All Oscar Charts Updated!

Every single Oscar chart has been updated. Woo-ho. Click on over to explore. The big movers up the chart this month are Marriage Story, Parasite, and The Irishman. Unfortunately we think this comes at a high cost for The Farewell. The films that no one has really seen yet but which could disrupt multiple races remain Bombshell and 1917. And, having seen Harriet, we've dropped that down to just competitive in three races.

She Had Oscar Buzz!

Yes, the title is an homage to our friends podcast "This Had Oscar Buzz". Here's a piece from new contributor Elie Chivi that we think you'll love on women who strangely haven't been nominated yet... 

by Elie Chivi

After Kirsten Dunst’s comments last month about the relative lack of awards attention she’s received throughout her career, I couldn’t help but think of the many other never-nominated yet deserving actresses of the past couple of decades. Some actresses can get Oscar nominations for doing the bare minimum (think Frances McDormand in North Country or Catherine Keener in Capote) due to a mix of bandwagoning on to a bigger lead performance or simply because of who they are. 

On the other hand, some of our finest actresses consistently do interesting, complex, or hilarious work yet always come up short on Oscar nomination morning. From the crop of post-90’s era performers, the list below highlights five of the most egregious members of the never-nominated list...

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Best Actress / Supporting Actress - Chart Updates!

We fully expect Marriage Story to be nominated in all four acting categoriesBEST ACTRESS and BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS charts are now up. Strangely, this year doesn't feel as competitive as usual when it comes to these two categories. That said, given the lack of a wide field of wildly loved work, we're expecting some unexpected volatility to occur. If one of the early precursors throws a major curveball expect everyone else to follow suit if the field isn't inspiring them. 

We are starting to wonder if Lupita Nyong'o is closer to a nomination for Best Actress than we thought she'd be at this point. (She's great in Us but we assumed the genre trappings would hinder her... but is enthusiasm there for other performances the way it was earlier in the year for hers? That's a campaign strength right there if Universal goes for it.)

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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