Top Five Pet Peeves of the 2016-17 Awards Season

Alright, the time has come to move on from this craziness. A new year in cinema is upon us, with its own horrors and treasures to discover. But first, one final look back at the horrors and treasures from the recently concluded Oscar derby:

Top Five Pet Peeves of the 2016-17 Awards Season:

5. Back-ended release calendar

This gets me every year, but why are distributers so bent on waiting until the last minute? Nearly all of my essential viewing for the year had to be crammed into December, January and February, which is no way to consume movies. Spread them out, for God's sake! At least Moonlight had the good sense to begin its roll-out in October, and look how that turned out for them. Compare that with another marvelous little movie, 20th Century Women, that held off until freakin' January. You do the math.

No Words -- Should've Sent A Poet

March is the month to decompress, go enjoy some bad movies, and stop thinking about Oscar for a spell. It does even the hungriest awards enthusiast good to take one's mind off the madness. But none of this sabbatical comes before extensive analyses and rundowns of the season that was, so I'll be rolling out my thoughts sporadically as we creep out of winter and into a new movie year.

I normally devote an entire piece to dissecting my predictions, but why even bother this year? With so many categories defying the patterns on which most pundits have come to rely (especially in the crafts), I wound up with an unexpected and historic low of 13 (uck), and in what I foolishly assumed would be a bounceback from last year's lacklustre 16/24.

I can deliver my thoughts on how I reacted to those losses -- some of which provided me with the most satisfying moments of the night, the year, and possibly the decade so far -- at a later date. First I have to go out of order and address the elephant in the room.

You know what I'm talking about.

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 Original Screenplay

Just like in Best Adapted Screenplay, this race feels like a tight one, except that it comes down to two scripts instead of all five nominees. I gotta tell ya, as much fun as true suspense on Oscar night can be, I'm having a rough go of predicting Best Original Screenplay lately, batting less than 0.500 over the last seven years.

Part of it is that the two main industry precursors are doing just as poorly when it comes to prefacing the Academy (which isn't their job, of course, and thank God for that). The WGA and the BAFTA have each anticipated the eventual winner only half the time in this decade, so maybe I'm looking at the wrong precursors.

One Category at a Time: Best Production Design

This feels like one of those tight categories in which literally any of the five nominees could win. The usual period dressings are conspicuously absent, precursors have been split every which way, and said precursors have not been all that informative in recent years anyway; Three Best Production Design winners of that last ten didn't have any of the ADG, BAFTA or Critics Choice Awards in hand before taking the Oscar.

Top Twenty Movies of 2016, Part 2 (#10-1)

And then there were ten. I've tried my best not to squawk about it too much over the course of the year, but I stand by the opinion that 2016 was not a vintage year for film. I do, however, think it may be the year wherein the importance of film (and our cultural sphere, in general) was clearer than ever.

Many might dismiss the pageantry of awards seasons and the minutia of 'Top Ten' lists as utterly frivolous in a year with so much noisy social and political unrest, with much larger (and disheartening) things happening outside the cinema bubble. But such tumultuous times are when we should cherish the movies even more.

The right movie at the right time can have tremendous power; It can soothe the vexed mind with magical escapism, it can educate by giving exposure to unseen people or issues, and it can provide connection to worlds we may never have known we could connect with. These ten movies do all that and then some. Congratulations to them, especially the top five, which represent my personal nominations for Best Picture of 2016.

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.

CDG Winners

The Costume Designers Guild wrapped up the industry-based awards last night on the final day of Oscar voting. They elected Hidden Figures in Period, Doctor Strange in Fantasy and La La Land in Contemporary.

Given that polls are now closed and that the guild is a smaller membership prone to idiosyncratic decisions now and then (remember W.E.... didn't think so), I don't think I'll be swayed from predicting Jackie for the Oscar, but it feels like a very pliable contest. Florence Foster Jenkins could surprise, and La La Land would make a satisfying winner on behalf of overlooked contemporary design efforts.

One Category at a Time: Best Costume Design

As many of us have been thinking ever since the BAFTAs so judiciously spread the wealth nine days ago (right before Oscar polls opened), a La La Land crafts sweep is now more improbable than probable, and I'd argue the category where it faces the biggest uphill climb is Best Costume Design.

One Category at a Time: Best Actress

Another year, another super competitive crunch for Best Actress nominations. Things were so tight this year it prompted Viola Davis to jump ship to the Supporting race, saw Amy Adams miss for a complex Best-Picture-headlining turn and Annette Bening get passed over for some of the best work of her career. And yet as tough as it's been to crack the Best Actress lineup these last few years, eventual winners have been easy to call.

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.

One Category at a Time: Best Original Score

Oscar watchers rejoiced this year when we saw a Best Original Score lineup populated almost entirely with first-time nominees. Usually the music branch has proved the most insular one in the Academy, only reserving one or two slots for fresh talent every year. Perhaps recent diversification initiatives are starting to take effect, though the branch clearly still has its favourites.

One Category at a Time: Best Cinematography

You know how much I love guys like Chivo and Deakins and Richardson,
but I gotta be honest: It's soooooooooooo refreshing to see some new faces in the Best Cinematography race. With only a single previous nomination between the five of them, this year's nominees represent a future full of promise for the art form, and one of them will be nabbing their first Oscar.

One Category at a Time: Best Original Song

With little in the way of industry precursors to go by (The Golden Globe and Critics Choice are the only two that come to mind), trying to anticipate who wins Best Original Song at the Oscars can be a crap shoot. However, whenever those two precursors agree on a contender that's also Oscar-nominated, it tends to win.

Wealth-Spreading BAFTA Keeps Season Interesting...

The Brits have been known to throw a monkey wrench into awards season every now and then, even when ultimately bowing to the status quo. Such is the case today as they handed the unquestionable Oscar frontrunner La La Land their Best Film prize, but it was far from the clean sweep which many pundits believe the Academy will bestow upon it. While its five-category haul is impressive, it ultimately lost more prizes than it won, putting thoughts of it matching the Oscar record (11 wins) into serious doubt. I'm especially skeptical of the design categories and Original Screenplay.

Other notable successes include Lion and Manchester by the Sea, each taking a pair. Lion feels like something that could surprise anywhere on Oscar night, especially in Adapted Screenplay. Manchester, on the other hand, feels like a surprise shutout just waiting to happen, with Denzel taking Best Actor from Affleck, and Chazelle Best Original Screenplay from Lonergan, but we shall see.

List of winners and some commentary to follow:

BEST FILM
La La Land - Fred Berger, Jordan Horowitz, Marc Platt

On to Oscar...

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM
I, Daniel Blake - Ken Loach, Rebecca O’Brien, Paul Laverty

Hardly a surprise, given its nomination in Best Film.

Moonlight Wins USC Scripter, plus ADG Winners

Moonlight's Barry Jenkins and Tarrell Alvin McCraney won the USC Scripter Award last night, which honours the best page-to-screen adaptations of the year by giving prizes to both the screenwriter and the author of the original source material.

Oddly, the Academy still included McCraney in the Oscar nomination as well, but if you're willing to give McCraney story credit on this project (for writing a play that never got produced), doesn't that mean you're treating it like an original screenplay? I don't think too many people are going to complain about McCraney standing alongside Jenkins with an Oscar in hand two weeks from now, but I'm curious to hear where others stand on this question.