2024 PGA Awards Nominations Might Predict Best Picture Oscar Nods

Awards prognosticators are, for the most part not, the audience voting for the Oscars. But the consensus upon the announcement of the 2024 PGA Awards nominations is that the Producers Guild of America’s picks for the prestigious Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures hit the nail on the head in terms of the direction the Best Picture race has been trending toward. In other words, it sure seemed like we just got an advance notice of the 10 films that will fill up nomination slots for the Academy’s highest honor come January 23.

For context, the PGA Awards are one of the most accurate bellwethers for Best Picture, with 15 of its last 20 guild winners (including “Everything Everywhere All at Once” last year) going on to win the Oscar. Other honors like the Critics Choice Awards and the AFI Awards have a similar reputation for accuracy, but the former has a voting body with almost no overlap with the Academy, and the latter focuses on productions that were on a certain level based in the United States.

Coincidentally, the PGA Awards nominations actually were announced the same day as the star-studded luncheon celebrating the AFI Awards’ 2023 honorees. When that list was announced, there was a similar sentiment around how it seemed to speak almost exactly what the Best Picture frontrunners were. It featured massive productions like “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Killers of the Flower Moon;” smaller…