Best Pic Battles: Opening Lines

Here are the opening lines of each Best Picture nominee. Can you guess which one belongs to which film? 

A. "14....15...16... Prime."

B. "QUIET!"

C. "______ Come on, come on. Get up. Come on, quickly!"

D. "A lot of stuff he just doesn't understand about the world that I understand. That makes all my actions when I move through the world -- I do things better because I can see it all laid out like a map." 

E. "Can you help me out, man?"

F. "Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting god, creator of the ends of the Earth."

G. "It's another hot sunny day today here in Southern California, temperature is 84 for downtown Los Angeles"

H. "I used to think this was the beginning of your story."

I. "____, you ought'a stop that lying." 

Try to guess. Go ahead and tell us how you did once you check the answers after the jump / scroll down!

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Numbers. Oscars. Numbers. Oscars...

If you love Oscars too much (*raises hands*) your head can get a little swimmy on Oscar nomination day, trying to parse it all. Particularly the numbers and the new statistics. This could take some time. But here are some non-subjective hierarchies and numbers and stats from the day.

We'll start with the easy one.

Most Nominations

1. La La Land (14)
2. [tie] Moonlight and Arrival (8)
3. [tie] Hacksaw Ridge and Lion and Manchester by the Sea (6)
4. Fences (4)
5. Hidden Figures and Jackie (3)
   
   NOTE: Jackie marks the second year in a row wherein a "chilly" gorgeous movie about a complicated woman wins the distinction of "most nominated movie that isn't nominated for Best Picture" -- coincidence? Nope.

5 of past 6 years film w/ most noms that wasn't up for Best Pic was a chilly beauty about complex woman. Coincidence? I think not. #Oscars pic.twitter.com/fRFZXaflsb

— Nathaniel Rogers (@nathanielr) January 24, 2017

Category with Most First Timers!
(excluding categories with too way many names to look up like producing, visual fx, sound,song, and makeup) 

1. Adapted Screenplay (5/5 nominees are newbies to Oscar)
2. [tie] Original Score and Cinematography (4/5 nominees are newbies to Oscar)
3. Best Director (4/5 nominees are first timers in this particular category though some have been nominated in other categories)
4. Best Supporting Actor (3/5 nominees are newbies to Oscar)
5. Original Screenplay (3/5 nominees are first time nominees for writing) 

Other Curious Statistics after the jump...

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Happy Thoughts from Oscar Nominations!

We've delivered the hot takeaways, mourned the snubs, but now let's get positive. I polled Team Experience about what made them happiest this morning and which category is the best overall. I hope you'll chime in. An unexpected consensus emerged straightaway in their answers. More after the jump...

Which nomination made you happiest?

Tim: Kubo and the Two Strings for Best Visual Effects. It's a great movie that deserves as much as it can possibly get, and also a good reminder to keep our conceptions about what "counts" as film craft as broad as possible

Laurence: Kubo and the Two Strings for Visual Effects. After the Ex Machina win I got the sense that branch was becoming more interested in awarding outside the box effects, so I bet on this nomination happening early. It's stunning work even by Laika standards...

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Personal Ballots Galore!

The Oscar correlative part of the Film Bitch Awards are almost done. Racing to the finish line here. In the updates you'll see the nominees for Best Screenplays and Animated Feature as well as Visual categories like Visual Effects and Makeup.

You never know where a great movie will come from. Who knew that a circular short story by Ted Chiang, an possibly unfilmable novel like "Oh...," or a novella like "Lady Susan" could make great movies like Arrival, Elle, and Love & Friendship? (Okay okay, everyone knows that Jane Austen stories can make great movies. But isn't it insane that Love & Friendship isn't locked up for an Oscar nomination? What was everyone thinking this year?) They're all up for the Film Bitch Award for Adapted Screenplay. The nominees are...

As for the Makeup and Hair ballot, I'll state straightaway that I'll never understand what Oscar's makeup branch wants from their movies (besides old age prosthetics. They love those). Everything that makes my list, save Hail Caesar! and Star Trek Beyond did not make the Oscar finals in that category (or perhaps did not even submit reels to the branch for consideration?). It may seem to on-the-nose to include Neon Demon, but when that nose is a work of art...

Previous Announcements
Picture/Director/Top Ten List
Supporting Actor
Supporting Actress
Costume Design and Production Design
Sound and Music Categories

Three more TBA: Actor, Actress, and Cinematography

The Final Predictions Begin!

I've updated the Picture, Director, Screenplays, Actor and Supporting Actress charts with final predictions. Though many questions remain we must make the hard calls with nominations only a week away!

Best Picture & Best Director
The Best Picture race will literally never be "locked up" again so long as Oscar sticks with its "5 to 10" balloting math. That shifting number of Best Pictures means that you just never know. I want to say 8 again this year but what if its 5,6,7,9, or gulp 10. The big question mark, at least for this pundit, is Nocturnal Animals. Given that it's the movie that won't go away in precursor season with great showings at the Globes and BAFTA and significant buzz in Los Angeles despite its polarizing nature and its relatively low box office take (lower than ALL the other still buzzing pictures with the exception of Loving). The thing is you can't vote AGAINST something. You can only vote for it, so we're predicting Tom Ford in Best Director. 

Leading Actor
Arguable the most settled of the Oscar acting races with Casey Affleck, Denzel Washington, Andrew Garfield, Viggo Mortensen, and Ryan Gosling all steady players for months. At this point it would be a minor surprise to see one of the ousted. Support for their rivals seems to be far too diffuse.

Supporting Actress
The other "settled" acting race though you can definitely make arguments about one of two women spoiling the party:  Greta Gerwig who is brilliant in 20th Century Women and who has definitely earned her place at Hollywood's most prestigious tables after years of fine work, or Janelle Monae, who proves herself a total natural in Hidden Figures with a bright film career ahead of her. Supporting Actress is a friendly category to double nominees which means if there's a major shake-up it could be both Octavia and Janelle in the mix.

With Captain Fantastic holding strong for Viggo and with its SAG nomination, we're betting the Screenplay shows up, too.

Original Screenplay & Adapted Screenplay
The big question in Adapted might be whether Fences has enough goodwill to earn August Wilson a posthumous nomination, or if naysayers who believe its too "stagey" have made it a Viola & Denzel only party. My guess is that if Tom Ford doesn't show up in Director he shows up here instead and steals that slot away from the late theatrical giant.

In Original Screenplay with three films looking unstoppable for nominations (Manchester, Hell or, La La), one looking like a very typical "of course it nabbed #1 votes!" critical darling style nominee (The Lobster), there's presumably only one spot left and SO many strong screenplays fighting for it: Captain Fantastic, 20th Century Women, Zootopia, Toni Erdmann, Jackie.