‘Oppenheimer’ keeps devouring awards with top prizes at Producers Guild, with Oscars up next

Oppenheimer sweeps awards season, winning top honors at PGA and SAG Awards, setting the stage for potential Oscar success.

With two weeks to go before the Oscars, Oppenheimer looks unstoppable.

Director and producer Christopher Nolan’s tale of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the atomic age won the top prize Sunday at the 35th Producers Guild of America Awards — a frequent predictor of Oscar best picture winners — the night after doing the same at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Oppenheimer won the PGA’s Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures over the exact same set of 10 nominees up for best picture at the March 10 Academy Awards, including Barbie, Poor Things and Killers of the Flower Moon, whose director, Martin Scorsese, was honored Sunday for his concurrent career as a producer.

The Zanuck Award winner has gone on to take the best picture Oscar for five of the past six years, and 12 of the past 15, including last year with Everything, Everywhere All at Once.

From the stage at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood, in the same complex where the Academy Awards will be held at the Dolby Theatre, Nolan thanked his fellow producer Charles Royen for giving him “American Prometheus”, the book that led to Oppenheimer, and “starting a chain reaction that’s spread all over the world.”

Earlier in the show, Robert Downey Jr. called it “the highest-grossing film about theoretical physics yet made.”

Downey on Saturday won best supporting actor at the SAG Awards, where Oppenheimer also won best ensemble, part of an awards season sweep that also included wins at the Golden Globes and Directors Guild Awards.