One Category at a Time: Best Picture

Usually by this point in the season, we've had enough indicators lining up behind one title to make calling Best Picture a mere formality on our Oscar night scorecards. The only instance in the last ten years that caused any confusion was two years ago, when the PGA ended in an unprecedented tie. The Producers Guild may not have split hairs this year, but they may as well have, because the rest of the industry has been so uniformly divided among the top three contenders that this may be an even tighter race than the famous Gravity/Slave sprint.

For starters, we can pare down the field of eight nominees. Figuring where they'd rank is an exercise in pure, unfounded speculation. But it's also kinda fun, so humour me.

One Category at a Time: Production Design

Without a doubt, the toughest below-the-line awards to call this year are the design categories. The critics, the guilds, and BAFTA have unanimously lined up behind one film in both Costume Design and (today's topic) Production Design. But will the Academy really go there in either design field, let alone both?

Top 20 of 2015, Part 1 (#20-11)

Even when you see well under a hundred movies a year, listing a mere top ten can still be awfully limiting. So this year I'm making time to lavish praise on twenty, which I should have started doing a long time ago. And even with twice as much love going around, there still isn't room to fit in every noteworthy achievement of 2015, so first a few shout-outs:

To Matthew Heineman's gripping expose on vigilantes fighting a hopeless war in Cartel Land; To Deniz Gamze Ergüven for evoking the sisterly bonds of Mustang with such purity and sensitivity; To Steven Spielberg's sturdy, classical construction of the Cold War pseudo-thriller Bridge of Spies; And to J.J. Abrams for reawakening our love of the galaxy far, far away in his exciting and affectionate Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

And now, the first half of my Top 20 Movies of 2015:

My Award Nominations: Sound Mixing

A 3/5 crossover this year between my two sound categories. That's more than I usually want, but the three double-dippers just can't be denied. Find out what they are, plus what other two titles I loved for their Sound Mixing:

One Category at a Time (x2): Sound Mixing+Editing

It seems like every year I end up saying something along the lines of, "the sound categories are especially tough this year". In truth, they're just hard every year. Which precursor do you believe in? Do you double down on one movie winning both (usually the case), or do you hedge your bets by predicting a split? Will it even be the right split?

I twist myself into a pretzel every year running over the permutations, so this year I'm gonna do myself a favour and just get Sound Mixing and Sound Editing over with quickly in one brief post. Like ripping off a band-aid.

One Category at a Time: Visual Effects

Every since 1971, the rule has held that no Best Picture nominated film has lost Best Visual Effects to a film not also nominated for Best Picture. It certainly buttresses the belief that Academy members simply vote for the movie they like in categories they don't really understand, and visual effects is arguably the most "technical" of the so-called "technical" awards (I always find that term so vulgar).

But if ever that rule was to be broken, this would be the year.

One Category at a Time: Adapted Screenplay

After a lean couple of years, 2015 saw the race for Best Adapted Screenplay return to high competitive form: Terrific adaptations like Steve Jobs and 45 Years couldn't find room in a field crowded mostly by Best Picture nominees: Critics prizes have been split every which way: And until the PGA pointed to our Best Picture frontrunner, it felt as though any of the five nominees had a legit shot at winning. It's a shame the contest has devolved into such an open-and-shut case.

My Award Nominations: Editing

My roster of personal nominees continues growing this weekend with the visual post-production categories and music.

It's one of those years when I wish I could include about seven or eight nominees for Best Editing. It pained me to make some of these cuts (heehee), but I like the final five I've wound up with:

One Category at a Time: Leading Actor

After several years of stacked competition, we find ourselves in the rare situation of Best Actor being the most lackluster of the four acting categories. All the better for the current frontrunner, who's been hungering for an Oscar for some time, and now has virtually no competition to bar him from claiming it.

Best Performance by a Grunter in a Leading Role

ADG Winners

The Art Directors Guild capped off the guild festivities for the weekend, handing The Revenant Best Period Production Design, Mad Max: Fury Road Best Fantasy Production Design, and The Martian Best Contemporary Production Design.

I'm really not sure where the Oscar race stands at this point. Mad Max has the lion's share of awards thus far, but it would make such an atypical winner, deserved or not. Same applies to The Revenant. Both are likely to take a bunch of craft categories, but this particular category? The Academy almost never gives it to a movie predominantly set in exterior locations. I'm still looking to Bridge of Spies to potentially pull a Lincoln, but I think I'll wait for BAFTA to weigh in.

My Award Nominations: Adapted Screenplay

A far more competitive field than it was last year, with some truly heartbreaking decisions about who to leave off. But five is the ceiling, and these are the five Adapted Screenplays that I thought were tops:

Reacting to the 88th Oscar nominations

Oscar noms are here! Soon we can start the long, tire-spinning process of analyzing the Academy's picks for patterns and trends, reading possible portents into their eventual winners, believing we have it all figured out then talking ourselves out of it, and catching up on all the docs, songs, foreign films, and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.

This process takes weeks, and by the time we reach the season's end we become numb to all the prognosticating, and resigned to the apparent winners. That's why I feel it important to document my first impressions for posterity while they're still fresh in my mind.

At first blush, this year's slate comes down to a whole lot of glaring, disappointing omissions that are redeemed by the outstanding haul for Mad Max: Fury Road. I held out far longer than I should have on its Best Picture chances, superstitiously beholden to the belief that the Academy would never be cool enough to spring for this type of in-your-face action extravaganza. Happy to be wrong. Excluding the foreseeable snub of Junkie XL's manic score, AMPAS gave this movie absolutely every nomination it deserved. We should always remember this as a significant triumph over genre bias.

I do find myself, however, progressively more nettled with every passing hour at the dominance of The Revenant, a uber-masculin ego trip for which I did not care. Sure, it'll finally win Leo his Oscar (Best Grunter in a Leading Role), but seldom has a movie taken so long to say so little. Even The Hateful Eight was better in this respect. The Fox publicists will no doubt move heaven and earth to pitch it as an 'issue movie' about displaced indigenous peoples, but in truth it's a barren, simplistic revenge saga stretched over what feels like 3 hours of disturbing, unpleasant misery porn. While I certainly can't fault the nominations for Inarritu's sound, vfx and design crews (and of course Chivo), it troubles me to envision the Academy seriously considering this for the win.

Far behind those two craft hogs, The Martian was a distant second with seve, followed by Spotlight, Bridge of Spies and Carol with six nods apiece. And yet one of these things is tragically not like the others: Carol was left oft the Best Picture ballot, which only numbered eight for the second straight year. If something as subtle and refined as Spotlight can make it in (and possibly win), why not Todd Haynes' exquisite masterwork? (Some have proposed that the tired old #OscarsSoWhite hashtag should be replaced with #OscarsSoMale)

Check out more knee-jerk reactions -- and a few cursory predictions -- after the cut.

Golden Globe nominations

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association sounded off this morning on the heels of yesterday's SAG nominations, adding fuel to the campaign fire of many a project. Flagging contenders like The Martian, Joy, and various acting hopefuls got some badly needed exposure, while the unlikely Oscar player Mad Max: Fury Road kept its engines purring with a pair of citations in top categories. The nomination leader: Critics' pet Carol, which continues its maddening lethargic roll-out. It had damn well better speed up after this successful showing.

Check all the feature film categories with some quick thoughts of mine:

Best Picture - Drama
Carol
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight
Looking more and more like Spotlight is the only movie in this scattered season with enough widespread approval to make it a frontrunner. It may be that everybody else is just playing for nominations now, but there are important battles to be won in that contest; The Globes have been proving themselves far cooler than the Academy for a few seasons now, and here's AMPAS's chance to keep in step. Putting these five on the Oscar Best Picture ballot would be a good start (I know I say this without having seen Carol or The Revenant yet, but I have high hopes, and the other three are highly deserving).

October Recap

So October is a wrap! As I was cobbling together my last-minute Doof Warrior costume in time for last night's frivolities, I figured now was the best time to start taking note of how the 2015-16 Oscar race is shaping up.

I realize that for many, the September festival circuit is the official kick-off of awards season. But for those of us without press credentials or travel time to burn, October is when we actually get to see the buzzy titles we've been reading about for a month or more. And this October was chalk full of them.

Early Oscar Predictions: Visual Post-Production

Once principle photography has wrapped, the long, laborious post-production process begins. Editors splice together all the footage while visual effects artists and animators complete the effects shots.

The editing branch has a habit for mostly cribbing from the Best Picture lineup for their own nominees. That doesn't give us much to go on from a predictive standpoint, but there are a few early contenders that wouldn't be terrible bets.