But as many know, the road didn’t always appear to be heading in this direction. Five years of financing and refinancing, numerous revisions from writer Michael Arndt that included the creation of eight separate endings (Mr. Arndt was even fired from, then re-hired on his own screenplay) and the pressure of finishing production in time for the 2006 Sundance Film Festival made for a bumpy journey.

“Our only hope was that the movie get made,” Mr. Berger told me yesterday, calling from his Bona Fide Productions offices in Los Angeles. “This is all wildly beyond anything we could have ever predicted.”

Mr. Berger’s producing partner, Ron Yerxa, agreed, calling attention to how a story like that of “Little Miss Sunshine” would certainly appeal to an industry constantly in search of similar diamonds in the rough.

“Sometimes you can’t extrapolate widely enough that something with such humble origins can become a Best Picture nominee,” he said, calling from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. “But people felt like they discovered an underdog that wasn’t homogenized and pasteurized in the system. For anyone who wants to do sharp character stories and comedies, it has to be seen as an inspiration.”

Indeed, the film’s eventual emergence as one of the year’s five Best Picture nominees should be seen as a testament to fortitude and dreaming the dream. As Mr. Arndt told me yesterday after hearing the Academy’s announcement, “I knew that there were a lot of people out there who loved the film, but this is the ultimate validation of the idea that the film industry is democratic. A year ago we were hoping to get a distribution deal and now we have four Oscar nominations.”

For directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Mr. Arndt’s screenplay was the opportunity they had been looking for to make the transition to feature filmmaking efforts. Fans of director Hal Ashby, Mr. Dayton and Ms. Faris had longed for movies painted with the strokes of humanism that came to define his greatest work.

“The script made me laugh at the way people really do live,” Mr. Dayton said in a telephone interview along with his wife, Ms. Faris. “It was actually about something. And it’s not like anyone expected to get rich over this movie. Everyone involved did it because they loved the material.”

Ms. Faris agreed, adding, “One of the things that really hooked me was the Dwayne character. I understood everything from ‘I hate everyone’ to ‘Go hug Mom.’ It captured all the reality and anger and emotion of being a teenager.”

The directors were unable to translate their Directors Guild nomination into a directing nomination from the Academy, so the morning was bitter sweet in some sense. But being singled out personally ran a distant second to the reward that is seeing a modest creation embraced so warmly and with such absolution.

“We’ve said it before, but we feel like we’ve won already,” Ms. Faris said. Her husband and partner concurred, adding “We’re incredibly spoiled. I’d be the first to admit it.”

What remains now is whether “Little Miss Sunshine” can pull the final rabbit out of the hat and grace the stage at the Kodak Theater as 2006’s Best Picture champion. In a season that ultimately came to defy conventional prognosticating wisdom, surely anything can happen. But due to arbitration and Academy regulations, only three of the film’s five producers can gain admittance to the film’s listed nominees.

Mr. Dayton says he and Ms. Faris are writing a letter to the Academy in the hopes that all five men could be recognized. The Producers Guild of America saw fit that each was worthy of inclusion, and typically the Academy follows the guild’s judgment.

“We support the Academy’s desire to reduce the number of producers to those actually involved,” Mr. Dayton said. “It’s just unfortunate that they’ve chosen this arbitrary number of three.”

Mr. Berger noted the value of the collaboration and how important each producer was to the process. “We worked very effectively with these guys,” he said, “and we thought the Producers Guild gave the right decision. We’ll have to see what the Academy says after they go through their process.”

Mr. Yerxa agreed, adding that he and Mr. Berger “are not critical of the Academy’s decision. They’re in a really tough position that they haven’t been in before.”

In the end, “Little Miss Sunshine” is clearly the product of group effort, no more or less than the next film. It has been held under a magnifying glass in that respect this year, drawing more attention to the process than tends to see the light of day. But you won’t find anyone involved straining for individual credit. They are quite proud of what their artistic communion has yielded.

If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is equally proud of the cinema as a collaborative art form, they could do a lot worse than to deem each producer involved an eligible participant. But no matter what the outcome, that yellow VW wagon will keep chugging along in the hearts and minds of those brave enough to embrace idealism and dream big.