The Best Visual Effects Oscar has flourished over the past decade, growing into a full-fledged category with five nominees. Prior to that, the category would generally be three nominees. Given the industry’s increasing reliance on visual effects, it is a surprise that it took until 2010 to expand the category to a guaranteed five nominees per year.
2020 is a prime example of this reliance. The category is not reserved for the blockbuster films that are, more and more, composed of VFX. This year, the dramas The Irishman and 1917 use extensive VFX, and the films would be very different without those effects. Then, of course, there’s The Lion King…not all visual effects are a good choice.
As we continue our annual Academy Awards prediction series, we turn to Best Documentary Feature. This year’s slate of nominees include two Netflix documentaries, a PBS film, a National Geographic film, and a film distributed by Neon.
The breakdown of this year’s Best Animated Feature Film category by studio is fairly interesting. Historically, Pixar leads all studios in nominations and wins, which is not particularly surprising. However, there is not enough history to the category to judge how Toy Story 4 will fair against its predecessors (the category was first awarded after the releases of Toy Story and Toy Story 2).
DreamWorks, the studio behind How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, won the first ever Best Animated Film Oscar in 2002 for Shrek. It hasn’t won since, including nominations but no wins for the previous How to Train Your Dragon films. Laika, which released Missing Link last year, has five nominations and zero wins.
The 2020 group of Best Cinematography nominees are composed of a three-time winner, a three-time nominee, a one-time winner (15-time nominee), and two first-time nominees. It is mostly a respectable group. I can’t say there aren’t others I would like to see represented here, but it’s not a bad group.
I think this year’s Best Director race is really intriguing. It is a group of filmmakers doing a variety of different things, and they all have their merit. While this makes predicting the winner a tough task, and there are many different ways this race could go, I think there are two presumed frontrunners heading into the Directors Guild of America’s award ceremony.
The Oscar acting categories can be predictable. Come this evening, following the Screen Actors Guild awards, the 2020 acting races may very likely be even more predictable. And Best Supporting Actress is no exception. The category has its frontrunner, and a SAG win for her will all but seal the race up.
As we head into the Screen Actors Guild awards, which will help clarify the frontrunners in the four Oscar acting races, perhaps it is a good time to look at the Academy’s nominees and their current place in the Best Supporting Actor race.
Of all the acting categories, Supporting Actor is, I think, the one without a clear frontrunner. In the other three categories, it is a matter of one nominee poised to win, where any other winner would be viewed as an upset. In this category, there are three actors in this category who could win this award.
Often times, the acting races at the Academy Awards are fairly cut and dry. By the time we get to the Oscar ceremony, it is usually pretty clear which actor is the frontrunner. A lot of this certainty lies in the Screen Actors Guild awards, whose winners often go on to win the Oscar. This is because the acting branch of the Academy is the largest, and the overlap between those voters and the SAG voters is enough to see a general pattern of voting.
This is not to say that upsets are impossible. An upset happened as recent as last year in this very category. So let’s look at who could possibly unseat the frontrunner this year.
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