With the Academy Award nominations releasing earlier today, it is ample time for me to play some catch-up. As always, there are 15 short films nominated across three categories, and it is inevitable that people will look at these titles and squint a little. These films hardly receive any buzz, particularly compared to the heavy hitter feature contenders, and they usually end up getting short shrift as a result.
Earlier this week, I put out some admittedly half-hearted Oscar predictions. I have not had my ear to the ground this awards season, but I did want to address the Best Picture race once more. (Mainly, I wanted to give some credit where it was due to CODA for being this year’s awards season darling. But more on that later). I think there are more shades to uncover than my original prediction took into account.
As such, I want to briefly rank the Best Picture nominees, from least likely to most likely to win.
Never before have I been less tuned-in to the Academy Awards. For many years, I have written in-depth coverage of the Oscars, including predictions for nominees and winners in every category. This year, I have been more invested in what teams will make the NCAA March Madness Tournament than what movies will be nominated for Oscars.
With that in mind, I do have some thoughts about the movies involved in this year’s contest. I have thoughts about who is in the races, I have some opinions on who didn’t make the cut, and I even have some (half-researched) predictions.
Here are my picks as of today (which may or may not end up on my final ballot come Oscar Sunday).
The Golden Globes awards were announced last night, January 9. No red carpet. No fanfare. No televised event. Just the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) sending out the names of winners via social media. The full list of winners was later publicized in a press release. It was nothing compared to previous years, where the star-studded event has been known for launching Hollywood’s award season.
It is good to preface the Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay categories with the usual spiel about the Writers Guild Awards (WGA). It has been very common, since 2000, for the WGA award and the Academy Award to go to the same movie in these categories. There is the occasional split, but there are usually a reasonable explanation as to why this occurs (for example, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King pulled off a massive sweep at the Oscars due to the Academy wanting to honor the series as a whole, while the WGA gave it to a much smaller film, American Splendor).
The thing about Academy Award acting categories is that, while they are often some of the most high profile awards of the night, they are also some of the least exciting from a prediction standpoint. Of all categories, the acting categories are usually locked up long before the ceremony begins. In recent history in particular, the same acting nominees usually steamroll through awards season, winning every award leading up to the Oscars. Of course, there is always room for upset. But even so, entering the Oscars it is generally fairly clear who the top one or two contenders are.
This year’s Best Actor category is a little strange for reasons that are bittersweet.
You might think that this category is all wrapped up now that the Golden Globes have happened. But the Globes are not the be-all end-all predictor of the Oscars. This is particularly true in acting categories, where the campaigning to the Globes’ HFPA looks much different than it does for the Academy. Each year, there seems to be at least one off-the-beaten-path choice by the Globes in the acting categories. And this year, that left-field win appears to be from the Best Actress category.
Some people like to talk about “category fraud” in the acting categories. It is generally a fairly semantic debate. Is Lakeith Stanfield the lead of Judas and the Black Messiah? Why, then, is he nominated with Daniel Kaluuya in Supporting? Does that mean there is no lead actor in the film?
But it’s just a matter of campaigning. In general, it is easier to get your film’s actor nominated in a supporting category than it is the lead category. In ensemble films, it is fairly easy to make the argument that anyone is a supporting performance, just based on screentime and/or billing. I’d put Stanfield in the lead category, but I’m also just happy to see him nominated. He and Kaluuya both are two of the best actors working today.
With the Oscars just hours away, it is time for me to re-evaluate my Oscar predictions and create my final ballot. Having written articles on every category during the past month, I will not elaborate on my choices here. Although some of my picks have changed since writing my initial articles, mainly due to how other awards ceremonies have played out, most of my changes are consistent with the lines of thinking I engage with in those previous articles.
Since writing my piece on the Best Animated Short Film category, I have caught up with my blindspot in that field, Dcera. Unfortunately, I find myself in a similar situation. Even more unfortunately, my blindspot in the Best Documentary Short Subject category is a pretty heavy contender: St. Louis Superman. But I have read up on the film enough that I think I can properly gauge its current place in the race.
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