The Oscars are coming up yet again. The guilds, Globes, BAFTAs, and critics have all made their picks. Now it's my turn to figure out what it all means with my multi-part Oscar predictions.
I'm going to go through each of the Oscar categories, tell you what has been nominated and won elsewhere, and order the nominee from who I think is most to least likely to win on Oscar night. That doesn't mean I'll be right, but it does mean I'll be informed. Wish me luck.
Previously:
Oscar Nomination Thoughts
Introduction & Documentary Feature
Foreign Film
Visual Effects
Production Design
Supporting Actor
Supporting Actress
Cinematography
Editing
Live-Action, Animated, and Documentary Short
Song & Score
Animated Feature
Lead Actor
Lead Actress
Original and Adapted Screenplay
Sound Mixing & Editing
Director
Glossary:
Eddie - American Cinema Editors Award
PGA - Producers Guild of America Award
BAFTA - British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards
Golden Globe - Presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Award
ACS - American Cinematographer Society Award
SAG - Screen Actors Guild Award
DGA - Director's Guild of America
I just can't wait any longer. I still have a few other awards left, but I have all I need to break down my pick for Best Picture winner. Unlike last year, this is mostly an academic exercise because, short of an historic upset,
La La Land has this locked up. Oops, I hope that doesn't spoil the surprise.
Oscar History
Best Picture is a broad category. It's the only category that shouldn't be voted on in a vacuum. For instance, Sound Editing, is voted on based on the Sound Editing in a film. The Production Design should have nothing to do with how Sound Editing is decided. The Best Picture award should consider both of those and more. The aim of the Best Picture award is to find the movie that is the best when you take all its parts into consideration. After careful examination, four broad categories give the best indication of what will win the Oscar.
The best picture winner has also been nominated for...
...
Directing 48 times in the last 50 years. The only exceptions are the widely criticized snub of
Argo in 2012 and the forgivable omission of
Driving Miss Daisy in 1989.
...
Acting 46 times in the last 50 years. The only exceptions are
Slumdog Millionaire (2008),
The Return of the King (2003),
Braveheart (1995), and
The Last Emperor (1987).
...
Writing 49 times in the last 50 years. The only exception was the production behemoth
Titanic (1997).
...
Editing 45 times in the last 50 years. The five exceptions being
A Man for All Seasons (1966),
The Godfather Part II (1974),
Annie Hall (1977),
Ordinary People (1980), and the lazy omission of
Birdman (2014).
I may be in the minority, but I'd say the screenplay nomination is the most important one to get. Since there's a combined 10 screenplay nominations handed out, even the weakest Best Picture hopeful should be able to get that nomination.
Titanic's failure to get nominated is weird but probably a result of being such a large production that the screenplay almost doesn't matter. Direction isn't far behind. Ben Affleck's lack of a nomination for
Argo is so ridiculous that it barely counts. Acting is pretty key, but failure to get even one nomination can happen if it's an ensemble or a true spectacle film. Editing is important, but I couldn't tell you why it's as highly correlated with winning Best Picture as it is.
In the 50 years I went back, 38 of the Best Picture winners have a nomination in all four of those category groups. All of them have had at least 3, no matter how weak a winner it was.
Chariots of Fire,
Braveheart,
Crash. They all had three.
Let's see how this year's nominees break down:
Arrival (Directing, Screenplay, Editing)
Fences (Acting, Screenplay)
Hacksaw Ridge (Directing, Acting, Editing)
Hell of High Water (Acting, Screenplay, Editing)
Hidden Figures (Acting, Screenplay)
La La Land (Directing, Acting, Screenplay, Editing)
Lion (Acting, Screenplay)
Manchester by the Sea (Directing, Acting, Screenplay)
Moonlight (Directing, Acting, Screenplay, Editing)
Based on that,
Lion,
Fences, and
Hidden Figures are right out of consideration. That's no surprise. None of them have ever looked that strong.
Hidden Figures is getting that
American Sniper late season boost when a movie is released late and is a success at the box office. Don't be fooled. The missing nominations of
Hacksaw Ridge (Screenplay) and
Hell or High Water (Direction) are damning to their chances. Neither omissions are flukes either if you look at the assorted precursor awards.
Manchester by the Sea isn't in worse shape without the Editing nomination.
Arrival is already this season's Icarus in terms of nominations even though Amy Adams' Lead Actress snub was pretty surprising.
The only two films that went 4/4 are
La La Land and
Moonlight, which are the only two films being considered at all as likely to win Best Picture. That's not always how it works out, but 2016 is taking it easy on us after last year's precursor mess.
Precursor Awards.
It's also important to look outside the Oscars for guidance. There are dozens of guilds, critic groups, and random film groups handing out awards leading up to the Oscars. I've picked 7 groups with awards that either correspond closely with the Best Picture winner or are broad enough to be worth discussing. Here's the credentials of each:
BAFTA Award for Best Film: 19 of the last 20 Best Picture winners were also nominated for this award. The only exception is
Million Dollar Baby, which I believe came into the race a little late for the Brits to take notice. This award winner has matched the Best Picture winner 11 times in the last 20 years, including a 6 year streak from 2008-2013. However, they've gone another way the last 2 years.
Golden Globe for Best Film, Drama & Comedy/Musical: The Golden Globe isn't reliable for picking winners. Between the two awards, they've only called 12 of the last 20 Best Picture winners. What is reliable is their nomination. Except for when they had the good sense to leave out
Crash in 2005, the Globes have nominated the Best Picture for the last two decades.
Producers Guild of America Award for Best Film: The PGA award is the single best Oscar predictor these days. They haven't failed to nominate the Best Picture winner in the last 20 years. Before last year, when it was a crazy-tight race, they'd matched the last 8 Oscar winners. This reliability is because they are the only other group who uses the weighted ballot that the Oscars use to pick a winner (Other Considerations for a better description of that).
Screen Actors Guild Award for Ensemble in a Film: The SAG award is similar to the PGA in that it has nominated the Best Picture winner in each of the last 20 years. They are only 11/20 when it comes to matching winners. I'll go ahead and point out that
La La Land got individual nominations but no ensemble nomination. There is a practice reason for that, however it's still worth noting.
Directors Guild of America Award for Best Director: By results alone, the DGA Award is the best. It's 20/20 for nominating the Best Picture Winner and 15/20 for matching winners. I still value the PGA more. In a year like this, it doesn't matter much though.
American Cinema Editors Award for Editing, Drama & Comedy/Musical: The Eddy award is only 19/20 after failing to nominate
Spotlight last year. That was a weird omission. Between its split award (like the Golden Globe) the Best Picture winner has also won the Eddy 11 of the last 20 years. This award is the "secret sauce" for predicting some of the more unlikely winners like
Crash and
Gladiator.
American Society of Cinematographers Award for Cinematography in a Film: I've considered dropping this from my major indicators list. It's only 13/20 for nominating the winner and has only matched 5 of those winners. It's another "secret sauce" nomination though that pushes certain films over the edge in terms of likelihood.
I'll get into what each individual nomination and win means when I get to my overall Best Picture rankings below. Here are the numbers you need to know for now. In the last 20 years, all the Best Pictures have won at least 1 of these 7 precursor awards and been nominated by at least 4 of them.
So, how do things look among those 7 groups for this year's Best Picture nominees?
Arrival: 5 nominations, 1 win.
Fences: 2 nominations, 0 wins.
Hacksaw Ridge: 3 nominations, 0 wins.
Hell of High Water: 3 nominations, 0 wins.
Hidden Figures: 2 nominations, 1 win.
La La Land: 6 nominations, 5 wins.
Lion: 4 nominations, 1 win.
Manchester by the Sea: 6 nominations, 0 wins.
Moonlight: 7 nominations, 1 win.
That narrows things down more.
Fences,
Hacksaw Ridge,
Hell or High Water, and
Hidden Figures don't have enough nominations.
Lion barely makes the cut. Only
Arrival and especially
Moonlight look competitive. There's one other key number I didn't mention: 5. That's the magic number for wins. In the last 2 decades, if one film has at least 5 wins out of these precursors it also has won the Oscar for Best Picture (It's happened 8 times).
Other Considerations
This is the part where I remind myself that numbers aren't everything. There's other factors to consider. I didn't listen to that advice last year and put
Spotlight as the third most likely winner. I went back and read what I said about each movie and it's clear to me that
Spotlight is what my gut said. I let the numbers sway me toward
The Revenant and
The Big Short*. This year has made it easy since virtually every indicator - including my gut - is pointing toward the same movie.
*For the record, The Big Short had a strong case. The Revenant was mostly noise.
At the end of last year's Oscar season, I would've assumed that a reaction to #OscarSoWhite would've put a minority-led movie front and center this time. I assumed it would be
The Birth of a Nation, which already has buzz out of Sundance. That film fizzled early, but this year ended up with no shortage of other great nominees from
Moonlight to
Hidden Figures to
Fences.
Hidden Figures was almost too traditional (it's pleasing in a
Forrest Gump kind of way and I don't think even
Forrest Gump would win in 2017).
Fences was an actors showcase.
Moonlight is tricky. I think it would've won in a different year. Last year, probably.
Instead, it's the escapism and Hollywood navel-gazing of
La La Land that drove the season. If you check history, Oscar voters are almost always happy drop a serious critical darling for something lighter (2010:
The King's Speech over
The Social Network, 2008:
Slumdog Millionaire over
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 1998:
Shakespeare in Love over
Saving Private Ryan). They also love to reward what they do lately.
Birdman,
Argo, and
The Artist are all examples Hollywood awarding Hollywood. These are not perfect formulas, but they make more sense to me than some of the more knee-jerk, sinister reactions. There's some truth to almost any theory you want to come up with though. The Academy is a large group and people vote for all sorts of reasons.
Then, there's always the consideration of the Oscar ballot itself. You see, it's a weighted ballot, meaning everyone ranks their 9 picks. If a movie doesn't have a majority on the first count, the ballots picking whatever movie came in last get redistributed using the second pick, and so on and so forth until one movie has a majority. If you ever feel like the Oscar winner is a compromise, you're kind of right. This method is more favorable for generally liked movies than ones that people run hot and cold on. For example, if
Moonlight has a lot of 1st and 9th place votes it will be harder for it to win than if
La La Land has mostly 3rd and 4th place votes, even if
Moonlight has more 1st place votes. In case you want to read more on how it works, this is the
best site I could find about it.
(Update: FiveThirtyEight also just posted a good simplified explanation of how the weighted ballot works)
Predictions
(From most to least likely to win)
La La Land
14 Oscar Nominations (including Directing, Acting, Screenplay, and Editing)
BAFTA - Feature Film - Winner
Golden Globes - Comedy/Musical Film - Winner
PGA - Feature Film - Winner
DGA - Direction - Winner
ASC - Cinematography - Nominee
Eddie - Comedy/Musical Film Editing - Winner
Pros: Everything! It has a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations. In any year, having the most nominations in the field isn't a lock (Just ask
The Revenant). It sure helps though. Included in those nominations are just about every major category (director, lead actress, lead actor, original screenplay, editing). It's had the frontrunners for several Oscar categories.
La La Land has tore through the season, getting key wins from the DGA, PGA, BAFTA, Editors Guild, and HFPA. You can create any narrative you want for how one of the other nominees could pull off a surprise Best Picture win, but there is no reasonable way to suggest that
La La Land isn't a heavy favorite to win going into the night.
La La Land isn't unbeatable. It's just very unlikely to be beat.
Cons: No SAG ensemble nomination is worrisome at face value. However, this is a two person movie with a few other small roles. Hardly an ensemble. If, say,
Gravity won in 2014, no one would've looked to the lack of a SAG ensemble nomination to say it couldn't happen. Other reasons determined that
12 Years a Slave was the smart pick (
Oops). That's the closest thing to a precedent working against
La La Land though.
Moonlight
8 Oscar Nominations (including Directing, Acting, Screenplay, and Editing)
BAFTA - Feature Film - Nominee
Golden Globes - Drama Film - Winner
PGA - Feature Film - Nominee
DGA - Direction - Nominee
SAG - Ensemble - Nominee
ASC - Cinematography - Nominee
Eddie - Drama Film Editing - Nominee
Pros: It is the only film recognized by all seven of the major precursors I follow. It's the only film other than
La La Land with directing, acting, screenplay, and editing nominations. The Golden Globe win is nice too. I don't include the Writers Guild Award on here for a few reasons, but it's worth noting that
Moonlight won that in a head to head with
La La Land. If any movie has the ammunition to knock
La La Land down, it's
Moonlight. Oh, and the 700ish new members in the Academy since last year is the largest injection of new blood in a very long time. Who knows how they could swing things?
Cons: The Golden Globe win didn't come agains
t La La Land. The SAG ensemble loss [also without
La La Land] to
Hidden Figures hurts.
Moonlight needs the support of the acting branch of the Academy, the largest branch, to pull off an upset. People get bored by a movie being a frontrunner from Telluride to the Oscars and convince themselves that there's more of a horse race than there really is. The internet is littered with think pieces about how
Boyhood,
Gravity, and
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button all had great dark horse chances. Even "surprise" wins like
Crash,
Million Dollar Baby, or
Braveheart had the benefit of a split field of contenders*.
*Million Dollar Baby is the closest thing to a true upset going against The Aviator in 2004. The Aviator wasn't as strong as La La Land going into the night though.
Arrival
8 Oscar Nominations (including Directing, Screenplay, and Editing)
BAFTA - Feature Film - Nominee
PGA - Feature Film - Nominee
DGA - Direction - Nominee
ASC - Cinematography - Nominee
Eddie - Drama Film Editing - Winner
Pros: It feels weird putting Arrival as the third most likely to win over
Manchester by the Sea.
La La Land,
Moonlight, and
Manchester have been the three headed monster of this award season. When you look at it, it makes sense to move
Arrival ahead. It's tied with
Moonlight for the second most Oscar nominations, and that's after the surprising snub of Amy Adams for Lead Actress. It's been just as present during the award season as
Manchester and even has an Eddie win.
Cons: Mad Max: Fury Road.
Gravity.
Hugo.
Avatar. All fairly recent "genre" movies that received a lot of love on nomination day, went home with a lot of tech and craft awards, but never really had a shot at a Best Picture win.
Arrival, these are your brethren.
Manchester by the Sea
6 Oscar Nominations (including Directing, Acting, and Screenplay)
BAFTA - Feature Film - Nominee
Golden Globes - Drama Film - Nominee
PGA - Feature Film - Nominee
DGA - Direction - Nominee
SAG - Ensemble - Nominee
Eddie - Drama Film Editing - Nominee
Pros: 6 Oscar nominations is nothing to sneeze at. It has all the nominations it needs to make a strong case for Best Picture. It was present throughout awards season, collecting a boatload of nominations along the way. It split many of the critic awards with
Moonlight.
Cons: Critics don't vote for Oscars though. Despite all the nominations, there were no precursor wins to indicate Best Picture success. Casey Affleck's late stumbles in the Lead Actor race aren't encouraging either. That is the award that
Manchester needs to believe that a Best Picture win is even possible.
Hidden Figures
3 Oscar Nominations (including Acting and Screenplay)
PGA - Feature Film - Nominee
SAG - Ensemble - Winner
Pros: The SAG win is huge. The PGA nomination is required for consideration. Perhaps the BAFTA snub can be ignored, because the Brits don't care as much for race stories in America.
Hidden Figures is the highest grossing nominee and a crowd-pleaser that's impossible to hate. That plays very well on the weighted ballot the Oscars use to decide the winner.
Cons: People need to stop fooling themselves about the late season box office argument.
American Sniper was almost three times the hit that
Hidden Figures is and it never stood a chance. The fact is, only 2 of my 7 precursors recognized
Hidden Figures at all. And, the weighted ballot will only help if they have to get to a third or fourth round of voting to get a winner. While we'll never know the exact results, I don't see how it goes more than 2 rounds before
La La Land gets the majority it needs.
Lion
6 Oscar Nominations (including Acting and Screenplay)
Golden Globes - Drama Film - Nominee
PGA - Feature Film - Nominee
DGA - Direction - Nominee
ASC - Cinematography - Winner
Pros: A healthy nomination haul. The ASC win keeps it floating, as do the other three precursor nominations.
Cons: I know most people haven't heard of most of the nominees, but even I've barely heard anyone say anything about
Lion. No Best Picture winner is this quiet. Not even
Spotlight.
Hell or High Water
4 Oscar Nominations (including Acting, Screenplay, and Editing)
Golden Globes - Drama Film - Nominee
PGA - Feature Film - Nominee
Eddie - Drama Film Editing - Nominee
Pros: This is a great movie. It has the 4 Oscar nomination minimum to even be considered a contender and a few precursor nominations to keep people aware of it.
Cons: I think everyone involved with this film is just happy that it's stayed in the discussion this long. It's this year's "accidental nominee": the film that wasn't aiming for Oscar attention and got it anyway.
Hacksaw Ridge
6 Oscar Nominations (including Directing, Acting, and Editing)
Golden Globes - Drama Film - Nominee
PGA - Feature Film - Nominee
Eddie - Drama Film Editing - Nominee
Pros: This year's "steak eater" nominee. It didn't manage the mighty haul that
The Revenant got last year, but it's still pretty impressive.
Cons: The "steak eaters" get less powerful every year.
Fences
4 Oscar Nominations (including Acting and Screenplay)
PGA - Feature Film - Nominee
SAG - Ensemble - Nominee
Pros: Not much. If a film is only going to have two precursor nominations, PGA and SAG are good ones to have.
Cons: It's too top heavy. The performances dominate this. Kind of like
Dallas Buyers Club.
