The PGA awards make history

Gravity and 12 Years a Slave share Hollywood producers’ top prize.

BEVERLY HILLS: Hollywood producers injected drama into the race for the Oscars on Sunday by choosing not one, but two movies as their best films of the year — space thriller Gravity and historical drama 12 Years a Slave.

It is the first time the Producers Guild of America has declared a tie in the 25-year history of its awards. The PGA has correctly chosen the eventual Academy Award winner for Best Picture for the last six years consecutively, including Iranian hostage drama Argo a year ago.

The PGA decision clashes with that of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which on Saturday chose 1970s-set corruption caper American Hustle from director David O Russell for its top prize, Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.

But SAG has a mixed record of foreshadowing the Oscar’s Best Picture with this award, mirroring the Academy Award  results in six of the last ten years.

Nevertheless, after an intense week of awards, the Oscars are shaping up to be a three-way race between these films. American Hustle with its strong performance, and Gravity, with its technical innovation, lead nominations with ten nods a piece, while 12 Years a Slave and its brutal depiction of pre-Civil War slavery in the United States has nine.

The highest honours of the film industry from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will be handed out on March 2. Voting among the 6,000 members runs from February 14 to 25.

“When the film first came out in Toronto, some people were saying that this was a brutal film, that no one would go to see it,” said McQueen, a British film-maker. “Box office here in the United States and in the United Kingdom has proven differently.”

The film is based on the true-life story of Solomon Northup, a free man tricked and sold into slavery in Louisiana plantations, who is subjected to horrific treatment. He is played by British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Gravity, from Mexican director and producer Alfonso Cuaron, is based on a script he wrote with his son Jonas Cuaron, inspired by their own setbacks as film-makers. It is about an astronaut played by Sandra Bullock, who is stranded in space after a space station is destroyed, her fight to return to Earth and a life marked by deep loss.

The longer time lag this year between Oscar nominations, voting and the ceremony itself, could spell some unpredictable voting among Academy members, adding more uncertainty to the highly competitive race.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd, 2014.

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