Best Actor / Supporting Actor - Chart Updates!

by Nathaniel R

Netflix would like to have 80% of the BEST ACTOR field (Driver, Murphy, Pryce, DeNiro) but that will prove impossible.

The new predictions are in. Best Actor is more exciting and competitive than Best Actress this year which is a strange and unusual development... and we don't like it! We kid. The male actors deserve their moment in the sun occassionally, even if they're not as fun to shine light on. The strangest thing about the leading actor competition is, at least at the moment, Netflix literally appears to have about 1/3rd of the entire competitive field. But since their can be only 5, we think that this shotgun approach will only result in two nominees at best. Right now we're going with Adam Driver (who feels like the ultimate winner... though let's not pretend anything's locked up yet in late September) and Eddie Murphy (who could easily not happen given Netflix's other horses in the race).

As for Supporting Actor. It isn't that much different than Best Actor this year. This year has been fairly heavy with duet films for men (The Lighthouse, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Ford v Ferrari, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Two Popes) so naturally a few of the co-leads will definitely block out supporting players for the coveted nominations. We're mostly giving the side-eye to Willem Dafoe. He's the most egregious category frauder this year since you can't be a supporting actor in a cast of two! (There are technically a few other actors that appear in The Lighthouse but they're non-speaking cameos. It's a duet film from start to finish). It's a shame that Dafoe is competing supporting because we think he'd still be competitive for a nomination in lead despite the strong year. The only traditional-sized supporting role that we think won't be hurt by the co-leads muscling in is Alan Alda's divorce attorney in Marriage Story. In some ways he's the film's most loveable character, and Alda has been nominated for less (The Aviator). At 83 he'll have sentiment on his side, too.

UPDATED CHARTS
PICTURE | DIRECTOR | ACTOR | SUPPORTING ACTOR | INTERNATIONAL FEATURE | ALL INTERNATIONAL FEATURE SUBMISSIONS 

Best Picture / Director Oscar chart updates !

by Nathaniel R

Marriage Story would have been a true blockbuster like Kramer vs Kramer or Terms of Endearment in a different era. Now it will just stream but could still be a big player at the Oscars.

There’s still so much we don’t know.

That’s an important fact to start with because reading online discourse about Oscar predictions each year is like pretending we live in a perpetual January when the precursors are well underway and the template is already set which will only vary slightly from organization to organization/pundit to pundit. Oscar fanatics (and pundits) never know as much as they pretend to know early on. History is filled with films with breathless first screenings that didn’t amount to much at the Oscars and vice versa. These things take time and all parts of the cycle should be considered when making predictions. If your predictions are exactly the same as someone else's this early, take a risk. Then you can be wrong in different ways instead of in the same way. Haha.

Five Very Important Things We Don’t Yet Know...

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Oscar narratives being pushed out of Telluride & Venice

by Nathaniel R

Hmmm... let's see Joaquin Phoenix Joker and Adam Sandler Uncut Gems for Best Actor (blargh and double-blargh*), Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson for Marriage Story, A24's Waves for everything, Renee Zellweger's second Oscar for Judy, Christian Bale for Ford v Ferrari, Ad Astra for something or other (or will this go the First Man route of being wildly praised at its festival bow and then too "reserved" emotionally to actually catch on?) and... what else... what else.... Sure we missed something.  

It all feels dizzying right now since everything just began happening all at once, as is tradition this week of each year. The numbers of course don't add up. If you accept preemie buzz with no caveats about anything that happens after this week, we already have the Best Actor lineup (Phoenix, Driver, Sandler, Bale, and Banderas) and the supporting actor winner (Brad Pitt, OUATIH). But this is a small sampling of the movies and performances to come in the next few months of the year...

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Oscar Predictions for August Complete!

It only took three days to revamp all the charts. Woohoo. Have a looksie.

In this mass overhaul we have major gains for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Farewell, naturally, since both have proven themselves with critics and at the box office already. Experiencing small gains are The Irishman and Just Mercy (now that they're officially going to be premiering this year), The Lighthouse and 1917 (after their stunning teases), and Judy (sigh). Small losses were incurred by Harriet (after a somewhat generic trailer) and The Report (given Amazon's sudden cold feet about regular theatrical exposure for their films). Films tumbling downward since our April Foolish wild guesswork include The Good Liar, Ford v Ferrari, and The Goldfinch (though we're definitely looking forward to two of those).

We've also added documentary predictions for the first time this year though this is still blindfolded guesswork since we won't know what's actually eligible and long-listed for quite some time still. 

 All Pages
INDEX | PICTURE   | DIRECTOR |
ACTRESS | ACTOR | SUPP ACTRESS |
SUPP ACTOR | SCREENPLAY  |
FOREIGN FILM | ANIMATION, DOCS |
VISUALS | SOUND

Oscar Chart Updates: Two-Lead Men's Movies

Robert Pattinson & Willem Dafoe in "The Lighthouse"

We're in for it with category fraud this year, y'all. Yes, we're in for it every year of course until something finally breaks within the Academy (disgruntled character actors stage a revolution, "do you hear the people sing singing the song of angry men..." c'mon SAG!) but 2019 in particular appears to be a film year with an unusual amount of two-leading-men films. We've got (arguably) The Lighthouse, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Ford v Ferrari, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, The Two Popes, and maybe more. So we've opted to just kind of ignore the problem and assume we know who is going where in the BEST ACTOR and BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR chart updates though as always we wish the leading men would just stay in lead like they're supposed to. If it was good enough for Amadeus, it's good enough for you, people!

Having said all that we just realized we left Matt Damon (Ford v Ferrari) and Robert Pattinson (The Lighthouse) off of either chart which is silly but not intentional. We'll squeeze them in somewhere as soon as we have a moment.  What do you think of the new rankings? Any strong hunches this August?