Five Reasons the Oscars Won't Be Cancelled. (Relax)

by Nathaniel R

Regular readers know that we put our Punditry hat on and whip out the foggy crystal ball each year about this time. The reason is an attempt to predict the Oscar nominations nearly a full year in advance each season. We tend to do alright at this admittedly silly endeavour (silly because 90% of the films haven't yet been seen.) But 2020 is different. Perhaps you've noticed that movies haven't been opening for a full month now and all filming stopped in Hollywood. Some pre and post-production business is still happening in Hollywood but in very limited work-from-home capacity. In the twenty years of running The Film Experience we've truly never seen anything like this!

However, we wish to sound a note of optimism that you generally won't get elsewhere on the web due to the click-bait happy tone and echo chamber hysteria so many sites opt for. We don't feel there's any reason to assume that the Oscars will be cancelled. Here's why in five reasons...

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Emmy Watch: Best Actress in a Drama

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

We’re looking at another Emmy Awards category today – Best Lead Actress in a Drama Series.  All but two of last year’s nominees are eligible again.

The remaining nominees – defending champion Jodie Comer (Killing Eve), Sandra Oh (Killing Eve), Laura Linney (Ozark), Mandy Moore (This Is Us), and Viola Davis (How to Get Away with Murder) – will have to fight hard for their slots due to a major influx of contenders from shows that are once again in the running this year or in the running for the first time.

The past four years have gone like so... 

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How you holding up out there?

We're worried about everyone's mental health. How are you doing during this astonishingly strange moment in our collective history? What new things have you discovered about your home while shut in? Which things do you miss most about the outside world? How are you preventing feeling too isolated? Share tips in the comments.

As for us we're finding virtual happy hours with friends on zoom, skype, or facetime are helping a lot. As is chasing whatever filmic obsessions occur and list-making (April Foolish Oscar Predictions coming very soon... even though we really don't know which films will arrive this year given the shutdown).

Final Oscar Predictions!

Hello beloved readers and fellow cinephiles. Sorry for this ultra-last-minute prediction post (which is cross-posted at Towleroad) but let it serve a dual purpose. It's to be read now and/or laughed at after the Oscars once I've shown that my crystal ball is totally defective.

One of these three films will win Best Picture

If you've been living under a rock the Best Picture field looks like so...

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9 days till Oscar

Final voting has begun for the Oscars with just 9 days until the big night. Preferential balloting is such that we can dream of crazy outcomes on the big night even though it's fairly clear that 1917 is in the lead amongst the 9 Best Picture contenders. (Have you voted on our "who should win polls yet?If not do so on each Oscar chart) Only Parasite and Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood are well poised to spoil the war film's party if preferential balloting is kind to them.

For those who don't know how preferential balloting works it's a complicated math system which begins rather simply by counting #1 votes until one of the contenders has reached 50.1% of the votes. Since that rarely happens on first pass, #2 votes become important... but only from the ballots that have been discarded by whichever film came in last on the most recent round.  It's a process of elimination whereby the least loved pictures votes are continually reallocated to that movie's biggest fan's next preference until one movie eventually gets half of the voters on its side...

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