Everything Everywhere All At Once takes Producers Guild Award

LOS ANGELES - Add another one to the Everything Everywhere All At Once trophy shelf (and slap some googly eyes on it, too).

The Producers Guild of America (PGA) handed its best film award on Saturday night to the sci-fi hit about a Chinese American laundromat owner’s unlikely quest to save the multiverse, extending the film’s award-season momentum after a big win at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) ceremony.

Producer Jonathan Wang took the stage flanked by his cast, including Oscar nominees Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis, and the film’s directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.

Wang spoke movingly about his feeling of never fitting in as a mixed-race child.

“When I was with my Chinese family, I never felt really Chinese, and with my white family, I never really felt white,” Wang said. “But in this room with all you other nominees, you shouldn’t have accepted me, you shouldn’t have welcomed me in, but I feel like family in this room with you producers.”

There is no stronger best-picture bellwether than the PGA Awards, which are voted on by a guild that shares significant member overlap with the academy.

Since 2009, when both groups adopted a preferential ballot and expanded the number of best film nominees from five, the PGA winner has repeated at the Oscars all but three times.

Last year, when the Producers Guild opted for Coda over the Directors Guild winner The Power Of The Dog, it offered the strongest evidence that the family dramedy was on a path to Oscar’s top prize.

And of the last 15 films to win both the PGA and DGA prizes, 11 went on to win the best picture Oscar.

With two significant guild prizes in its pocket, Everything Everywhere is heavily favoured to triumph at both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards on Sunday night and the Writers Guild Awards (WGA) next weekend.

That would be an auspicious clean sweep: In the last 28 years, no film has won the best picture Oscar without first taking a top prize from at least one of Hollywood’s four major guilds.

Is the final race decided, then? Well, it is worth noting that Everything Everywhere got a cold shoulder last weekend at the Baftas, prizes that are handed out by the British academy, which also shares members with the American academy.

Despite 10 Bafta nominations, Everything Everywhere won only an editing prize, and even season-long sweeper Ke Huy Quan lost the supporting-actor trophy to The Banshees Of Inisherin star Barry Keoghan.

Bafta gave its

best film award to Netflix’s All Quiet On The Western Front,

although it will be difficult for that war movie to build dark-horse momentum over the coming weeks, as it was not nominated for the SAG, WGA or Independent Spirit Awards.

Elsewhere at the PGA Awards, the documentary film prize went to Navalny, while Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio was named the best animated film. The top television awards went to The White Lotus (best episodic drama), The Bear (best episodic comedy) and The Dropout (best limited series). NYTIMES