One Category at a Time: Actress

For those of us who absorb movies and writing thereof on a year-round basis, one of the defining stories of 2015 has to be how many of the year's best pictures were female-centric stories. It's fitting then, that in a (sadly) uncharacteristic role reversal, the category of Best Actress is far more competitive than that of Best Actor, which is comparatively lackluster. But even with a wealth of quality (which mirrors my own personal ballot quite closely), there's one name that has emerged as the bona fide frontrunner.

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).

Early Oscar Predictions: Best Picture & Director

If you've been tracking the various films I've been predicting in certain categories, then it should go without saying what I'm anticipating to be Best Pictures players. I'll go the limit and pick ten, even though we all know that'll never happen.

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.

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.