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Question: Why do the Oscars honor producers when a film wins Best Picture? What exactly did they do?
There's a reason you're confused: producers themselves find it difficult to describe their work.
“I do the impossible for the ungrateful,” someone cracked when I asked. “You can learn it, but you can't teach it,” another told me, referencing something professional wrestler Maurice “Mad Dog” Vachon used to say about his profession. An old producer advised me to give up this assignment completely. “Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown,” he said, using the classic movie line to sum up how difficult it is to demystify the work.
What drama queens! Okay, admittedly: producing is a complicated, underappreciated job. But there Are a few ways to think about the performance that help explain why producers—and not, say, directors—receive the Best Picture Oscar.
What a producer is and isn't
For the purpose of this discussion, throw out anyone who is listed on a film as an “executive producer” (someone who plays a major role early on, usually by securing financing and crucial rights). Only people named as 'producers' ultimately have a chance to win small gold statues.
Producers guide films from start to screen. They identify film ideas, sometimes by reading books or news articles, and work with writers to develop scripts. They attract directors. Some provide funding and help find the right leaders for various departments: casting, production design, wardrobe. Producers also oversee budgets, location scouting and scheduling. They advise on marketing campaigns once a film is ready.
“Everyone produces differently,” said producer David Hinojosa, a best picture nominee last year for “Past Lives,” whose recent films include “Babygirl,” an erotic thriller, and “The Brutalist,” an epic immigrant drama.
“But essentially the work is the same,” Hinojosa continued. “You download every aspect of the project into your DNA – financial, logistical, emotional.”
Many producers (but not all) spend a lot of time on sets.
“I show up with my hose, my oxygen and my ax and I'm ready to fight any fire, to do whatever I have to do to protect a project,” says Peter Jaysen, founder of Veritas Entertainment, one of the production companies behind 'A Complete Unknown', about the rise of Bob Dylan.
It can be a long haul. Jaysen said Veritas began working on “A Complete Unknown” in 2018, when HBO decided not to move forward with another version of Dylan's origin story.
How many producers are needed…
Individual producers have not always received the best picture award. In the early decades of the Academy Awards, the honor (then called Outstanding Production) went to a company. Studio bosses – Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and the like – were usually the ones to accept it and give a speech.
Individual producers were first designated as nominees at the 1951 Oscars. Records from the academy's Margaret Herrick Library indicate that there was “a lengthy discussion” among Oscar organizers about the adjustment, but they do not provide a precise reason for the move. It probably had to do with the post-war collapse of the studio system; three of the previous four Best Picture winners came from independent production companies or a foreign filmmaker.
Another rule change: how a lot of producers can get the highest Oscar – was prompted by Harvey Weinstein. In 1999, five producers, the most ever, trotted onto the stage to accept the best photography trophies for “Shakespeare in Love.” Weinstein, the Miramax co-founder who has since been jailed, was one of them, pushing a colleague out of the way in a race for the microphone. Then an embarrassed academy limited the number of nominated producers to three.
To winnow it, the academy first relies on the Producers Guild of America: which producers were the most involved? The guild has an extensive monitoring system that includes an appeals process. You can see which producers have been chosen by looking at the credits on the screen; next to their name they receive a “producer mark” consisting of the lower case letters pga
The academy's producer division will then make a final ruling, including reversing the three-nominee rule. In 2024, one best picture nominee, “Maestro,” had five producers approved to receive hardware. (It lost to “Oppenheimer.”)
And the Oscar goes to…
Producing gets a bad rap because the tasks are so vaguely defined and because so many people on the fringes of the film world call themselves producers when really they're just charlatans.
But since producers – sincerely producers – have such all-encompassing responsibilities over films, maintaining trust even when the doors are slamming in their faces (and working without much reward until relatively late in the process), their claim to the Best Picture Oscar is strong.
“Producers ARE filmmakers,” producer Mynette Louie (“Land Ho!”) wrote on Bluesky in November. “We are not financiers, executives, managers, agents, etc. We are creative people who are also good at leadership, organization, logistics, entrepreneurship and mathematics.”
“Please say it clearly,” she concluded. “We have been doing this for over a hundred years.”
