The Producers Guild liked the same movies everyone else liked, also pretty sure it watched Mad Men last year

By Sean O'Neal | January 3, 2012 | 8:47pm

Aux Features TV

Meeting at the stroke of midnight in a craggy stone hall lined with the skulls of former Harvey Weinstein assistants, the shadowy Producers Guild convened over flagons of mead for its annual intoning of filmed works that met with their approval, so sayeth them all. With its track record of accurately predicting most if not all of the films that will end up being selected for Oscar recognition, this year’s selections are perhaps more useful than ever, as we’ve seen over the last few months that almost no one can agree on anything other than that Christopher Plummer was pretty great in Beginners, and we should all just pretend Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close didn’t happen, even though it wanted an Oscar so bad it was kind of embarrassing. And other than a couple of sort-of surprises—for instance, rare nods to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Bridesmaids, the latter of which is definitely getting the dark horse contender push from Universal now—anyone who’s been paying attention to this incipient spewing of year-end lists will notice that presumed front-runners like The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo, War Horse, and The Help are looking more and more like locks.

And because everyone needs another opportunity to kvetch about overrated and underappreciated TV shows, the PGA also recognized outstanding work by producers on the small screen, and in the process implied that Dexter (which got nominated) is better than Breaking Bad (which didn’t), or any of the many other dramas that aren’t Dexter that weren’t nominated. Naturally, you could also make similar gripes about Community, ameliorate it with “at least Parks And Recreation got nominated,” and then close out with some general rancor directed at Glee or The Big Bang Theory, because we haven’t that done that in a few weeks. Not that you should necessarily take the PGA’s TV recommendations too seriously: Not only is it likely the only group to believe that The Kennedys was worthwhile, it also saw fit to recognize Mad Men this year, despite the fact that the show hasn’t aired an episode since 2010. It’s just that good, apparently. Anyway, here’s the complete list of nominees: