The Film Experience has never loved the complacency of locked up Oscar races, so it is with great pleasure that I share the news (though you probably didn't miss it) that Birdman won the Producers Guild Award tonight. Do we have an actual race for Best Picture? Have you voted as to who should win yet?
This doesn't mean that Boyhood is in trouble, necessarily, but it's a fascinating curveball, especially given that Boyhood was such a feat of producing; Imagine bankrolling and shepherding a small scale but dozen yaer experiment when you had no idea how it would turn out or if it would work at all?!
As you know from my top ten list I do slightly prefer Birdman to Boyhood but let's forget about Oscar's unfortunate "side-taking" for a minute and face facts: either of those films would make thrilling, atypical and totally deserving Best Picture winners.
And yet... Perhaps it's not so much a two way race as a three way?
The Weinstein Co continues to push The Imitation Game hard. More impressively than the film's very healthy box office haul is that they've managed to turn one of its detriments into a positive. Despite the film's ever so timid nods to the LGBT community, they've made that big weakness a rallying point. Consider the royal pardon of Alan Turing in the UK in 2013 and this current campaign:
I'm not a huge fan of The Imitation Game but I don't mind this shameful "message" movie ploy. I really don't. The desired but probably unsuccessful end will justify the means, if you know what I mean. Do you?
The movie itself preferences celebrating vague / idealogically flexible "specialness" over the more divisive celebrate gay people and what they've contributed to the world that has often rejected and harmed them but even so. It's a good message to get out there even if it's relatively weakly stated in the actual film. Perhaps its timidity is why it's actually so popular. Consider that of all the Best Picture nominees I offered to my extremely conservative and religious family while visiting them before Sundance, this is the one they opted to see. They've never before been interested or willing to sit through anything that one might dub "gay". They all loved it and really glommed on to its repetitive quote.
Sometimes it's the people no one imagines anything of that do the things no one can imagine."
Is the thing no one can imagine this film winning Best Picture?