Save for a couple of recent back-to-back discrepancies in “The Big Short” and “La La Land,” the Producers Guild’s Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Theatrical Motion Pictures has been a fairly reliable barometer for the yearly Oscar season result. In any event, as far back as both the PGA and film Academy extended their best categories, sharing the ever puzzling special poll for deciding candidates and champs, it’s been protected to state whatever successes the producers’ honor is your best picture frontrunner.
All things considered, with a victory at the Beverly Hilton Saturday night, Peter Farrelly’s “Green Book” is currently your best picture frontrunner.
Universal and Participant Media’s heartfelt race relations dramatization — which has experienced the ringer on different occasions this season, weathering criticism that it’s antiquated, that it’s a backward decision in the time of movies like “BlacKkKlansman,” “Black Panther” and “If Beale Street Could Talk,” that it took shocking freedoms in the perspective of relatives near the creation, that its executive was famously unseemly with associates before, that its co-writer subscribed in to a 9/11 fantasy proliferated by the sitting Commander in Chief — has taken its licks and soldiered on. It commenced the season with a People’s Choice prize at the Toronto Film Festival and it stays here on the cusp of the current year’s Oscar assignments declaration as the one to beat.
It’s quite a turn for Universal, which just a year ago repped a very different race relations contender in “Get Out.” Oscar glory has been elusive for the studio for nearly two decades, going back to 2001’s “A Beautiful Mind.” Oscar glory has in fact been elusive for all the major studios save Warner Bros., as the last 20 years have largely been about specialty distributors like Fox Searchlight and The Weinstein Company at the Academy Awards. The story this season has been the return of the majors in force with films like “Black Panther,” “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “A Star Is Born,” and now it appears “Green Book” is the ringleader of the bunch.
