At yesterday’s “Movers & Shakers” (i.e., producers) panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein asked Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa to comment about the Academy’s grossly unfair decision to exclude them from the official group of three who, if LMS wins the Best Picture Oscar, will be allowed to go up onstage and receive a statuette, despite theirBerger and Yerxa being the film’s “real” ground-floor producers.
Yerxa gave a soft-pedalled response, saying that the Producers Guild, which approved Yerxa and Berger as one of the LMS producers, and the Academy “are not fully conversant.” Berger was more emphatic: “We produced this movie. Whatever the Academy may say or determine, we produced this movie.”