PGA Award Nominations Include Spotlight, Mad Max

The Producer Guild of America Awards have announced their nominees for the best in film and TV of 2015, and it’s a swell lineup. The guild’s list of the Top 10 films of 2015 includes likely Oscar contenders like Spotlight and The Big Short, which combined with their SAG Awards noms all but guarantees those films will land Best Picture Oscar nominations. But the PGA also gave boosts to bubble contenders like Mad Max: Fury Road and Straight Outta Compton, even throwing in a couple of pleasantly surprising additions in Ex Machina and Sicario. But what’s not here? Carol, Room, Steve Jobs, The Hateful Eight, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The PGA winner is actually a pretty solid indicator of Oscar glory, so the odds are very good that our eventual Best Picture winner is on this list. Given that there is overlap between voting members in the PGA and the Academy, we see which films a large group rallies around in terms of consensus. The past 8 PGA winners in a row have gone on to win the Oscar for Best Picture (2013 was a tie between 12 Years a Slave and Gravity), so if you’re looking to handicap your Oscar ballot, the PGA Award and the DGA Award are the two strongest hints towards where the Academy might lean.

spotlight-john-slattery-michael-keaton — Image via Open Road Films

In terms of nominees, however, there’s rarely a film-for-film match. Last year’s PGA nominees included Nightcrawler, Gone Girl, and Foxcatcher, none of which landed Oscar nods. And the previous year’s outliers were Blue Jasmine and Saving Mr. Banks. So while some of these nominees are likely to land Best Picture Oscar nods, it’s unlikely that all of them will make the cut—although how great would an Oscar nomination for Ex Machina be?

Having followed the Oscar race closely this year, I’d wager at this point that Spotlight, The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, Brooklyn, The Revenant, and Bridge of Spies all go on to score Best Picture Oscar nominations, with Straight Outta Compton falling firmly in the “maybe” column. But we’ll have a better idea of the Oscar prospects once the DGA announces, which is another voting group that has overlap with the Academy membership.

For now, take a look at what the Producers Guild of America deems the best films and TV shows of 2015, with a bit of a shocker in the latter category as the critically derided second season of True Detective scored a Best Long-Form Television nomination.