Everything Everywhere All at Once cements status as strong Best Picture Oscar frontrunner with PGA win

Can anything but Everything win the Best Picture Oscar?

Everything Everywhere All at Once has scored the top prize at the Producers Guild of America Awards, a key Oscar bellwether. Since 2013, the PGA winner has gone on to win Best Picture seven times (counting the year of a tie). This cements Everything Everywhere's status as a dominant frontrunner in the Best Picture Oscar race after its previous win at the Directors Guild of America Awards.

Crucially, the PGAs also use the same balloting system as the Oscars, in which voters rank the Best Picture nominees in order of preference. This tends to favor films that are broadly appealing. Some had argued the preferential ballot could hurt Everything Everywhere at the Oscars because the film would turn off some older Academy voters with its wacky sense of humor. But the fact that it won at the PGAs using a preferential balloting system seems to disprove this. A PGA loss for Top Gun: Maverick also may take that film out of the running for Best Picture, as the producers guild is generally more willing to recognize blockbusters than the Academy.

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The only knock against Everything Everywhere is that it was largely shut out at the British Academy Film Awards, whose voting body overlaps with the Academy, but its main competitors have even more working against them. The Fabelmans is missing an editing Oscar nomination, which is usually needed to win Best Picture, and received just one BAFTA nod. The Banshees of Inisherin lost the top prize at the BAFTAs despite winning two acting awards. And All Quiet on the Western Front won Best Film at the BAFTAs, but its director wasn't even nominated at the Oscars.

If any other film hopes to gain last-minute momentum, it can make a final stand this evening at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Everything Everywhere, though, is expected to win that top prize too, suggesting its competitors can only hope to become Best Picture winners in another life.