My Award Nominations: Director

My final official nominee announcement this year is Best Director. Rather than similarly highlighting just my five Best Picture nominees, I'll be publishing my top 20 pics of the year in two lists on Tuesday and Wednesday. But for now, the five helmers whose storytelling most impressed me in 2015:

My Awards: Animated Feature

I'm nearing the end of my personal nominations, and today I post my picks for the specialty categories of Foreign, Documentary and Animated Features. Inevitably, there's a fair bit of overlap with AMPAS, as I never get around to catching much more than what's up for the Oscar in these niche arenas.
So, you know, subject to change and all that.

Here are my top options for Best Animated Feature:

One Category at a Time: Best Animated Feature

With a limited number of eligible entries being submitted each year, it's usually no hard task predicting the winner of Best Animated Feature. Last year's contest may have been a nebulous one due to the vacuum created by the shocking omission of The LEGO Movie, but strange circumstances of that ilk are the exception to the rule.

This year we're back to the status quo with a bona fide lock that's entirely deserving of that designation. But first, let's briefly peruse the other nominees, which represent a diverse cross-section of styles and stories. For these four, the true value is the nomination, which will hopefully draw new audiences that might otherwise have passed them by.

One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

With only a handful of weeks before the Oscars, now is the time for me to start formulating some predictions, and I'll start with what may be the surest lock of the year, Best Original Screenplay.

It's hard to imagine the prize going to anything but the former Best Picture frontrunner Spotlight. Though it's no longer favoured to win the top award after The Big Short's momentum shifting PGA win, Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer's dense journalistic procedural will surely be given its due here.

The nearest challenger -- a distant second despite being a perfectly respectable option -- is probably Matt Charman and the Coens' austere political quasi-thriller Bridge of Spies, being the only other Best Picture nominee in the field.

PGA Preview + My Award Nominations: Original Screenplay

Tonight all eyes will be on the Producers Guild of America, who have matched the Academy all six years of the expanded Best Picture era so far. Pundit logic suggests that Spotlight (my prediction) is the only movie that can survive the rigors of the preferential ballot, although I wouldn't put it past them to be sufficiently impressed by the gargantuan production that was The Revenant. Spotlight is a relatively small and very talkative movie after all; Not the type that usually wins Best Picture, but I'll try to remain optimistic.

While the producers' decision may ultimately end the perceived race for the Academy's highest honour, the race for my own awards is just getting started. Each weekend from now until the Oscars I'll be publishing my own list of personal preferences, starting with Best Original Screenplay.

Review - Inside Out

Leave it to Pixar – the animation haven that made us believe a rat could cook, and a house could fly, and a robot could fall in love – to make their latest brainchild... well, the brain of a child. Or more specifically, the feelings that make it tick.
As such, Inside Out is the studio's most ambitious concept to date, and also one of its greatest triumphs. This wonderful invention of cinema does more than make you laugh and cry (and it will make you do both); It blithely examines the human condition and what it finds is deceptively profound.

Riley Anderson (voiced by Kaitlyn Diaz) is a perfectly normal, perfectly happy 11-year-old girl. Her early life growing up in Minnesota may seem a bit ordinary on the outside, but her gray matter is anything but gray. Pixar represents it as a bubblegum-tinted world of pure imagination, overseen by the five core emotions – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger – that literally push her buttons from a command booth in her frontal lobe.

Giving voice to these tiny balls of neurological energy are a quintet of TV comedians who would seem almost too perfectly typecast in a lesser film. It's to their (and the animators') enormous credit that we never get distracted trying to picture the actor behind the caricature.

Early Oscar Predictions: Animated Feature

Animated films are a special case in which the vast majority of the work is carried out in post. Years are often spent on the animation alone, and that's not even taking into account all the other elements such as effects, music and sound.

Walt Disney animation has dominated lately, winning back-to-back Best Animated Feature Oscars and two Best Animated Short Oscars in the last three years, but they have no feature in contention for 2015. With one of the big three American studios sitting it out, one would think that a DreamWorks entry should make the cut, but do Home or B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherwordly Operations really strike anyone as Oscar-worthy? I have my doubts.

Instead, it may be Disney's corporate acquisition Pixar that reclaims some of their lost lustre by double dipping, as for the first time ever they are cranking out two original films in the same year.

Early Oscar Predictions: Original Screenplay

Guess what, guys: It's officially the first day if Spring (though try telling that to the weather), and what better way to kick off the season of new life than by Springing forward into the new Oscar season with some early predictions!

Each Friday until the end of April, I'll be adding new categories to the sidebar with accompanying articles. In the spirit of the filmmaking process, the category order will be based on the order of steps of making a movie. "Loosely" based, at least. There's nothing about these early guesses that isn't completely loosey goosey anyway. But one thing we can assume with some degree of certainty is that most films start with a screenplay, so too will that be our starting point.

First off, even though some pundits have already read many of 2015's buzz-
worthy scripts, landing a nomination depends much more on how well the film is received overall than on the calibre of the writing. It makes spitballing these categories as much of a crapshoot as Best Picture, but there are some distant Best Original Screenplay contenders that certainly look promising enough on paper.