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LOS ANGELES - Comedy Little Miss Sunshine was the surprise winner at an influential awards ceremony in Hollywood yesterday, making the low-budget film a formidable contender heading into the Oscar race.
The movie was named best picture by the Producers Guild of America, an association of film and television producers whose choices are often echoed at the US film industry's top honours, the Academy Awards.
The other contenders for the guild's feature honours were cultural drama Babel, crime thriller The Departed, musical Dreamgirls and The Queen, an inside look at the British royals.
Awards and nominations from industry associations like the Producers Guild often help narrow the choices for Oscars. Many of the group's members belong to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars.
Babel, The Departed and Dreamgirls are expected to dominate when the Academy Award nominations are unveiled on Wednesday in Beverly Hills, though Little Miss Sunshine's PGA win is likely to raise its profile among Academy voters.
Babel and Dreamgirls took the top awards at the closely watched Golden Globes earlier this week.
Little Miss Sunshine, which was made outside of Hollywood's studio system for a mere US$8 million, was a commercial and critical hit, earning about US$60 million in the United States so far. Comedies, however, do not historically score well with Oscar voters.
The film follows a family on a road trip to a young girls' beauty pageant in California and its ensemble cast includes Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell and Toni Collette. It was released by Fox Searchlight, a unit of News Corp.
The Producers Guild of America has predicted the eventual best-picture Oscar winner 11 times in its 17 years of voting, but it was out of step in the last two years. In 2006, the guild chose Brokeback Mountain, while the Academy went with Crash. In 2005, PGA choice The Aviator lost out to Million Dollar Baby on Oscar night.
Oscar winners will be unveiled February 25 during the 79th annual Academy Awards.
In other awards given out by the Producers Guild, Cars was named the year's best animated movie and Elizabeth I was named best made for television film. Grey's Anatomy was named best TV drama series and The Office best TV comedy series. The non-fiction TV award went to CBS' 60 Minutes and the award for best variety TV show went to Real Time with Bill Maher.
(Additional reporting by Dean Goodman)
- REUTERS
