One Category at a Time: Best Makeup & Hairstyling

The polls are open! And with just under two weeks to go until the big night, it's time to start breaking down the previous two months of precursors and campaign antics to determine who will be the winners at the 89th Academy Awards.

All eyes will be glued to see if La La Land can tie the auspicious record of 11 wins (currently held by Ben-Hur, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), but I'm kicking off my yearly series of predictions with one of the few categories where Damien Chazelle's powerhouse musical missed the nomination: Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

This has always been a wonderfully weird contest for Oscar watchers: There is perhaps no branch of the Academy more iconoclastic than the makeup branch, with its active resistance to beloved Best Picture frontrunners or seemingly obvious contenders. And with only three slots available (umm... why?), high profile snubs are a yearly occurrence. Winning this particular Oscar is 50% quality of work, 50% the branch eliminating the heaviest competition. Suffering from their unpredictable tendencies this year was Florence Foster Jenkins, the only semifinalist to have been nominated by both the BAFTA and the corresponding industry guild MUAHS. Alas, Meryl's wigs and syphilis weren't enough, clearing the way for our first nominee.

One Category at a Time: Makeup and Hairstyling

Best Makeup and Hairstyling is traditionally easy pickings for pundits. Just choose whichever one of the three (since this branch stubbornly refuses to expand to a more appropriate five) is a Best Picture nominee, or in the absence of one, choose whichever has the most obvious makeup.

But this year is a veritable coin toss between two Best Picture nominees who happen to be squaring off in almost every craft category, including this one. Trying to decipher how AMPAS will split the love between them is a maddening game indeed.

My Award Nominations: Hair & Makeup

Like the costumers, the Hair & Makeup crews have a huge responsibility in visually defining  film's characters. Why the Academy's correlative branch is still reluctant to expand this to a proper 5-nominee category is beyond me. I know better (shut up, you know I do!), and have named these five my best of the year: