The Producers Guild Award winner has agreed with the Academy's choice for Best Picture eight out of the last eleven Oscar winners. It's still tough to say whether it can still pull off the daunting task of actually winning Oscar's top honor, but it's starting to look like it's more in the realm of reason now.
So with that, I begin part 2 of my countdown to the 74th Annual Academy Awards. We're now only 20 days away from the big night, and I will reveal my predictions in four more Oscar categories in just a moment. But first, the PGA Awards were not the only precursor awards given over the past weekend. Another big predictor for possible Oscar success are the Writer's Guild Awards, which were presented this past Saturday night. The WGA winners are not the best possible predictor this year though, because two of the big Oscar front-runners for the writing prizes, In The Bedroom and Memento were deemed ineligible for WGA consideration and were not nominated, but yet, they're nominated for the Academy's awards.
Julian Fellowes won the Best Original Screenplay Award from the Writer's Guild for his script to Robert Altman's Gosford Park. Akiva Goldsman got a small boost towards claiming the Oscar, as he was awarded the Best Adapted Screenplay honor for A Beautiful Mind.
So we move on closer to the Academy Awards ... final ballots have already gone out to Academy members, and they're voting as we speak. Not much else going on, besides Russell Crowe getting in a fight with a British television producer at the BAFTAs a couple of weeks back, after Crowe was angry that the producer had cut his speech short on the television broadcast. As strange as these things are, I think this does legitimately hurt Crowe's chances, as some voters may now truly feel that Denzel Washington may deserve it more than Crowe getting his second Oscar in a row. A lot will be determined by the last two big precursors coming this weekend, the Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild Awards, but I'll preview those in my article on Friday.
