We'll finish up our April Foolish' work with the acting categories this week but for now all the other pieces of the prophetic (or not) puzzle are in place. You can see it all at the Prediction Index. We're usually about half right about Best Picture this early on but... which half? And of course this year is wildly different. It's the only time we've ever had a nationwide movie theater shutdown. Georgia plans to reopen movie theaters this month (medical experts think any such reopenings of crowd venues are premature) but most States aren't eager to risk it just yet.
About the current crisis and the Oscars....
We've already discussed the hysteria about what might happen with the Oscars but let's dive in again since after we published our (optimistic) thoughts, more "the sky is falling" conversations hit the internet.
Unavoidable Truth: There will be fewer movies eligible for the Oscars in 2020 than there have typically been for many many many Oscar years now.
Forthcoming Sure-to-be Ubiquitous Complaint That Will Probably be a Falsehood:
"They can't hold the Oscars because there aren't enough movies!"
In the 1970s and 1980s there were reportedly fewer than 150 movies opening annually. Nowadays it's more like 700 per year which is even more pictures than in Hollywood's Golden Age (though the movies aren't half as popular since television didn't yet exist back then). Of those 700 or so that open about half of them end up being Oscar eligible. So the Academy usually has over 300 pictures to choose from and then promptly settles on only about 15 to pay any attention to at all. In short, a lot more movies have been coming out in this past decade than used to come out.
There's no reason that drawing from a smaller pool of eligible releases should be a problem unless the Academy panics. If movie theaters reopen, by, let's say, October... that's six months of movie releases (Jan-March/Oct-December) and so, even if you cut the year in half, it's still more movies than were released in some years within the 1970s and 1980s and they didn't cancel the Oscars back then. (Now, if movie theaters don't reopen in the fall, we will have been proven wrong. It is possible that theaters don't reopen in 2020. We just dont think it's probable.)
Will any of these titles become Best Picture contenders?
So those Oscar predictions?
On our Best Picture chart we've mostly centered on prestige projects and possible critical darling indies that are either completed or in post-production already. Anything that still has filming to do (after Hollywood goes back to work) we're assuming will end up in 2021 or 2022. We can't consider anything a sure thing in this unfortunately dangerous and volatile year.
So please receive these early bird predictions as they were intended: a bit of enthusiastic Oscar-loving foolishness while we wait for our beloved cinema to return to us via movie theaters. Some of the pictures you see on the chart will crash and burn (and become future candidates for Joe & Chris's "This Had Oscar Buzz"). Others will get pushed to 2021. But SOME OF THEM will end up celebrating their good fortune next February at the Oscars as nominees. TAKE A LOOK.