I watched a clip on the news of the Oscar nominees, and was surprised when they announced Seabiscuit for Best Picture with “producer nominee to be determined.”
What does this mean? Don’t they know who the producer is? I looked up Seabiscuit on the Internet Movie Data Base and didn’t see a producer listed there either. What gives?
I imagine it’s to-be-announced because films for Best Picture are only nominated by name, not with the whole list of producers. Then when something gets nominated the Academy has to figure out who the people behind that name are, without actually asking them. If there is a long list of producers, you may not be sure who to include, and you don’t want to snub anyone, so you wuss out and say TBA.
OTOH, for the Producer’s Guild Awards, the nominees for the film were Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Gary Ross.
PS. IMDB does list a bunch of producers. They are on the full credits page, after the cast.
It comes down to Hollywood politics, as does almost everything Oscar-related.
The last twenty years have seen something called “credit proliferation,” wherein the title of producer, which is not regulated by unions or any other formal rules, is handed out as a reward when it isn’t particularly deserved. Please see my article on what exactly a producer does on a movie, and how this has been subverted by power politics over the years.
Now, because the producer (or producers) collects the statue for Best Picture, this has led to spectacles such as the win for Shakespeare in Love during which half the people in the audience got up to participate the award. I exaggerate, but really it was like eight or nine people, which is kind of silly, and brings to light the embarrassing dilution of the producer credit (even though Joe Average doesn’t know or care what’s really going on).
So the Academy Awards committee, in an attempt to avoid that kind of industry humiliation, decided a couple of years ago that a maximum of three people can collect the Best Picture statue, regardless of how many are listed as supposedly producing the film. The rules are tweaked and re-approved every year, so the official set for this ceremony isn’t yet available, but it probably won’t be substantially different from last year, in which Rule Seventeen, Paragraph 3 went as follows:
Emphasis added.
So naturally, when you’ve got a movie like Seabiscuit, whose credits list four producers, five executive producers, and one co-producer (line producer is different and doesn’t count here), you end up with a train wreck. Over the next few days, the makers of the horse-racing picture will engage in a lot of jockeying for position (heh) as they try to figure out who “really” produced the movie and who “really” deserves to stand up and get the statue if the movie wins. Whether this will in fact reflect the reality of the creative team, or if the more powerful people will elbow aside those beneath them with a “you’ll never work in this town again” warning, is entirely an individual phenomenon.
Based on my knowledge of the film and of Hollywood politics, I’d give you 4-1 odds that the final producer list will be Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy, and Gary Ross. But, as they say, that’s “to be announced.”
Let me know if you need more info.