One Category at a Time: Best Picture

In just over two days from now the 89th Academy Awards will be underway and everyone will be tuned in to see just how many Oscars La La Land can win on its triumphant march to Best Picture. Anyone predicting an upset in the top category at this point is just looking for attention. This is a done deal. Sure, you could point to its lack of a SAG Ensemble nod, a stamp which every Best Picture winner since Braveheart managed to attain en route to Oscar immortality, but why split hairs? We know why it didn't get that nod (it's far from an ensemble piece), and we know it doesn't matter. A happy ending is coming for the marvelous musical that hit the ground running this season and never looked back.

One Category at a Time: Best Actor

Dammit, SAG. Y'know if it weren't for you, this would be one of the easiest calls of Oscar night. So utterly dominant was one contender for so much of the season, it seemed unthinkable that we'd have this tight a race for Best Actor, but so it is. It's a true two horse sprint to the finish in one of those rare categories that we know La La Land can't win.

Busy Guild Weekend: WGA, CAS, MPSE, MAHS

We're into the final stretch, and this long weekend saw a smattering of the remaining guilds announce their winners for the year (only the CDG is left).

The most contested of them would have to be the Writers Guild of America Awards, where the three presumed Best Picture heavyweights Moonlight, La La Land and Manchester by the Sea all squared off against each other for Best Original Screenplay. Moonlight won that distinction, giving me just a bit more comfort in sticking with it for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, although this gives us no further hints in the nail-biter between La La Land and Manchester for the Original Screenplay prize.

With both Moonlight and Lion absent from the guild's Best Adapted Screenplay category, Arrival was able to capitalize. What a wonderful surprise it would be if it could translate its Critics Choice and WGA cache into Oscar gold!

The prize for Documentary Screenplay went to Robert Kenner's Command and Control, which had been shortlisted for the Oscar but failed to make the final five.

One Category at a Time: Best Sound Editing

Earlier today I outlined my thoughts on the race for Best Sound Mixing, and now I'm doing the same for its sister category Best Sound Editing. I did consider covering both predictions in a single post, but it occurred to me that this may be one of those rare years in which we see a split between the two sound categories.

What could make it an even rarer occurrence is that the split might be between two films nominated in both contests, which as only ever happened once (between Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight). The reason such wealth-sharing is so uncommon is that the Academy often struggles to differentiate these two aural disciplines, unless they receive some sort of "obvious" and oversimplified direction, like 'musicals = sound mixing' and 'action = sound editing'.

One Category at a Time: Best Sound Mixing

I feel like every year it gets harder and harder to predict what the Academy as a whole takes into consideration when voting on Best Sound Mixing. Even among the most avid film enthusiasts, the particulars of this craft can be mysterious and confusing. I sometimes struggle myself to decide what constitutes the finest achievement of the year (especially so this year), so trying to speculate as to what others will decide is next to an impossible task.

It brings me no pride to confess that this is the category with my poorest prediction record (roughly 38%), and even the corresponding industry guild -- the CAS, which announces its winners tomorrow -- hasn't matched up all that often: Only 6 of the last 13 CAS champs repeated with the Academy.

But there is one constant that can usually be counted on to pad your Oscar stats: Best Sound Mixing loves musicals.

One Category at a Time: Best Film Editing

Since the art of picture editing is so tricky to assess on face value, it can be equally tricky to predict how a large voting body like the Academy will assess it. The Oscar for Best Film Editing usually goes either to the Best Picture winner or probable runner-up, or occasionally something far from winning Best Picture but which obviously features the "most" editing. Over the last fifteen years, three precursor groups in particular have been informative: The BAFTA, the BFCA, and the ACE guild.

One Category at a Time: Best Director

Splits between Best Picture an Best Director have a weird arrhythmic history at the Oscars. They seem to crop up in bunches before to returning to long stretches when it never happens. We seem to be in the middle (or perhaps the end) of one such bunch, which has seen these two top categories go different ways in three of the last four years. Whether or not this is a blip on the radar or a more mainstaying result of the current Best Picture voting mathematics might require a few more years to suss out, but this year it appears that things will return to the status quo.

My Award Nominations: Makeup and Hair

I'll be honest: There weren't a whole lot of makeup and hair jobs that really impressed me last year. Sure, there were plenty of films in which they played a key role, but nothing on the level with recent efforts that have won my personal prize. Nevertheless, these five movies feature transformative work good enough for a mention in Best Hair and Makeup (which I shall temporarily rename 'The Passion of Andrew Garfield Award'):

My Award Nominations: Sound Editing

Truth be told, there was only one film I saw (that is, heard) this year whose sound design is so embedded into the identity of the movie that it instantly became my defacto winner. That said, there were still plenty of other impressive aural accomplishments, so for now I'll let you guess which of these five Best Sound Editing showcases will take my esteemed prize:

Loving the Arrival of Strange Trolls

The first half of November is well in the books, and brought with it were a handful of releases that could figure into the Oscar race, albeit in limited ways.

Loving was a mainstay on many prediction lists for most of the year, even after the soft though respectable impression it left at Cannes. But having now been seen by a greater number of domestic press and audiences, it's looking more like a fringe contender. Jeff Nichols' telling of the story of interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving -- who fought and won a groundbreaking Supreme Court case to have their marriage recognized in Virginia in the 1960s -- eschews the obvious Oscar-bait hooks of its premise and takes a far more low-key look at their shy personal lives.