It's OK, take a deep breath – before you know it this whole awards season affair will be over and you can go back to watching films that you want to instead of films that you feel weirdly guilted into seeing because it won some ultimately pointless award.

But before it's all over, another award has been handed out – and it's an important one. The Producer's Guild Of America (PGA) has announced that the best film of the year is Little Miss Sunshine. Little Miss Sunshine winning the PGA Best Film award is important because a) The PGA awards have a clever history of predicting the movie that wins Best Picture at the Oscars and b) unusually for an award-winning movie, Little Miss Sunshine features surprisingly few scenes of Helen Mirren being all hoity-toity or Brad Pitt relentlessly crying into a telephone for 45 minutes.

Anticipation for the Oscars is reaching as much of a fever pitch as you can expect from an exercise in back-slapping hosted by Ellen DeGeneres that's more about fancy frocks than actual films. Later this week the Oscar nominations will be announced, but thanks to the deluge of awards that have already been handed out most people already have a decent idea about what they'll be. So far this season awards have been handed out from everybody to dusty old historians to review-writing slobberchops, and a pattern seems to be emerging. Actors liked Babel, The Queen and Little Miss Sunshine, The Golden Globes liked Babel, The Queen and Dreamgirls and the Directors Guild liked Babel, The Queen and Little Miss Sunshine too.

But what about the producers, the ultra-important people who help the movie-making process by… by… alright, so we don't exactly know the job description for Hollywood producers, but they're still allowed their opinion, right? In fact, the PGA is notoriously spot on when it hands out its awards – the winner of the PGA Best Film award has gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar 11 times out of 17 in the past. OK, so last year the PGA liked the gay cowboys and the Oscars liked bleak racism by numbers, but that doesn't count.

And this year the PGA has named indie comedy flick Little Miss Sunshine – the answer to the question 'what would Napoleon Dynamite be like if Wes Anderson directed it?' – as the best film of the year. Even though Little Miss Sunshine was beaten at the box office by a shitty-looking American Football film, it has begun to pick up critical momentum in recent weeks and looks set to be the Best Picture Oscar outsider. Let's hope that Little Miss Sunshine does go on to win an Oscar, purely so we can read stories about Brad Pitt angrily phoning his agent and demanding that someone finds him "one of those goddamn dancing fat girls movies that everybody likes" in an effort to win him the Oscar that has so far eluded him. Here's the full list of PGA award-winners:

Film: Little Miss Sunshine

Animated Film: Cars

TV Drama: Grey's Anatomy

TV Comedy: The Office

TV Movie/Miniseries: Elizabeth I

TV Variety: Real Time with Bill Maher

TV Nonfiction: 60 Minutes

Read more:

Sunshine Day at PGAs – E! Online