The PGA Awards were handed out last night.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, Nomadland took home Best Picture, which basically shores up that discussion. All that’s left to announce are BAFTA and SAG. And no one’s expecting BAFTA to vote for anything except Nomadland and SAG doesn’t really matter so much. Nomadland’s not nominated there and the only outcome there that will affect the race is if Chicago 7 wins, thereby nominally making it the second choice. Otherwise, that one’s locked.
In other categories, Soul won Best Animated Feature (no surprise), Hamilton won a Streaming Award (no shit) and My Octopus Teacher won the Documentary category. Only that and Time are in the Doc Feature field and, honesly, the win doesn’t mean a whole lot to me at the moment. Since the category began in 2007, only five PGA doc winners went on to win the Oscar. And you know what they were? The obvious populist five: Man on Wire, The Cove, Searching for Sugar Man, Amy and O.J. Made in America. Other stuff that won here are the docs that got ignored by the Academy: Life Itself, Jane, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Apollo 11. It’s hard to put that much stock into this, though it is a piece of information and given how the doc category is a giant question mark this year, I am wondering if we’re gonna see a March of the Penguins situation emerge with this one. Because truly, right now I can make a case for four of the five nominees.
But otherwise the big news to come out of here is that the Best Picture race is locked and depending on how the BAFTAs and all the guilds go, we might have a whole lot of locked categories coming our way over the next three weeks.
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