Punditry Madness! Team Experience joins in...
Saturday, January 22, 2022 at 11:58PM 
So dear readers, I've been having meetings with the team and they all wanted to join in on the Oscar prediction fun. So before the traditional charts on the Picture, Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, and Best International Feature Film pages you can see what each participating team member is predicting. It's fascinating to note the variety of opinions despite the fact that we're now late in the season.
BEST PICTURE / BEST DIRECTOR
Though Power of the Dog is leading with 11/13 #1 placements (and all #1 placements in Best Director), there are still Belfast holdouts. Ben & Chris think Branagh's personal passion project still has some Oscar oomph in it...
More surprisingly only five movies made every top ten prediction list, so there's quite a bit of disagreement as to which films are going to be in the running for Hollywood's most coveted award.
a tease of the chart
On this collective chart you can also see who has the most and the least faith in particular movies. For instance, Abe has the most faith in CODA while Elisa, our favourite Italian, has more faith in King Richard than the rest of our team, while Nick Taylor and I think West Side Story is the main challenger to Power of the Dog (but no one else does!)
BEST ACTRESS / BEST ACTOR
These two collective charts feature near-ties in both with the team evenly split between Colman vs Kidman & Cumberbatch vs Smith.
SUPPORTING ACTRESS / SUPPORTING ACTOR
These collective charts are really interesting because there's so much disagreement (beyond the top two placements). For instance two of our teammates are predicting Jessie Buckley to surprise in Supporting Actress (it makes a kind of sense with Olivia Colman's coattails!) while Cláudio is expecting that Oscar reverts to its old habits and nominated the currently buzzless Judi Dench for Belfast.
My favourite surprise on the collective Supporting Actor chart is that people are either expecting Mike Faist (West Side Story) or Jesse Plemons (Power of the Dog) to be nominated OR they don't even think of them as potential spoilers, there's no inbetween!
INTERNATIONAL FILM
This chart is the most dull at first glance since it's unanimous that Drive My Car is in the lead but what's intriguing when you dive in is that only one other film (A Hero) made every prediction list so there's not exactly consensus. I myself have decided to predict that Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom is going to be the surprise nominee (it's an endearing film with cute kids, an intriguing undertow, and beautiful vistas). Only I wasn't alone since Abe also went there.
Reader Comments (5)
Not gonna lie, I still don't think Drive My Car will make the international film line-up.
Arkaan -- i can see an argument for it not winning (not everyone will spark to its meditative chill pacing or the long cumulative effect (or even make it to the end) but i think the combo of passionate fans and critical acclaim probably make it safe for a nomination. That said I think people are overestimating just about every "favourite" in that category since they are all easy to imagine as 'snubs' and a handful of the lesser discussed feel quite possible as "surprise" nominees (like Lunana)
I see a few people predicting Branagh or Spielberg snubs in Best Director, but nobody is predicting Villeneuve to be left out? He’s my personal prediction for this year’s snub in that category. I really just don’t sense that Dune has that much passion behind it, and it seems to be skating into the Best Picture lineup as a default nominee based on it being a sure thing in so many tech and craft categories. I could totally see it ending up with 8 or 9 nominations, but with Best Picture being its only nomination in the “big 8” categories.
But really, Campion is the only lock in that category, so it wouldn’t even be that surprising to see Villeneuve AND Branagh snubbed if the directors branch decides to shake things up this year, as they have done on a few occasions in recent memory.
Do we know why Bhutan is re-submitting LUNANA this year, after it was disqualified last year? (Apologies if this is digging up ground already covered in a past post.)
Travis -- I spoke to the director about that. Interview coming this week!