2012 Producers Guild Award Winners: 'The Artist' and 'Tintin' Take Home the Honors

The Producers Guild of America (PGA) announced the winners of their 2012 awards tonight and The Artist keeps on rolling while the animated contenders got a bit of a shake-up. The Adventures of Tintin earned its second big win in less than a week after winning at the Golden Globes last weekend as it took home the producer of the year award for Best Animated Feature tonight. Does this mean Rango is now on the ropes? More on that in a second…

Of the more than 5,000 members of the Producers Guild, only 446 of them are members of the Academy, but, despite the number discrepancy, you can rest assured their declaring The Artist a winner tonight is a big deal. Since first handing out the award in 1990, 14 of the 21 PGA Producer of the Year winners have gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars with the last four winners matching exactly. If you’ll remember, it was when The King’s Speech won with the Producers Guild last year that the tide really began to turn.

This year it isn’t as much about the tide turning as much as it’s a confirmation the race is virtually over for Best Picture. If anything, I felt the PGAs were the one place where the year’s Best Picture race could shift as it did last year had a film such as The Descendants, Hugo or had any other film winning the award. As it stands, I don’t see anything standing in The Artist‘s way.

Meanwhile, in the documentary category things continue to remain maddening for someone like me attempting to predict the Oscar nominees as a film not even eligible for Oscar consideration won tonight’s documentary producer of the year award. The win went to Michael Rapaport’s Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, which takes a look behind-the-scenes of the innovative and influential band. I’ve held off so far on predicting the category, hoping the PGAs would give me a little assistance as Oscar nominations will be announced this Tuesday, January 24, but no such luck.

Getting back to the animated contenders for a second, I took to Twitter and asked whether the win for Tintin made it an Oscar favorite over Rango to which indieWire’s Anne Thompson replied, “If it gets nominated Tintin could win but I still have my doubts about the animated branch, which hates performance capture.”

This isn’t something I had thought of since the film was included on the list of film’s up for consideration in the category, but Anne does bring up a good point. To my knowledge, Happy Feet and Monster House are the only two films that ever used performance capture to be nominated for Oscar’s Best Animation category.

Previously, films including A Christmas Carol, Beowulf and The Polar Express were all eligible for Best Animated Feature. Of course, none of those films were directed by three-time Oscar winner Steven Spielberg. Will that make a difference?

Of the three films I just mentioned, Tintin has a better RottenTomatoes rating than them all with Beowulf four percentage points behind at 70%, which is to say the film does have its share of supporters in the audience, though the support for Rango would still appear to make up a larger audience.

All of that said, I will be here on Monday with my final predictions in 21 Oscar categories. You can check out my current predictions right here and all of tonight’s PGA winners directly below with the winners marked in bold red typeface.

I’ve also added The Artist as the winner to my “Oscar Overture” section, taking a look at winners from the major guilds and award shows, a section that will begin filling up over the next month with tonight’s PGAs being the first major guild awards to be handed out. You can check out that section right here.

Darryl F. Zanuck Producer of the Year Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures: