LA-LA LEADS
PRODUCERS, WRITERS RAVE OVER MUSICAL
Oscar favorites LaLaLand, Moonlight and Manchesterby theSea were nominated by the Producers Guild of America (PGA) for its top award on Tuesday. But the snarky, expletive-spewing superhero of Deadpool continued his unlikely awards season campaign. The guild’s 10 nominees for its Best Picture honor, the Darryl F. Zanuck Award, also included Arrival, Fences, Hack saw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures and Lion. It was a largely expected bunch plus the surprising inclusion of Deadpool.
Is it still a surprise if it has racked up nomination after nomination in almost every award show? It last week landed a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in the Writers Guild of America (WGA), and it was twice nominated by the Golden Globes: Best Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy and a Best Actor-Musical or Comedy nod for Ryan Reynolds.
PGA nominees have historically been a good predictor for which films will receive Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. And for seven consecutive years up to last year, the PGA’s top prize matched (in one case with a tie) the academy’s top honor. Last year, however, the PGA chose TheBigShort, while
Spotlight won the Oscar. The Producers’ Guild uses the same preferential balloting system that the Academy of Motion Pictures employs.
The producers also nominated five films for Best Animated Movie: Finding Do ry, Ku bo and the Two Strings, Mo ana, The Secret Life of Pets and Zootopia. Winner will be announced in a Jan. 28 ceremony at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.
The WGA also announced its nominees for the best screenplays of the year with selections that largely stuck to awards season regulars. The Best Original Screenplay nominees were Kenneth Lonergan’s script for
Manchester by the Sea, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Damien
Chazelle’s LaLaLand, Taylor Sheridan’s Hell orHighWater and Jeff Nichols’ Loving.
While the WGA Awards can be strong predictors of the Academy Award screenplay nominees, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has already deemed Loving (inspired by Nancy Buirski’s documentary) and Moonlight (based on Tarell Alvini McCraney’s play) adapted scripts. The nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay were Arrival, penned by Eric Heisserer; Fences, by the late playwright August Wilson; HiddenFigures, by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi; Nocturnal Animals, by TomFord; and Deadpool, by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.
Nominees for Best Documentary Screenplay went to Author: TheJTLeRoy Story, written by Jeff Feuerzeig;
Command and Control, with a telescript by Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser, from a story by Brian Pearle and Kim Roberts; and Alex Gibney’s ZeroDays.
The WGA will name the winners to its 69th annual awards on Feb. 19 in simultaneous ceremonies in New York and Los Angeles. Television nominations were announced earlier.
LaLaLand leads Gosling and Stone are also racking up awards after awards and pundits expect Oscar nominations for both of them. They have already won the Best Actor and Best Actress trophies in the recently concluded Golden Globes, where the film was also hailed the Best Picture among five nominees in the Musical or Comedy category.