The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the Academy Awards presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) since the awards debuted in 1929. This award goes to the producers of the film and is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible to submit a nomination and vote on the final ballot. The Best Picture category is traditionally the final award of the night and is widely considered as the most prestigious honor of the ceremony.
Richard Darryl Zanuck was an American film producer. His 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Zanuck was also instrumental in launching the career of director Steven Spielberg, who described Zanuck as a "director's producer" and "one of the most honorable and loyal men of our profession."
The Film Independent Spirit Awards are awards presented annually to independent filmmakers. Founded in 1984, the event was renamed the Independent Spirit Awards in 1986. The ceremony is produced by Film Independent, a not-for-profit arts organization that used to produce the LA Film Festival. Film Independent members vote to determine the winners of the Spirit Awards.
Brian Thomas Grazer is an American film and television producer. He founded Imagine Entertainment in 1986 with Ron Howard. The films they produced have grossed over $15 billion. Grazer was personally nominated for four Academy Awards for Splash (1984), Apollo 13 (1995), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Frost/Nixon (2008). His films and TV series have been nominated for 47 Academy Awards and 217 Emmy Awards.
William Todd Field is an American filmmaker and actor. He is known for directing In the Bedroom (2001), Little Children (2006), and Tár (2022), which were nominated for a combined fourteen Academy Awards. Field has personally received six Academy Award nominations for his films; two for Best Picture, two for Best Adapted Screenplay, one for Best Director, and one for Best Original Screenplay.
Morgan J. Freeman is an American film director. In 1997, his debut feature, Hurricane Streets, won three awards at the Sundance Film Festival.
Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 American tragicomedy road film directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from a screenplay written by Michael Arndt. The film stars an ensemble cast consisting of Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, and Alan Arkin, all of whom play members of a dysfunctional family taking the youngest (Breslin) to compete in a child beauty pageant. It was produced by Big Beach Films on a budget of US$8 million. Filming began on June 6, 2005, and took place over 30 days in Arizona and Southern California.
Mark Johnson is an American film and television producer. He won the Academy Award for Best Picture for producing the 1988 film Rain Man.
Michael Arndt is an American screenwriter. He is best known as the writer of the films Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Toy Story 3 (2010), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).
Indiewood films are made outside of the Hollywood studio system or traditional arthouse/independent filmmaking system yet managed to be produced, financed and distributed by the two with varying degrees of success and/or failure.
David T. Friendly is an American film producer best known for co-producing the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.
The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,660 attending in 2016. The festival takes place every January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort, and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres. Many films premiering at Sundance have gone on to be nominated and win Oscars such as Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Our Idiot Brother is a 2011 American comedy-drama film directed by Jesse Peretz and starring Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel and Emily Mortimer. The script was written by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall based on Jesse and Evgenia Peretz's story, and tells the story of a dimwitted but idealistic and well-meaning man who intrudes and wreaks havoc in his three sisters' lives.
Irving Saraf was a Polish-born American film producer, film editor, film director and academic. Saraf won an Oscar for producing the 1991 documentary film, In the Shadow of the Stars. In total, Saraf had more than one hundred fifty film and television production credits. His resume included Poland, Communism's New Look, a 1965 television film; USA Poetry: Twelve Films About Modern Poets in 1966; and the 2009 documentary Empress Hotel following the residents of a low-income hotel in Tenderloin, San Francisco.
Peter Saraf is a film, television and theatre producer. His producer credits include Little Miss Sunshine, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and Loving. He began his career producing with director Jonathan Demme on movies such as Philadelphia (film), Beloved, Adaptation (film), Ulee’s Gold, and the Oscar nominated documentary, Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation. He co-founded and co-ran Big Beach (company) with Marc Turtletaub, which he co-ran with Turtletaub for two decades until he exited "quietly" in 2020 after Big Beach moved its headquarters from New York and laid off a number of Saraf's staff. He has been nominated for Oscar, Golden Globe and Tony Awards and won multiple awards including the Spirit, Gotham, and Producers Guild Awards. He was the chair of the PGA East, a Vice President of the PGA, and currently sits on the executive committee of the Producers Branch of the Academy.
A24 is an American independent entertainment company that specializes in film and television production, as well as film distribution. The company is based in Manhattan.
Lily Gladstone is an American actress. Raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, Gladstone is of Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce, and European heritage. She earned critical acclaim for portraying Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman who survived the Osage Indian murders, in Martin Scorsese's crime drama film Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), receiving several accolades. She became the first Native American to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture and be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Marc Jay Turtletaub is an American film producer and former president and CEO of the Money Store.
Higher Ground Productions, also known simply as Higher Ground, is an American production company founded in 2018 by former United States President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
CODA is a 2021 coming-of-age comedy-drama film written and directed by Sian Heder. An English-language remake of the 2014 French-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, it stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, the child of deaf adults (CODA) and only hearing member of her family, who attempts to help her family's struggling fishing business while pursuing her aspirations to become a singer.
