Prediction Updates: Picture, Director, Costumes & Visuals
Friday, December 20, 2013 at 5:00PM Time for major chart fixes now that all the major precursors have announced their nominations. We've started with Best Picture, Best Director, Animation & Documentary, and the Visual Categories... all updated to reflect recent changes (still working on the rest!).
It's The Film Experience, calling about your Oscar nominations...
The visual categories needed the most fine-tuning though they're much harder to predict prior to the guild nominations. Still, I'm feeling pretty bullish on the my predicted costuming lineup -- not that that branch isn't capable of major surprise inclusions and snubs come nomination morning.
Disco fashions could be hot hot hot with Oscar this year if THE BUTLER & AMERICAN HUSTLE are both nominatedThough the BFCA "Critics Choice" Nominations named the exact ten films most pundits believe are heading towards Best Picture nods, the category is still quite volatile thanks mostly to the precursor underperformance of Saving Mr Banks, the weird resurgence of Rush (of all things), the late breaking Wolf of Wall Street (which underperformed at virtually all the precursors despite a very vocal legion of freshly baptized disciples) and the Weinstein Co's stable of four. It's never wise to count Harvey Weinstein out and the major SAG response to The Butler and August: Osage County combined with the Globe embrace of Philomena and the sweep of "first film" prizes for Fruitvale Station suggest that there's life in that quartet yet.
I'm guessing we have five fairly secure pictures: Hustle, Gravity, 12 Years, Capt Phillips, and Nebraska... which have all shown up everywhere they could have hoped to. But beyond that for the possible 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and/or 10th slots? It still feels like any number and permutation of the remaining eight or so pictures with the buzz could happen. Though, as per usual, I'd love to see a year with just five nominees again if only to watch the internet's collective head explode from the shock of it.
Current Oscar rules do allow for that, you know. We will have anywhere between 5 and 10 Best Picture nominees depending on how the voting goes down (Oscar's own statistical analysis of the past 20 years suggests that 10 is a virtual impossibility).
So have a look at the refurbished charts and report back. More categories to come.
Reader Comments (12)
Based on precursors the two front runners for Best Picture might be 12 Years and American Hustle, but you put AH outside the five in Film Editing. Does that mean you feel AH is not actually that strong in the Best Picture race in terms of winning? And then I remember you were a bit skeptical that they will go with 12 Years because of the tone of the film. Do you feel more confident now that the precursors show so much love for it?
I think Gravity will take best picture. Its a safe subject, its very well made, it stars two of Hollywood's most popular actors--on and off screen, it made tons of money.
Just curious why you don't think Stories We Tell can make the cut.
I am all about this idea of the internet's collective head exploding from the shock of there only being five nominees.
American Hustle was strong, all the way around. It was a lot like a Scorsese movie, which is not a bad thing. It was Scorsese but not just not quite as effective as his best work. It is good to have movies like this and WOWS, I presume, can not wait to see that, this year. A lot of the films are so heavy and dramatic, and in the Butler's case just melodramatic. Hopefully that movie goes the GG route and gets nothing.
I guess you haven't seen La grande bellezza. I'm sure it would made a strong appearance in your visual categories. Italian sumptuousness at its best.
I love the fact that Patricia Norris seems to be the frontrunner this year.
I haven't seen that many pictures this year but no royalty porn in costume?
I have a theory that the chance for five nominees isn't as great as we think. The Academy did an internal investigation in 2011 when they changed the nomination procedure and found that between 2000-2010 there would be years of 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 nominees. However, I theorize that increasing the number of nominees causes voters to be open to voting for more contenders. Whereas in the years of five nominees, they'd stick to the 6-8 films that stood a chance at a nomination, in a year of 10 perhaps they're willing to branch out to the top 15 films. This diminishes the support for any one film and, presuming the votes are too diffuse, would result in more nominees.
Even if that theory is wrong, I don't see how there could be only 5 nominees. It's just so wide open; votes will likely be spread around.
Evan -- i agree with the theory that the knowledge that more films are actually in the running changes the way people vote. I think it would have to. But still, I find it hard to believe that given that internal study that we won't see a year coming up that surprises us with less nominees. It just this year might not be that year.
Jordan -- my feeling on stories we tell (which i loved) is that it does two things that the documentary branch historically is averse to: it's tangentially about movies (the general voting body loves this but not the documentary voting body) and it's experimental in form (they definitely like traditional biopics best) to the point where some people think of it as a hybrid between a feature and a documentary.
Glenn wrote about those two theories in his recent documentary piece and I agree.
It's funny that Anna B. Sheppard is a contender in Costume Design for another WWII movie!
Those are good reasons, but I hope you're both wrong! Would love to see Polley take home the Oscar this year.
P.S. Glad to hear you loved it!