“Brokeback Mountain” wins Producers Guild Award

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Director Ang Lee’s gay-cowboy
romance “Brokeback Mountain” solidified its status as the
front-runner for Oscar glory on Sunday when it was named best
picture of the year by the Producers Guild of America.

In 11 of the past 16 years, the winner has gone on take
home the Academy Award for best picture. Last year was an
exception with “The Aviator” winning the Producers Guild Award
but losing the Oscar race to “Million Dollar Baby.”

Oscar nominations will be announced on January 31 and
winners unveiled on March 5 during the 78th annual Academy
Awards.

The other contenders for the Producers Guild Award were the
historical dramas “Capote,” “Walk the Line” and “Good Night,
and Good Luck,” and the contemporary ensemble piece “Crash.”

“Brokeback Mountain,” which stars Heath Ledger and Jake
Gyllenhaal as two lovelorn cowboys, led the pack last Monday at
the Golden Globe Awards, another Oscar bellwether, winning four
awards, including best drama and best director for Lee, a
Taiwan native.

The Producers Guild usually honors big-budget films but
this year the group’s members went for smaller picture over the
high-profile likes of “Cinderella Man,” “Munich” and “King
Kong.”

Of this year’s five nominees, only “Walk the Line” was
distributed by a major studio, Twentieth Century Fox, and its
relatively modest budget of $29 million dwarfed those of its
rivals. The saga of the burgeoning romance between country
music singers Johnny Cash and June Carter, has earned just more
than $100 million at the box office.

“Brokeback Mountain,” on the other hand, has earned about
$42 million to date but has not played widely yet. It was
distributed by Focus Features, a unit of General Electric Co.’s
NBC Universal. Fox is a unit of News Corp.