On Tuesday, the Producers Guild will announce their nominees for the 2010 Oscar year. This will be the second year that they’d upped their nominees from five to ten, as they offer up what they think are the year’s best for Oscar consideration. Oscar sits there, at the very end of the whole magilla, and considers all of the offerings and decides for Himself whether or not He agrees.
It is rather fruitless, then, to go back and look at the years that did or didn’t match the PGA, since so much has changed since the last year’s expansion. We only really have last year to go on. I will say that finding ten is a hell of a lot easier than finding five, thus much of the suspense has been removed from the equation when it comes to finding nominees. It turns out that, by the time the end of the year rolls around, one just knows what films are considered the best. But there is still some wiggle room for the 8, 9 and 10th slots.
The Producers Guild has over 4,000 members. They use the preferential ballot as opposed to the weighted ballot to determine their winner now that there are ten nominees. Last year, it was said that Avatar would have won the PGA on a weighted ballot, with five nominees, but with ten, The Hurt Locker managed to win under some sort of “if it isn’t number one it will be number 2” scenario. I am not sure Avatar would have won, but I will save my speculation since there is no valid way of knowing this.
As for the preferential ballots, you do want your movie to be either number one, or two or three. You don’t want it sitting at the end of most of the ballots and you don’t want it to be all or nothing. We already know from last year that offensive voting tactics are used – not offensive as in “they offend” but offensive as in “offense.” Putting a contender in last place is obviously a way to have that film never be used. So then why put it on the ballot at all?
It all still comes down to the overall popularity of the film. This will help The King’s Speech, as it’s most likely to come in at 2 if it isn’t coming in at 1.¬† Black Swan is likely to come in at a lot of number 1s more than it would be a number 2 or 3, I’m guessing. If you like that movie, you really like that movie. It isn’t going to be a “it was okay” kind of vote.
Last year, the PGA went for the Sci Fi three: District 9, Avatar and Star Trek. But the AMPAS omitted Star Trek, choosing The Blind Side instead. I’m going to assume that the PGA 10 won’t match the AMPAS 10 for 10, but we won’t know that for a while yet.
What we do know is that each time these awards are announced, they further cement the placement of some titles. Since many of you have already entered our contest to predict the PGA, you probably don’t want to put them down here again. But you might want to leave us a No Guts, No Glory prediction.
It will be shocking indeed if the following films are not mentioned with Tuesday’s announcement. These seem to be the locks:
The Social Network
The King’s Speech
True Grit
The Fighter
Inception
Toy Story 3
Black Swan
The Kids Are All Right
Winter’s Bone
And we’re still down to:
127 Hours vs. The Town for the last slot.
Both films have their merits. The Town is one of the few films this year in the Oscar race that got close to the magic number of $100 mil. True Grit will pass it.  Inception, Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon and Shutter Island all passed it. The Social Network got mightily close.
I don’t know how it will go on Tuesday, but my single No Guts, No Glory prediction will be that Shutter Island gets in. I don’t know who gets bumped, though.