Despite the 11th hour notion that The Revenant is indeed the film to beat (and it might be), we are still left with a needling question: when each guild picks a different movie to win, which guild most reliably prevails for Best Picture?
First, let’s look at what The Revenant has against it, knowing what we know about what films normally win Best Picture:
- No SAG Ensemble award nomination (since the SAG Awards began, only Braveheart has won without this)
- No Screenplay nomination (Titanic is the most recent BP winner to win without this)
- No PGA win (so far, no film has lost PGA and then won the Oscar after both started using the preferential ballot in 2009)
- Late breaker (no film that have been released after October has won Best Pic since Million Dollar Baby)
- Oscar History (no filmmaker has directed Best Picture winners in consecutive years)
- Divisive (with 50 negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, The Revenant sits alongside films like Crash and A Beautiful Mind)
But Anne Thompson makes a pretty good argument for why The Revenant might win, and likely will win Best Picture. She goes more on buzz and intuition, and thus probably knows what she’s talking about. Not to mention that the latest Gurus of Gold rankings show that prediction all-stars like Dave Karger, Steve Pond, and Scott Feinberg are all predicting The Revenant to win. Indeed, if you aren’t a stats or history person, The Revenant is regarded as the “most likely” to win.
Still, those of us who do make use of stats have trouble reconciling this win. For one thing, if you take away the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs — neither group awarded Inarritu or Birdman last year, as the Academy did — then we’re left with these precursor wins:
The Big Short
PGA/ACE/WGA
The Revenant
DGA/ASC
Spotlight
SAG/WGA
Producing, editing, and writing for The Big Short is a tight and powerful combination, and has often led to a Best Picture win, though admittedly the DGA is usually needed to complete the picture. A Revenant win would bust all of the stats wide open such that there would be little point even writing about them ever again. It would be like when the iPhone replaced land lines.
It does “feel” counterintuitive to not predict the film that just won big at the BAFTAs. But imagine yourself as an average BAFTA voter who didn’t pick Birdman last year. Are you really not going to pick Inarritu again? I doubt you ever would.
Now imagine your average Academy voter. Are they going to pick Inarritu again after just picking him last year? He already made history at the DGA. But why would he at the Oscars, where every branch of the industry has a strong divergent voice?
Let’s look at each guild and how many guild members vote.
The first thing to note and to remember is that only two groups vote with the preferential ballot: the Producers Guild and the Academy. That’s it. To explain a Revenant win with a preferential ballot, you have to first explain why it didn’t win the PGA. The going over-budget by $45 million is one explanation; the supposition that no one knew if The Revenant would succeed or fail is another explanation (I don’t buy that one, though, they pick what they like best, period).
Okay, so now that you’ve explained the PGA, you then have to wade through the SAG Ensemble award nomination miss. The theory that SAG-AFTRA members didn’t see The Reveant doesn’t wash. So SAG didn’t see The Revenant, but somehow they knew enough to nominate Leonardo DiCaprio and then give him the win? Apparently we’re told enough of the 2,000 SAG voters on the nominating committee didn’t see it. Okay. So no one at PGA wanted to pick it until it was successful enough, and no one in SAG had seen it.
Now that you’ve explained away both of those, you then have to figure out why it didn’t win the ACE Eddie Drama award against Mad Max: Fury Road (Mad Max had better editing), and also why it didn’t get a screenplay nomination. Not enough dialogue? I’ll buy that. After all, it just won the BAFTA without a screenplay nomination. Why can’t it win the Oscar?
Finally, you then have to explain away the widely divisive reviews. Joe Morgenstern has a long history of giving raves to almost every Best Picture winner, and even when he didn’t like a movie all that much, he still generally gave it a decent enough review. But not with The Revenant. He gave The Revenant a review that scored 40 at Metacritic. In other words, passionate dislike. The film also has passionate likes. And that passion may have helped drive it to win the DGA, with 15,000 members voting, the largest group of industry voters it has won over. Spotlight won over an even larger group — SAG-AFTRA and its 160,000 members — but it wasn’t up against The Revenant.
Let’s say we’ve pushed all of those supposed stumbling blocks aside — which we could do and you probably should do because you can’t stop what’s coming. Let’s now look at previ0us years when the three major guilds split three different ways.
It has only happened four times. 2000, 2001, 2004, 2013. Two out of those times, the PGA winner won Best Picture. The other two times, the DGA prevailed, and both those times happened before the implementation of the preferential ballot.
The Revenant actually has much in common with Million Dollar Baby; namely, that both films have an acting frontrunner. Hillary Swank then and Leonardo DiCaprio now. Both won the Golden Globe for Director and both won the DGA. The only difference is that Million Dollar Baby also had a SAG Ensemble award nomination.
All About the Guilds
The Producers Guild – 7,000 members. Their PGA Award started in 1990, just 25 years ago. Since then, 18 of their winners have gone on to win the Oscar. They PGA expanded their field of nominees and switched to the preferential ballot in 2009, to match the Academy’s decision to expand their Best Picture race and also implement the preferential ballot. Since then, no film has lost the PGA and won Best Picture, 6/6 years. Granted, almost every one of these years, the DGA matched the PGA, except once, 2013 (where it half-matched). The Producers Guild also tend to be more gender-diverse than the other guilds: according to Wikipedia, “As of 2015, the gender ratio of the PGA’s membership is 57% male and 43% female.”
The Directors Guild – 15,400 members. According to Wikipedia, they are composed of “assistant directors, unit production managers, stage managers, associate directors, production associates, and location managers — that representation includes all sorts of media, such as film, television, documentaries, news, sports, commercials and new media.” They handed out their first award in 1948. No director ever won back-to-back DGA Awards until Alejandro G. Inarritu. His second win makes this the third consecutive win for Mexican directors at the DGA.
SAG-AFTRA – 160,000 members. Their history might have to be tossed and reevaluated because since 2012, SAG merged with AFTRA, which may or may not dilute their Oscar influence. The jury is still out on that one. They are described as “film and television principal and background performers, journalists, and radio personalities.” They use a nominating committee of around 2,000, selected each year by a process not unlike the lottery. Some members live in big cities, some don’t.
Now, let’s look at the dates.
SAG nominating ballot deadline: December 7, 2015. Definitely too early to have seen The Revenant in theaters except at VIP screenings, but then how do you explain Leonardo DiCaprio’s nomination?
PGA final ballot deadline: January 22, 2016. Not buying that they didn’t see it. That’s plenty of time. Also not buying that they didn’t know The Revenant was making money because it already made around $80 million by January 15. This voting deadline was well after The Revenant’s Golden Globe wins as well as after it received 12 Oscar nominations, leading the Best Picture field.
DGA final ballot deadline: February 5, 2016. That’s late enough for everyone to have seen The Revenant, the money came through, the sex with bear thing died down… Inarritu made history. Shortly thereafter, he went on to the BAFTAS to win there, too.
Now, let’s quickly run through these guilds, and how they matched or split over the years:
1995 – PGA/DGA/SAG – Apollo 13 / Oscar Mel Gibson, Braveheart (no SAG ensemble nomination)
1996 – SAG – The Birdcage, PGA/DGA/Oscar – The English Patient
1997 – SAG – The Full Monty, PGA/DGA/Oscar – Titanic
1998 – PGA/DGA – Saving Private Ryan, SAG/Oscar – Shakespeare in Love (won ACE)*
1999 – PGA/DGA/SAG/Oscar – American Beauty
2000 – SAG – Traffic, DGA – Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon, PGA/Oscar – Gladiator*
2001 – PGA – Moulin Rouge, SAG – Gosford Park, DGA/Oscar – A Beautiful Mind
2002 – PGA/SAG/DGA/Oscar – Chicago*
2003 – PGA/DGA/SAG/Oscar – Return of the King
Date Change. Oscars moved up a month.
2004 – PGA – The Aviator, SAG – Sideways, DGA/Oscar – Million Dollar Baby
2005 – PGA/DGA – Brokeback Mountain, SAG/Oscar – Crash (won ACE)*
2006 – PGA/SAG – Little Miss Sunshine, DGA/Oscar – The Departed
2007 – PGA/DGA/SAG/Oscar – No Country for Old Men
2008 – PGA/DGA/SAG/Oscar – Slumdog Millionaire
Preferential Ballot put in place. Expanded Best Picture slate.
2009 – SAG – Inglourious Basterds, PGA/DGA/Oscar – The Hurt Locker
2010 – PGA/DGA/SAG/Oscar – The King’s Speech
2011 – SAG – The Help, PGA/DGA/Oscar – The Artist
2012 – PGA/DGA/SAG/Oscar – Argo*
2013 – PGA/Oscar-12 Years a Slave, PGA-Gravity, DGA – Alfonso Cuaron, SAG – American Hustle*
2014 – PGA/DGA/SAG/Oscar – Birdman
2015 – PGA-The Big Short, SAG – Spotlight, DGA – The Revenant
*Resulted in a Picture/Director split
Five times in their collective past, the guilds have given out a different award to 3 different films. Only in 2013 there was a tie for the PGA.
Of those times, PGA has called Best Picture twice – Gladiator and 12 Years a Slave. The DGA called it twice, with Million Dollar Baby and A Beautiful Mind. Although, it’s worth noting that we can’t REALLY use 2013, since there was a tie. We know that the PGA did fail, and the PGA didn’t fail. So in a way, we have to kind of throw out those results. And if we do that, the DGA still loses.
Since the preferential ballot, though, only once has there been a three-way split — even though with a tie you can’t really say it’s a clean split.
A couple of key points:
- Once we fold in the SAG Ensemble award, we’ve never seen a year when the DGA called Best Picture without that key nomination.
- SAG Ensemble has never predicted Best Picture without also winning the ACE Eddie Award (Crash)
Considering the unusual nature of The Revenant, though, which can’t be discounted — it could be in the “too big to ignore” arena, like Gladiator, like Titanic, like Schindler’s List, where you just can’t ignore something that massive. It could be one of those years, like 2000, where you have to throw out the stats and be done with it.
Even after all of this, I still can’t tell you not to predict The Revenant. Despite the stats, it just seems to have the Big Mo. Nothing can be done about that. But I’ll keep ticking off check boxes, analyzing how the Oscar race goes down each year. You’ll forgive me for being wrong, won’t you?
