The Film Experience

I've never been good at math so predicting this year's Oscar race feels especially challenging. You can tell me that a picture requires 5% of #1 votes or that it's 10% or 406 votes or that you need #2 or #3 placements on 69.3% of ballots with odd #1 choices that weren't already tossed aside... None of it will really sink in. For the first time in well over a decade, I had a flashback to my high school algebra class and how my friends (who were in calculus) kept teasing me about my "polynomials?" confusion. I hate math!*

But in the end what does it matter? Buzz, also an abstraction, is more fun to play with and closer to the truth for non-mathematicians. Best Picture nominations have long required #1 votes, maybe not in the same configurations but they've always required them. And as Joe recently pointed out on the podcast, we're tricked into thinking too deeply about this each and every year. Who thought Frost/Nixon was the best movie of 2008? Who would ever have voted for Chocolat as the best film of 2000? And yet it happens year in and year out. Focusing too much on #1 votes can cloud this certainty: Any film still being discussed as a possibility this late in the game has a fanbase. The question is just 'is that base big / loyal enough within the Academy to secure it a best picture nomination?'

Mo'Nique reading the Best Picture nominees last year!

What Happens With The Screens Behind the Presenters?
For the first time in modern history we'll have no idea until the names are read whether there will be five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten nominees. In past years when they announced the nominees you'd see the blank boxes where the nominees would be revealed while they read out the names. You knew, for instance, if there would be 3 or 5 animated nominees by how many boxes were there even if you hadn't been paying attention to the number of eligible pictures released.

My current hourly obsession is wondering whether we'll be tipped off to how many pictures there are seconds before we hear the titles...

When we knew there would be ten they simply appeared as they were read but there weren't actually boxes behind the announcers to be filled in as there were in years with five. You follow? So this year if there are, say, 6 nominees will we first see the empty boxes and KNOW there will be six before the names are read?

PICTURE
If we only had five nominees, this race would be easy to call. Our nominees would be: The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris. And in that order of likelihood. (My preference order, just as reminder from my year in review, would be The Artist, Midnight in Paris, The Help, Hugo and The Descendants.) I believe the nomination tally hierarchy is going to be Hugo, The Artist, and The Help way out in front of other films. Moneyball would, I think, be the spoiler in a traditional shortlist year. No matter how you feel about those films on an individual basis, as a group that's a pretty beautiful spread of the film year: message movies, family dramas, cinematic novelties, smart comedies and releases stretching from summer to Christmas, from critical triumphs to sleeper hits. It's representative and we like the Oscars that way.

More after the jump...

But there could be six, seven, eight, nine... even ten nominees this year! Since we've never had a year like this one before no one knows how it will play out. No one. You could be John Nash and the math still wouldn't help any more than general buzz does. The most we know is the Academy's own statements that when they tested this new system out retroactively over the past ten years worth of ballots they had years with everything from five to nine nominees. Technically ten is possible but ten never came up in their retrospective recalculations.

My Predictions

The Artist
The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball

Though this year does seem to be a year with a widespread set of films with AMPAS appeal, everything beyond what I'm predicting as the nominees seems to have major impediments. (Or perhaps imagined ones...we'll know on Tuesday). While it's easy to imagine The Tree of Life, Drive, or War Horse getting #1 votes, it's also hard to imagine them triumphing after their poor showings in the guild nominations. And if you start to play the "which films will get #1 votes?" game, you're going to have 20 films in the running instead of 10. If you take the guild results super seriously, than The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Bridesmaids are both very much in the running. But if you can remember anything beyond the last two years of ten-wide lists, they don't really look at all like Best Pictures in terms of genre or intent or even, in Dragon Tattoo's case, the size of its gross. Usually films which veer towards the violent thriller genre require huge box office returns. Would The Silence of the Lambs, to cite a quick ancestor, have generated as much love with Oscar, despite its quality, if it hadn't been such a supersized success? Dragon Tattoo is no Silence. It's not even, some would argue, as good as David Fincher's previous two serial killer pictures Se7en (one nomination: film editing), and Zodiac (zero nominations) but those came before Fincher's induction into Oscar's club so they weren't as ready to honor him. Reputation means a lot for Oscar traction so maybe this will happen. But I'm doubtful.

DIRECTOR
It's foolish to doubt the candidacy strength of any of the DGA nominees each year which means that Allen, Fincher, Hazanavicius, Payne and Scorsese are all in the running. But it's also foolish to assume that the DGA will transfer totally intact. It rarely does and it happened just last year so the odds are against it. It's usually closer to 4 of 5 and 3 out of 5 is hardly unheard of. I'm guessing that Fincher falls to Malick, a director's director and a legend rather than a legend in the making.

ACTRESS
In this age of awards mania the internet usually moves on to "who will win?" LONG before we even know the nominees. All anyone has been talking about for the past couple of months is Viola vs. Meryl and before that it was months of Meryl vs. Glenn. The big question mark is whether that late cross-guild surge for Dragon Tattoo will fuel momentum for Rooney Mara. It might but I'm not going to bet on it. Guess how many votes the art directors, editors, directors, producers, and writers get when determining the Best Actress nominees? Zero. Yep, you're right. Only actors can nominate actors. The way I see it we have four women in the running for the 4th and 5th spot. The question is only whether they love Mara's new star narrative more than they love Tilda Swinton's art queen dominance. Tilda has had three years of worth of huge critical acclaim as an improbable headliner (just try to find a correlative movie star) post Oscar win is pretty damn impressive. Or maybe the question is whether they love Charlize Theron's comedic character work more than Glenn Close's dream project narrative. I'm guessing: Streep, Davis, Williams, Close and Swinton hang onto their SAG momentum.

P.S. I don't see Close as all that vulnerable. Dream project narratives tend to make that gold man shine with pride over his favored children.

ACTOR
This is where I'm taking my biggest risk. It's just a hunch but despite a lack of interest in him from the precursor voting bodies, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that Michael Shannon is going to show up. I'm guessing he replaces Michael Fassbender (despite Fassbender's great year). Why am I still predicting the buzz free Leonardo DiCaprio? I've learned that my own personal distaste for those effortful biopic performances and those uneven performances in Eastwood pictures (this one being both) is not remotely in line with the tastes of the Academy who tend to enjoy both of those things enormously. I'm happy to be proven wrong but right now I see Clooney, Pitt, Dujardin, DiCaprio and Shannon... but I think it's a very very close race for the fourth and fifth spots and if it's not Shannon & Leo, it could easily be Fassbender & Oldman, you know?

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Six women have been constantly propped up by precursors but there are only five slots. Toss a coin. Earlier my hunch for the ousting was Bejo or McCarthy... now it's Woodley. It keeps changing so I'm just tossing a coin. My guess: Shai on the outside looking in. But really it could be anyone besides Octavia Spencer.

SUPPORTING ACTOR
If there's an acting category we know less about than we think we know, it has to be this one. There has been so little discussion beyond the trio of Christopher Plummer, Albert Brooks and Kenneth Branagh. Whenever anyone gets out front super early and stays there with the strength that Plummer has, conversation below him or her tends to dry up. There is theoretically the possibility that a lot of other favorites exist that are just not being heavily i.e. publicly discussed. I wanted to predict Corey Stoll as a surprise (best picture coattails + great performance) but I don't want to jinx something that I'm sure is wishful thinking on my part... and I'm using my one wishful thinking allowance up in Best Original Screenplay.

So I'm sticking to the usual suspects: Plummer, Brooks, Branagh, Nolte and Hill. I don't quite believe in the Jonah Hill Moneyball nomination but I also can't really see who replaces him with anything like confidence though neither he nor Nolte strike me as particularly invulnerable. I'm just having a hard time picturing who among Stoll, Oswalt, and Mortensen can find enough rallying power to unseat them. Hell, if the voting is totally turbulent we might even see Armie Hammer smothering them all with his old age latex.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
To me this is the most volatile nomination competition (this year) outside of the big six. The WGA nominations which went to Midnight in Paris, Bridesmaids, 50/50, Win Win and Young Adult tell us (potentially) little since buzzy limited release writer-friendly movies like Take Shelter, Beginners, and Margin Call and the BP frontrunner The Artist and traditional bait like The Iron Lady were not eligible. I'm going with Midnight in Paris, Bridesmaids, 50/50, The Artist and the one wishful thinking move I allow myself this late in the prediction game is going to go to A Separation. Hey, if they watched their screeners and ever once thought about its LAFCA win, why wouldn't they vote for it? It's brilliantly constructed.

I expect that a lot of pundits will be sticking with Win Win which is probably a good guess since the people who love that movie feel warmly towards it. But it's interesting to note that Win Win's writer/director Thomas McCarthy has never been nominated for one of his own pictures. His sole Oscar nomination is for writing Pixar's Up. He wasn't nominated for The Visitor or The Station Agent despite their awards buzz.

SOUND I find these categories interesting in a very particular way this year. You've got two franchises in the running that both tend to do well here Transformers & Pirates of The Caribbean but you've also got all these new films with major sound elements like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Super 8 and the Cinema Audio Society nominees which went in a different direction somewhat from the blockbusters and toward the Best Pic hopefuls like Hugo and Moneyball.

Oscar can be weird with franchises, giving them the same nominations each time or abruptly ignoring them or alternating years in which they're honored and for somewhat arbitrary reasons (I still can't figure out that Deathly Hallows Part 1 Art Direction nomination). Guessing what they'll do can feel a bit like throwing darts at a board. Why, for instance, did Oscar find the first two Pirates movies worthy of dual sound nominations but no such nominations for the third film? Will the siren call of the mermaids win them dual nominations again or are the Giant Robots going to muscle their way back in or will they both be pushed over for brainy Apes or Superheroes. Won't honoring these franchises each time make the Oscars remarkably like the Emmys? Would love to get your perspective on this one. The question of what to do with similar annual achievements in franchises looks to become an increasing problem for the Oscars since franchises are truly dominating Hollywood culture these days.

With final predictions out of the way... it's time for me to get back to work on my own awards, future articles and building some charts so that Tuesday morning's tidal wave of information doesn't catch me unaware! Finally, a reminder: I'll be here tomorrow morning at 11 am for a live chat if you'd like to join us.

* For the record the best explanation of the best picture voting I've read -- because it doesn't get all math nerd but still explains it -- is over at Mark Harris's column.