Surprise! Producers Pick "Moulin"

Mon., Mar. 4, 2002 10:30 AM PST by Josh Grossberg

The Oscar race has just been kicked up a notch.

Throwing the already wide-open Academy Award derby into chaos, the Producers Guild of America tapped Moulin Rouge as the top film of 2001.

Baz Luhrmann's manic musical--starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor as a pair of tuneful, if ill-fated, lovers--surprisingly took the top trophy at the union's 13th Annual Golden Laurel Awards Sunday, beating a field that featured the seemingly odds-on Oscar favorites A Beautiful Mind and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, as well as the crowd-pleasing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Shrek.

Along with the Directors Guild of America's Awards, which will be presented this weekend, the PGA contest is considered the most accurate prognosticator of Oscar glory: Nine of the last 12 Golden Laurel winners have gone on to capture the Best Picture Oscar, including last year's Gladiator .

The victory marked a comeback of sorts for Rouge.

The love it-or-hate it film had widely been thought to have fallen by the wayside in the Oscar race after Academy voters snubbed Luhrmann for a Best Director nomination.

Now, Rouge has to be considered a solid Oscar contender, up there with early front-runner A Beautiful Mind and Lord of the Rings, which leads the Academy Award race with 13 nominations.

The Golden Laurel is the latest award in the can-can for Rouge. The postmodern musical also won plaudits for Best Motion Picture Comedy at this year's Golden Globes and was named the top film of 2001 by the National Board of Review.

The PGAs also honor television. HBO dominated, with Sex and the City picking up the Danny Thomas Award for Best TV Comedy Series and Band of Brothers capturing the David L. Wolper Award for Long-Form Television. The only thing preventing an HBO sweep was NBC's The West Wing, which earned producer John Wells yet another Norman Felton Award for Best Dramatic TV Series.

Leading the list of honorary award winners was legendary Hollywood director Robert Wise, who was presented with the union's Milestone Award, which singles out those individuals who have made "an historic contribution to the entertainment industry."

Veteran producer Lawrence Gordon received the David O. Selznick Lifetime Achievement Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures for producing such classic action hits as Die Hard and Predator, as well as award-winning flicks like Field of Dreams and Boogie Nights.

The Stanley Kramer Award, for films dealing with social issues, went to the I Am Sam production team of Jessie Nelson, Marshall Herskovitz, Edward Zwick and Richard Solomon.

Motion Picture Hall of Fame Awards went to John Frankenheimer for his 1962 Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate and Howard Gottfried for 1976's TV-skewering classic Network. On the TV side, Garry Marshall was recognized for Happy Days and Norman Lear for Maude.

The TV production company Carsey-Werner-Mandabach--which masterminded such sitcoms as The Cosby Show, Roseanne and That '70s Show--received the David Susskind Lifetime Achievement Award in Television.

DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg was honored with the Visionary Award for his role in putting together the history-making America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon.

And Pixar's Ed Catmull, John Lasseter and Steve Jobs earned the PGA's Vanguard Award for their ground-breaking 'toon work on such hits as Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc.