"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
Best Feature: Nomadland
Best Animated Feature: Soul
Best Documentary Feature: My Octopus Teacher (lol, it's happening)
The PGA has a very good track record of predicting the Academy Awards. Over the last ten years, they've matched up with the eventual Oscar winner seven times (The King's Speech, The Artist, Argo, 12 Years a Slave--tied with Gravity, Birdman, The Shape of Water, and Green Book) and did not match up with honoring The Big Short over Spotlight, La La Land over Moonlight, and 1917 over Parasite. In this current era (over the last five years), almost every Best Picture winner has been considered an upset. The only one that hasn't (The Shape of Water) was from an Oscar race where nobody was terribly confident in what was going to win. But Green Book was one of the several upsets over the last five years that they did forecast. So, generally good news for
For Best Animated Feature, seven of their last ten winners all won the Oscar (Toy Story 3, Frozen, Inside Out, Zootopia, Coco, Spider-Verse, Toy Story 4). The ones that missed were The Adventures of Tintin (not nominated for an Oscar), Wreck-It-Ralph (they with Brave), and The Lego Movie (not nominated for an Oscar). So, Soul is in a good place.
For Best Documentary, the PGA has a very odd track record. Seven of their last ten winners were not nominated for an Oscar (Apollo 11, Won't You Be My Neighbor, Jane, Life Itself, We Steal: The Story of WikiLeaks, The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, and Waiting for Superman), which probably has more to say about the Documentary Branch's taste than the PGA. I mean, look at those documentaries. None of them were nominated. Their overlap of winners were O.J. Made in America, Amy, and Searching for Sugar Man. So, what does that mean? If their winner is Oscar-nominated, it wins Best Documentary.
