Team Experience Predictions Chart - Round 4 - Post Holidays, Pre Awards Shows

We're polling the Team Film Experience on where the Oscar race stands. This week Best Picture, Director, and the Acting and Writing categories.

It has been over a month since we’ve checked in on the directing, acting and writing categories. Since then, Avatar has soared at the box office, Babylon has flopped and both the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards have announced their nominations. Some categories look completely different than they did at the end of November. Others, funny enough, remain the same. One category has a contender who is unanimously on the top of everyone’s predictions… and it’s not the one you think. 

Check out our predictions after the jump…

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Team Experience Predix - Round 1: Post-Thanksgiving Snapshot

We'll be polling Team Experience biweekly to get their (collective) take on the Oscar race. This week, the 'Big Six' categories and Screenplay prizes.

THE FABELMANS

BEST PICTURE

Click to get expanded view.It’s a dangerous business to be an early frontrunner. However, if anyone can handle that title, it’s Steven Spielberg...

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Almost There: Paul Dano in "Love & Mercy"

by Cláudio Alves

Paul Dano's film career has been awards-adjacent since the very beginning. At seventeen, he won the Best Debut Performance Spirit Award for his work in L.I.E. Five years later, he was one of the stars of Little Miss Sunshine, the first of three Best Picture Oscar nominees in the actor's filmography. Still, though the Academy regularly loves Dano's movies, they have never shown any affection for Dano himself. That might change this year with The Fabelmans, where the actor portrays a fictionalized version of Steven Spielberg's dad in what's bound to be one of the season's biggest award magnets.

To celebrate the actor's achievements and potential first Oscar nomination, let's look back to the last time Dano was on the Academy's radar. In 2015, he almost category frauded his way to a Supporting Actor nomination for his work as Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy…

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Which young male actors will factor into awards season?

by Nathaniel R

Gabriel Labelle in "The Fabelmans"

While rising stars are a semi-annual event in the female acting categories, Oscar voters have long been resistant to young male actors. The statistics bear this out. For whatever reason (cough *the patriarchy*) voters prefer their women young / full of potential and their men older / with lots of achievements already under their belt. Yes, those stats are beginning to change. For example, Oscar voters have been much kinder to 40something to 60something actresses in the past couple of decades than they previously were. With the men, though, things have stayed much the same. 

Once men enter their 30s, awards bodies tend to take them seriously but before the 30something years it definitely takes a very special combination of the right role in the right film in the right year and with the right co-stars. Do you think any of these men will make it this year? Here are eight actors, thirty or younger, that are in the conversation or adjacent to it this season...

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Almost There: Anthony Hopkins in "Magic"

by Cláudio Alves

This fall will be a lovely time for Anthony Hopkins fans. The actor co-stars in both Armageddon Time (Oct 28th) and The Son (Nov 25th), playing important grandfather figures in both films. While he's said to be a warm presence in James Gray's movie memoir, the actor's second collaboration with Florian Zeller (The Father) seems better positioned to showcase the bitter and biting side of Hopkins' screen persona. After a few decades in less than stellar projects, it's a great joy to see the thespian return to form in such interesting endeavors, regardless of the mixed reactions both films have garnered. Though another Oscar nomination feels unlikely at this point in the season, watching Hopkins thrive in his 80s is its own reward.

Because spookiness is in the air, let's remember when Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins was neither a knight nor an Oscar nominee. We're going back to 1978 when Richard Attenborough's Magic saw him play a creepy ventriloquist and maybe come close to his first Academy Award nomination…

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