Editors, Writers Honor Argo, Searching for Sugarman, & Breaking Bad

The Academy Awards is less than a week away and tomorrow is the final deadline for voting. The past few weeks, however, have already shown us where the wind is blowing with Argo dominating industry awards left and right including taking top honors in a couple of big ones which were announced this past weekend.

First up is the ACE Eddie Awards which honors editing in both film and television. The winners are:

Feature Dramatic Film: Argo
Feature Comedic or Musical Film: Silver Linings Playbook
Animated Feature Film: Brave
Documentary: Searching for Sugar Man
Half-Hour TV Series: Nurse Jackie
One-Hour Commercial TV Series: Breaking Bad
One-Hour Non-Commercial TV Series: The Newsroom
Miniseries or Motion Picture for TV: Hemingway & Gellhorn

Argo continued its hot streak by beating out three of its fellow Oscar nominees to win the drama award which more often than not has gone on to win at the Academy Awards giving the film even more momentum for its now supposedly inevitable Best Picture triumph. Silver Linings Playbook expectantly won its category as it was the only one nominated for an Oscar, but underestimate Harvey Weinstein's film at your peril. It's perhaps the one film that has been doing better than any other film to try to derail the Argo speeding train during this volatile voting period. Searching for Sugar Man, already the Oscar front-runner won here while Pixar's Brave is picking up some late-season steam. Finally, nice to see Breaking Bad win some more industry awards. For a complete list of the ACE Eddie Awards winners, click here.

ACE winners Breaking Bad and Searching for Sugarman join Argo as repeat winners at the Writers Guild Awards which honors screenwriters. The winners are:

Original Screenplay: Argo
Adapted Screenplay: Zero Dark Thirty
Documentary Screenplay: Searching for Sugar Man
Drama Series: Breaking Bad
Comedy Series: Louie
New Series: Girls

The two films that got the most critics wins in their respective categories came out on top here with Argo picking up yet another guild award and Zero Dark Thirty triumphing after all the controversy. With this said, both categories still seem delightfully up-in-the-air for Oscars. Argo is certainly the favorite for Adapted (especially with its more surprising win last week at the USC Scripter), but how do you deny BFCA-winner Tony Kushner for his work in Lincoln? Original Screenplay is even more of a minefield with Zero Dark Thirty, as stated previously, mired in controversy and not facing two of its fellow Oscar nominees and biggest challenges at the WGA Awards namely BFCA/Golden Globe winner Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained and surprise nominee Michael Haneke for Amour. Finally, Lena Dunham picks up another award for her work in Girls! For the complete list of WGA winners, click here.

Finally, if you're like me and want to have some idea how those always tough-to-predict Sound categories might go at the Oscars, then perhaps these results might shed some light though I honestly remain stumped:
- Les Misérables, Brave, and Homeland won at Cinema Audio Society Awards
- Life of Pi, Skyfall, Wreck-It Ralph, and Les Misérables honored at MPSE Golden Reel Awards