Eye Candy Predix Pt 1: Who will be nominated for Best Cinematography?

by Nathaniel R

F1 The Movie - shot by Claudio Miranda

Eye-candy. It's a good chunk of the reason we obsess over cinema, a gloriously visual artform. Films which don't maximize the capabilities of cinematography, costumes, and production design often risk looking dull or under-thought by comparison to those that use everything the cinematic toolbox has to offer. It should go without saying that Oscar predictions do not necessarily mean that these are the titles which will excel in any given craft area -- we all know that Best Picture heat gets you further than it ought to  in every category... yes, even the ones you deserve to be competitive in! All categories should be judged on their own exquisite merit. Neverthless here is some guesswork about what Oscar voters might respond to this year in terms of these visual arts...

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Last night I caught an IMAX screening of Joseph Kosinski's latest all quadrant hopeful, F1: The Movie. It's received a bit of breathless Variety hype for Chilean DP Claudio Miranda's work...

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New Oscar Charts: Screenplays, Music, and Visuals

by Nathaniel R

Speeding the April Foolish Oscar chart production up now, with 10 of Oscar's 24 categories posted, in order to finish by, uh... June's end.

• Prediction Index
  (in progress since some categories are still under construction)
• Original & Adapted Screenplay 
• Visuals (all but two posted)
• Sound
• International Film

Ten categories left to publish (we never predict the shorts or documentary categories this early), so we'll try hard to get them all up this week and say more about the, too. They are: Actress, Actor, Animated Feature, Casting, Cinematography, Costume Design, Director, Picture, Supporting Actress, and Supporting Actor. 

Wicked and Sinners currently lead the predicted tallies though that may change with the remaining categories yet to be posted. What's interesting is that they could fill up 80% of the original song category since Wicked (an official musical) has two Original Songs, one for each of its leading ladies, while Sinners (an unofficial musical) has four or five ... though of course only two song nominations are allowed for any film given the current Oscar rules; That rule is kind of a bummer because given the popularity of both Wicked and Sinners we could have finally had a year without the mandatory throwaway Diane Warren nomination! 

New Oscar Charts: Can Norway finally win "Best International Feature Film"?

by Nathaniel R

possible submissions from Japan & Norway

Counterintuitively, we begin this year's April Foolish Predictions (two months late --- woot!) with a category for which we currently have no proof of eligibility for. No country that competes in Oscar's annual Best International Feature Film category has (yet) announced their submission. But we do know, from past experiences, that many of the submissions each year will have premiered at film festivals ranging from last fall in 2024 through the fall of 2025. So we looked at recent editions of Sundance, Berlinale, and Cannes for clues. This is great fun to do as anything is possible this early; you don't even need a US distributor to compete (though of course it doesn't hurt)...

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Team Experience Oscar Predictions: Final Scores

by Cláudio Alves

Let us be glad. Let us be grateful. Let us rejoicify... that the awards season is over.

The Oscars have come and gone, and it's time to settle some scores. Nothing too dramatic, of course, just the matter of who, in the Team Experience, was best at predicting the 97th Academy Awards winners. Eric Blume took the honors for the nomination period, but the tables have turned. The king has fallen, and a new queen has risen – all hail, Lynn Lee! She correctly predicted 18 out of 23 categories, accounting for a roughly 78% success rate. On the other hand, I did the worst of the lot, with only ten correct predictions, or a 43% success rate. It's pretty dire, but that's what you get when you go "no guts, no glory" on some of these…

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And the winner is... ANORA

We'll talk about this year's Oscar ceremony over the next couple of days but tonight, sleep! You can see the complete list of winners on the Oscar Chart Index. Sean Baker's sex worker comedy Anora was the atypical Oscar favourite, winning five Oscars (four of them for Sean Baker himself who wrote, directed, edited, and produced) and losing only only one of its categories: Best Supporting Actor.

The only shock amongst the acting awards was Anora herself, Mikey Madison, who took Best Actress over the long-time frontrunner Demi Moore (The Substance) and the rising Fernanda Torres (I'm Still Here).

More soon...