Final Oscar Predictions

A shorter version of this article was originally shared on Towleroad

With the 90th Academy Awards coming tomorrow another tradition must precede it:  predicting the Oscar winners! If you're a frequent reader of The Film Experience, you've probably been following this race for an entire year and now it's about to end. Those who only follow in the last month have a lot of catching up to do (I have a friend here in NYC doing that Best Picture marathon -- all nine movies).  If you'd like to keep up more emphatically next year please sign up for our mailing list as we will begin weekly newsletters shortly after the Oscars with exclusive content.

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But this season's race ends Sunday night. Hopefully without a snafu on the epic scale of last year’s Envelope Gate when La La Land was read out as Best Picture when Moonlight had actually won. Can you believe that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are returning for a do over? (Or do you think that news is smoke and mirrors to hide another surprise in store?)

I am sad to share that there’s a possibility that all of the best “Best Pictures” (Get Out, Lady Bird, and Call Me By Your Name) go home empty-handed but what else is new? Not to be pessimistic but Oscar night is often a come down from the multiple-winners joy of nomination morning. Or to quote the great Stephen McKinley Henderson in Lady Bird...

The high probability of wins you don't like is why you should always attend or throw a fun Oscar party and try not to take it too seriously. Enjoy the gowns and the speeches and celebrate every film and celebrity you love as they're paraded before you on Hollywood's High Holy Night. 

Let’s call each individual Oscar race after the jump. Links will take you to the Oscar chart in question...

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Podcast: Pre Oscar Grab-All

The gang gets back together as Oscar approaches. Nathaniel R, Nick Davis, Katey Rich, and Joe Reid discuss what they've been watching as they prep for Oscar night. How many movies do YOU still have left to see? (Or are you not a completist?)

Index (41 minutes)
00:01 What we still haven't seen
02:30 Loving Vincent & Animated Feature
08:40 Andrey Zvyagintsev's Loveless, Russia's nominee
12:00 Short Film categories
15:00 A Fantastic Woman & Foreign Film
20:00 Acting Categories
23:00 Lady Bird, actressy movies, messy trivia
29:30 Preferential ballot theories
33:00 Director/Pic splits and The Shape of Water
37:00 Who will present Best Picture?
38:30 RED ALERT: NICK IS GOING TO THE OSCARS !!!
40:30 The End

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Grab-All Oscar Talk

16 days til Oscar. Ranking the 16 Animated Feature Winners

by Nathaniel R

which movies willed this category into existence?

With just 16 days to go until Coco wins Pixar its 9th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature let's look back over the first 16 years of the category. (Yes, that's right math geniuses, Pixar has won a full 50% of the animated Oscars thus far.)

The History, Chronologically

1988-2000 The category didn't exist until 2001 but it wasn't just created on a whim. The previous dozen years which included the renaissance of Disney, the sizeable popularity influence and beauty of what was happening in Japanese animation, the explosion of new animation studios all over the map, and the rise of Pixar in particular, all led us to the inevitable: an Oscar category for animated features...

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Does 2017 = 2005 in Best Actor?

by Ben Miller

Film blogger Jordan Ruimy posited an observation a month ago on Twitter: 

In 2002 Gary Oldman would have been a cinch to win Best Actor, in 2017 he's a major question mark. The Oscars have changed.

While the awards season definitely shifted thereafter, his tweet remains at least partially true. Look at the history of the Best Actor Oscar.  From 1990 to 1997, every winner had a specific ailment (criminal insanity, alcoholism, AIDS), while 1998 to 2001 had a run of death scenes.  Of the past 16 years, starting with Adrien Brody in 2002, 10 winners have been for portrayals of real people (Casey Affleck's win last year broke a four-year run of biopic winners). There are always patterns to Oscar behavior.

This year’s slate of Best Actor nominees has an interesting parallel with the Best Actor race of 2005.  Let’s take a look back at the lineup...

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Olympics at the Oscar and "I, Tonya"

by Nathaniel R

Margot Robbie recently shared this pic from "exactly a year ago" when she was training for I TONYA

Is Margot Robbie the first actress to ever be nominated playing an Olympic athlete? I legit don't know the answer but I can't think of any others. The only previous Oscar nominated performances that we could think of were men: Will Smith as Muhammad Ali (though the focus there wasn't on the Olympics) and Mark Ruffalo as David Schultz (thanks commenters for this one!)

If you think back over movies that revolved around the Olympics in some way they aren't usually acting showcases (Chariots of Fire) or aren't focused on the Olympians themselves (Munich) or they're films that were either aimed at wide audience crowd pleasing or just didn't connect with awards voters (The Cutting Edge, Personal Best, Running Brave, Prefontaine, Eddie the Eagle, Cool Runnings) or they're documentaries which by their nature can't score acting honors.

There have been Olympians with movie careers but I can't think of any actors except Margot and Will Smith (who coincidentally co-starred in Focus in 2015) who have been nominated for playing an Olympian. Can you? Am I forgetting something totally obvious?