The King's Speech claimed the crown for best film at the Producers Guild of America Awards on Saturday, knocking off Golden Globes best-drama winner and presumed Oscar front-runner The Social Network . It also beat out 127 Hours , Black Swan , Inception , The Fighter , The Kids Are All Right , The Town , Toy Story 3 , and True Grit .
The PGA Awards were hosted by filmmaker Judd Apatow at the Beverly Hilton - where, a week before, the Golden Globes had been hosted by comic actor Ricky Gervais , who drew brickbats for his relentlessly snarky jibes at the awards, guests and nominees. "What did you think of Ricky Gervais?" Apatow asked the PGA crowd. "I didn't like him. I thought he was mean."
The PGAs are part of the steady stream of ceremonies leading up to next month's Academy Awards. The Social Network , starring Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg , appeared to be on Oscar's best-picture fast track, dominating honors from top critics groups and winning the Golden Globe last week.
But the PGA win solidified a contender spot for The King's Speech , which features Golden Globe best-actor winner Colin Firth as Queen Elizabeth II 's father, George VI, as he tries to overcome a debilitating stammer.
Jonathan Franzen is back in the awards circle.
His Freedom , one of 2010's most lavishly praised novels, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle fiction award. Though bypassed for the National Book Awards, judged by fellow authors, it was an obvious choice for a prize voted on by reviewers, many of whom placed Freedom on their annual best-of lists. None of the NBA fiction nominees, including winner Jaimy Gordon 's Lord of Misrule , made the critics-circle cut. Winners will be announced March 10.
Other nominees, announced Saturday, were Jennifer Egan 's novel A Visit From the Goon Squad , Isabel Wilkerson 's history The Warmth of Other Suns , and memoirs by Christopher Hitchens ( Hitch-22 ) and Patti Smith , whose Just Kids won an NBA for nonfiction. Books written in foreign languages but available in English also are eligible; fiction finalists also include 101-year-old German-Dutch novelist Hans Keilson , cited for Comedy in a Key and Israel's David Grossman for To the End of the Land. The fifth nominee was Irish novelist Paul Murray for Skippy Dies .
Nonfiction choices are Wilkerson, S.C. Gwynne 's Empire of the Summer Moon , Jennifer Homans ' ballet history Apollo's Angels , former Inquirer correspondent Barbara Demick 's Nothing to Envy and Siddhartha Mukherjee 's The Emperor of All Maladies .
Among the other finalists are those in the biography category - Sarah Bakewell 's How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne ; Selina Hastings ' The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham ; Yunte Huang 's Charlie Chan ; Thomas Powers ' The Killing of Crazy Horse ; and Tom Segev 's Simon Wiesenthal .
Besides Hitchens and Smith, autobiography nominees were Darin Strauss ' Half a Life ; David Dow 's The Autobiography of an Execution ; Rahna Reiko Rizzuto 's Hiroshima in the Morning ; and Kai Bird 's Crossing Mandelbaum Gate .
Audiences weren't afraid of committing to Paramount's rom-com No Strings Attached , making it the No. 1 movie in its opening weekend, earning $20.3 million. Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman star as friends who try to maintain a purely sexual relationship with each other, even as they find they're falling in love.
Last week's No. 1 movie, Columbia Pictures' action comedy The Green Hornet , dropped to second place with $18.1 million, for a total of $63.4 million.
It was the 11th weekend in a row that was down from the same time in previous year, when James Cameron 's Avatar was still dominating from its debut at the end of 2009.
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