about $60 million-plus worldwide) now long out on DVD. There are also new radio and TV spots. At any rate, it can’t hurt the studio’s longtime relationship with the film’s main backers, Working Title and Sidney Kimmel or with writer/director Paul Greengrass who is now the engine behind U’s most important franchise, the “Bourne” movies. In fact new studio toppers Marc Shmuger and David Linde will be throwing an upcoming cocktail party and supper celebrating Greengrass (who also is reportedly slated to write and direct the Vietnam-era film, “They Marched Into Sunlight” for U in 2008) and his awards season success when he hits town on a break from shooting “The Bourne Ultimatum” in Europe.
Another question after this morning’s SAG nominations is just how did all those endless SAG nominating committee Q&A sessions pay off? It’s hard now for studio strategists to set a SAG screening without guaranteeing personal appearances from the principals afterwards. Of the nominees only Peter O’Toole (stuck in England) and Meryl Streep did virtually nothing and got nominated while everyone else worked their asses off signing autographs and greeting the SAG Nom Comm, a 2000-strong group of largely little known performers, and storming stages from the Harmony Gold to the Pacific Design Center to the Arclight to the Aero everyday. The personal touch paid off more than ever while elusive actors like Jack Nicholson were surprisingly overlooked. The nominations offered up few surprises other than that, with the only other surprise the relatively tame showing by “The Departed” which tied Leonardo DiCaprio’s underachieving “Blood Diamond” in total number of nods. Also worth mentioning is that while DiCaprio is the lead in both films he scored an eyebrow-raising supporting mention for “Departed” at the expense of co-stars Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg who are both Globe-nominated in the same category. Some thought Sacha Baron Cohen might have scored in a rare comedy bid for “Borat” but he was overlooked. Cohen interestingly did no SAG Q&A sessions until last night which was apparently too little, too late.
The lure of these Guild nominations trumps everything, so expect the talent “meat parade” (as George C. Scott so eloquently described it) to continue as SAG often predicts exactly what will happen at the Kodak (last year, “Crash,” Philip Seymour Hoffman, Reese Witherspoon and Rachel Weisz all repeated at the Oscars with only SAG supporting Actor winner Paul Giamatti losing to George Clooney). And 11 of the 17 films to win the PGA top honor did the same thing with the Academy (although PGA’s last two choices “The Aviator” and “Brokeback Mountain” were upset by Paul Haggis scripted movies at the Oscars).
A side note on the PGA nominations. Up for animated film are five contenders, “Cars,” “Happy Feet,” “Monster House,” “Ice Age 2” and “Flushed Away.” The Academy was also expected to nominate five animated films (instead of 3) for the first time since 2002 but word is the animation committee has determined that one of the previous qualifiers, The Weinstein Company’s import, “Arthur And The Invisibles” has too much of a live action component in it. “Arthur” was a long shot for a nomination to be sure but now its apparent disqualification appears to have also done in two potential nominees as the 15 remaining eligible films fall one short of triggering the full slate of five noms. Insiders are saying if this is the case then that leaves the field to just 3 candidates, most likely “Cars,” “Happy Feet” and “Monster House.”
Now on to the DGA January 9th and the WGA January 11th when a wide open race gets closed just a little tighter – or not - as THE SEASON continues to play its union card.
