Who will be nominated for Best Picture? Our Final Predictions.

The wisest thing to do in Oscar prediction in most years is a holistic approach. Start with Best Picture and let everything flow outward from that. Many technical or acting nominations throughout Oscar history are headscratchers unless you notice that their housing film was up for the big prize. People love what they love and they love blindly. Or, well, that's not right. That's... ungenerous. I don't think anyone is willfully myopic  -- which is why diversity in Academy membership is so important -- it's just that we all have our limitations and our fields of vision can be narrowed by any number of things including time spent looking at options.

If there were still only five. Oscar.... so manly!

For my own awards -- which statistically always include more movies than Oscars field each year -- this is probably because I see more movies and I probably fuss over my ballot more than 90% of Academy voters. They're inside the raging storm (and as some of them have told me over the years they either see movies very early before they're out in the world or well after the fact depending on their connection to the filmmakers studios and demands of current projects) while we're outside the storm looking at it and able to consider it from more vantage points. Of course that always brings the danger of overthinking it, the #1 easiest trap for pundits. "Guilty!" I shout, knowing myself

How many of these pictures will also be nominated? Last year we had 8 nominees in total.

Best Picture is unusually competitive this year and it's been a  clogged up mess. The sudden lurching away from critical darlings  Carol & Mad Mad Fury Road -- no secret at all that they're my two favorite films of the year -- that some pundits were predicting to lead the nomination tallies as recently as a week or two ago, toward more traditional Oscar Bait like The Revenant and The Big Short (read: heavily masculine, more traditional in form and message) has been a bit disheartening. I go on about this and the gender bias of Best Picture in my intermittent column at Towleroad. I am hopeful that Carol will be nominated still but it's no sure thing. I expect Carol and Room and Brooklyn are in the same 'could go either way' boat .. and together with longer shots Sicario and Inside Out -- well it's hard to miss that these are all extremely well reviewed films with female leads. So why are none of them sure things? Oscar might me walking into an #OscarsSoMale situation tomorrow morning. But we'll cross our fingers and hope voters realized during balloting that women are 50% of the human race and their stories aren't any less important and when they're told so gorgeously it'd be a real shame to pass them over. 

UPDATED CHARTS: PICTURE | DIRECTOR | ACTOR | SUPPORTING ACTOR | ALL SOUND CATEGORIES 

The DGA Nominees. Other directors still blind to the genius of Todd Haynes

Weep with me now my fellow people of good taste for the continual shunning of Todd Haynes at awards shows. Save one. Haynes will always have the Independent Spirits as loyal cheering squad. They've miraculously nominated him for his direction on every single one of his feature films.

Yes well before even the bulk of cinephiles realized he was going to be a legendary filmmaker. They nominated him for his strange triptych debut (Poison) and his then quite divisive/confounding but now universally admired sophomore effort ([safe]) and they've been true ever since. I bring this up to quench the tears and prepare for the worst on Thursday in case Carol is barely acknowledged which is what usually happens with Todd Haynes films on Oscar nomination morning. Even Far From Heaven (2002), his biggest hit, got a weak 4 nominations despite having the kind of "Spectacular Spectacular!" craftsmanship that at least nets filmmakers Moulin Rouge! honors (nope - Far From Heaven was stiffed in both Art Direction and Costumes. Hilarious to contemplate but true.) 

The Academy's directing branch is much more exclusive in numbers and arguably more sophisticated than the much larger voting body of the directors guild, but it's best to lower expectations; the world is often a mysteriously cruel place! Nevertheless it's frustrating that an auteur as singular and consistently wondrous as Todd Haynes has trouble getting honors from peers. He's in good company at least. Great artists in every field throughout time have had to decades for people to catch up with their greatness. Sometimes it didn't even happen until after they died. Remember that Alfred Hithcock never won a Directing Oscar and Douglas Sirk, one of of Todd Haynes's greatest influences, was never even nominated for one. Curiously Sirk, who specialized in the melodrama (those are often about women and you know how Oscar feels about women's pictures - Ewww!) was nominated by the DGA once, for Imitation of Life but an Oscar nomination did not follow. Generally Oscar will boot one of the DGA nominees for someone else but since they haven't gone 5/5 for awhile we're probably due for another year of exact crossover. 

We should probably talk about the actual nominees not just one of our all time favorite auteurs. So let's do that after the jump...

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CAS Nominees & Oscar Predictions. Do you like the sound of these movies?

The Cinema Audio Society, which awards the sound mixing in movies, is our only real clue beforehand of how the two sound categories (mixing and editing) at the Oscars might go. The MPSE, which honors their brethren, the sound editors, doesn't announce its nominees for "The Golden Reels" until two weeks after the Oscar nominations. So this morning's announcement is another last minute reminder that Nathaniel (c'est moi) needs to get both his final Oscar predictions on (TODAY AND TONIGHT) and publish those Film Bitch Award nominations -- at least the Oscar correlative categories (TODAY AND TOMORROW) -- which are his own long-running film honors and should not to be confused with the Team Experience Awards which come from the contributors here and are going up in one week's time. 

So basically ALL of that is happening... simultaneously. Maybe. Definitely. Hopefully. But how ???

Surveillance footage of TFE Headquarters, shows Nathaniel stockpiling snacks, Motrin, and water bottles. The latter he will both drink from and pee in, as he's not allowed to move until Friday morning once Oscar noms have sufficiently sunken in. But first he is downing pots of coffee, typing this very post you're reading and begging himself to quit typing in the third person.

CAS Nominees for the film year, as well as both Oscar Predictions and Film Bitch Awards. Yes we're doing it all (Yipee) after the jump

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The Seven Best Ladies of the Globes

Chris here with a post-Globes actress love hangover. Sorry boys, but unless your name was Denzel, you didn't do much during the ceremony to win our attention. Here are the seven women who won the evening (and we're not even talking best dressed yet. In no particular order, except for this golden girl.

C O N S I D E R

Let's hear it for Brie Larson! After earning accolades for Room and keeping her social media game on point, she's finally got a big prize to set her apart from tough competition. Add in a charming speech where she credited the Room team above and below the line (including best friend Jacob Tremblay), and we've got the once-supposed frontrunner securing that status for real.

Oh and speaking of that winning speech...

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Watching the Documentary Finalists: Part 3 - Confrontations

Glenn here looking at each of the 15 Academy’s documentary finalists from which five will be nominated for the Oscar.

We're at the final of three parts looking at the 15 finalists for the Academy's best documentary category. In the first part we examined people, in the second part we looked at world politics, and now confrontations. It's something that can come in a myriad of forms. Confrontations can be between enemies on TV sets around the nation or in the towns and jungles of Indonesia. Whether it’s the confrontation of death, or the confrontation of major religious corporation, these films encompass big themes that have a longstanding tradition in cinema but each go about it some wildly different ways.

All that after the jump

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