The producers behind Gladiator, along with the rock nostalgia trip Almost Famous, the feel-good British dance import Billy Elliot, the martial-arts fantasy Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Steven Soderbergh's crusading babe flick Erin Brockovich, are the nominees for the Producers Guild of America's top honor (and key Oscar predictor), the Daryl Zanuck Producer of the Year Award. The winner will be announced at the guild's 12th annual Golden Laurel Awards three weeks before the Oscars.
The five finalists are all considered possible Academy Awards nominees. Notable films also hoping to snag an Oscar nod but overlooked by the PGA include Soderbergh's other critical smash, Traffic, as well as Cast Away, Chocolat, Quills and Wonder Boys.
For those films dissed by the PGA, the Oscar outlook isn't good. Winners of the Zanuck Award have seen their film go on to nab the Best Picture statuette eight of the last 11 years. Driving Miss Daisy, Dances with Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs, Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, The English Patient, Titanic and, last year's champ, American Beauty all captured both PGA and Academy honors.
The three PGA winners that didn't follow up with an Oscar were 1993's The Crying Game, 1995's Apollo 13, and 1999's Saving Private Ryan. Instead, Unforgiven, Braveheart, and Shakespeare in Love, respectively, took the top Academy Award in those years.
The producers guild also covers TV, and for the first time, the tube contenders have been split into two categories, one for comedy and one for drama. For its Norman Felton Producer of the Year Award in Episodic television dramas, producers singled out HBO's Oz, ER, Law and Order, The Practice and The West Wing. Last year's winner, when there was just a single trophy, was The Sopranos, which didn't even get a nomination this time out.
Nods for the Danny Thomas Producer of the Year Award for episodic comedies went to Will and Grace, Ally McBeal, Frasier, Friends, and Sex and the City.
Nominees for the David L. Wolper Producer of the Year Award in Longform Television were: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, CBS' live telecast of Fail Safe, If These Walls Could Talk 2, TNT's Nuremberg and the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs, which aired on the Discovery Channel.
The guild will honor the legendary Kirk Douglas with its Milestone Award; it will give Lifetime Achievement Awards to Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley and veteran film producer Brian Grazer, the man responsible for bringing 2000's biggest hit, Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, to the big screen.
Meanwhile, the PGA has decided to clamp down on the proliferation of all those producing credits by initiating an accreditation process to only make those producers who actually worked on a film eligible for awards, as opposed to stars and their agents who get so-called vanity credits. Last year, the guild was forced to withdraw 22 nominations for producers after finding out several of those getting on-screen credit did not actually do the nuts-and-bolts work to get the picture made.
The PGA will announce winners of the Golden Laurel Awards March 3 at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.