2 Days Til Oscar. Final Oscar Predictions

This article originally appeared in my column at Towleroad and is reprinted here (albeit slightly altered for the TFE crowd) with their permission

Gravity will win how many Oscars? The most at any rate.

Oscar Weekend is upon us! Those damn Olympics forced it into March so it already feels like its running late and pushing back the local news broadcast yet further into the AM hours. And it hasn't even started yet! But soon Ellen Degeneres will be dancing down the aisles and we'll be on our way. [Before we get there make sure to like TFE on facebook so you don't forget about us during the spring/summer. We hit it all year round!]

I've been an Oscar blogger for over ten years (yikes) and usually predicting the winners in the high profile categories is easy; it's about getting out of your own way since it's easy to overthink it and create scenarios which aren't likely to happen. This year is more volatile than usual, though, with Gravity, 12 Years a Slave, and American Hustle all displaying strength after strength during "precursor season" but meeting plenty of resistance, too, on their awards path. Anything might happen in Best Picture, which is not something you can usually say going into the big night. It'll be a groundbreaking night almost any way it turns out with a first in Best Director (first Hispanic winner or first black winner) and a first in Picture (first sci-fi winner or first film that's totally about black people) 

Oscar never presents the categories in the exact same order from year to year, but let's take these in the order the envelopes opened last year just as an outline on which to hang our predictions after the jump... 

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Every Best Actress Dress

Here's one infographic that seems to have been pulled direct from the subconcious collective subconcious of actressexuals everywhere - it's every Best Actress dress ever worn to the ceremony. Obviously that's less than 85 dresses since some people didn't show to their ceremony. [Updates: though there are a couple missing. Vivien Leigh's second Oscar and Norma Shearer's only are not listed. Odd] You can click on it to embiggen.

But I'll share my 10 favorites after the jump, okay? okay. 

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3 Days Til Oscar. Open Thread

A genie appears offering you three wishes. One of the wishes can't be more wishes (duh!) and this genie is an Oscar queen so he demands that all three wishes be about Oscar night. Go!

Here are mine if you need a moment to think about yours... 

1) That 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture
2) That Kim Novak and Liza Minnelli's appearances go so spectacularly well that the Academy magically stops worrying about whether 14 year olds are watching and sets in motion plans to make the Oscars grander again with more living legends and classic film shoutouts that aren't as passionless as "montage celebrating ___". (Listen, genie. It's not like I'm asking that all of this minute's biggest stars share the other 364 days of the year but Oscar is one freaking night a year and it's about the grand tradition of the cinema. And you can't have grand traditions without having had a glorious past. And if you don't acknowledge the scale of that past, your tradition starts feels tremendously tiny and hollow.)
3) That someone on stages thanks The Film Experience catapulting yours truly and the site to global fame and fortune for all the thankless years of Oscar coverage (What? It's a free wish. I have to dream big because I like to be able to pay rent and eat and I want to keep doing this)

Ranking the Oscar Presenter Lineup

Which categories will they present?The full list of presenters has been announced. If we know Oscar, this means Best Picture is being presented by either a) Sidney Poitier b) Harrison Ford or c) Bobby De Niro. They totally can't deal with women who aren't named Streisand getting that honor for reasons we'll never fathom.

So who do you think it will be?

I'm personally disappointed that Liza with a Z isn't listed among the 40+ names. They're honoring The Wizard of Oz, so why not wheel her out for Best Picture or something? The biggest non-nominee name I was hoping to see given the film year being honored: Scarlett Johansson. But it was not to be.

After the jump, the full list of presenters. Alphabetizing is for sissies, so let's rank them. 

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A Well Preserved Beauty

This week's New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt

"Ready for His Closeup"

Who cares if Oscar has had work done? He's still a beauty.

I love the cover but Blitt's take, not so much (no surprise but I loathe the smugness people who don't watch the Oscars sometimes have about it... as if watching sports is some kind of civil disobedience. Ha! Sports... very inconoclastic, that. You've really shown society!) but I like Anthony Lane's column. He gets dinged by critics for valuing his wit above the cinema but he's still  a good read.

Oscar night is anxiety central: TV needs the stars to light up the ratings, and the stars, for their part, use TV to stage what is, in essence, a communal bath of self-love. “Just a small group getting together for a pat on the back,” in the words of Janet Gaynor, who won the first Oscar for Best Actress, in 1929. Since then, the pat has become a caress, and the caress has grown into the kind of activity that in “The Wolf of Wall Street” is reserved for yachts and jets.

Are you excited for the big night? I suddenly am after a week of the blahs. After the jump my two favorite New Yorker Oscar covers ever and they're both by the same artist.

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