One Category at a Time: Original Score

There's nothing more frustrating for an awards pundit than being able to narrow a category down to two realistic outcomes, but then being forced to flip a coin between them. So it is this year with Best Original Score, which is, for me, an even more hair-pulling exercise in prediction waffling than the tightly contested Best Director and Picture races.

But first, let's whittle things down with some process of elimination.

One Category at a Time: Costume Design

For a while there, it looked like the Academy might never get over its obsession with Western European royalty in this category. A string of consecutive winners made up of Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Duchess, and The Young Victoria certainly cast the discouraging impression that Oscar voters had lost all their imagination when it comes to assessing the best dressed film of the year. Perhaps those complaints actually reached enough ears to initiate some kind of mini paradigm shift. Things have been looking up in Best Costume Design for the past few years, with the Academy branching out a bit in terms of the historical eras and geographical locales that the winning costumes have evoked. And with nary a stodgy royalty drama in sight, that trend looks to continue this year.

My Award Nominations: Best Cinematography

This was a great year for this category. Many DPs exhibited rich and varied work that was not only visually dazzling, but saturated with thematic subtext. Whittling it down to ten was tough enough, but then choosing five after that was even more painful (Bradford Young, I'm so sorry!).

Here are my Best Cinematography nominees for 2014, each accompanied as usual with a frame that stood out to me as especially memorable:

One Category at a Time: Production Design

2014 was, in my opinion, a pretty awesome year for production designers. There was an extremely rich variety of work on display, from trippy sci-fi to austere period pieces, and from autere sci-fi to trippy period pieces! It's a shame that only five can be honoured by the Academy (the guild has three categories over which to spread the wealth), because I can definitely think of at least ten worthy of a nomination.

And yet, as outstanding as so many sets were in so many movies this year, there's only one that has rightful claim to this award. And fortunately, that's the one on track to win.

One Category at a Time: Cinematography

Twenty-two business days to go until the Oscars; Essentially New Year's Eve for film lovers and award obsessives, both camps into which I fall. How will I ever pass the time?

Why, by continuing my annual tradition of analyzing the various Oscar races in 'One Category at a Time', the very first article series I began back in 2008 when this was just a baby blog. I suppose six years old still seems kinda babyish, but relative to the age of the Internet, I guess that makes this site now more of a disrespectful teenager that wishes it could be more like the grownup websites. That's an appropriate description, I think.

Anyway, back to this year's series, which I will be kicking off (as I did last year) with my favourite category Best Cinematography. This year's race feels eerily similar to last year's, with one inarguable frontrunner soaring well above its competition... and it's the same person too!

87th Academy Award Nominations!!!

Oscar noms are here! And as is always the case on this most exciting of mornings, the Academy had a handful of surprises to keep us interested.

I think the biggest takeaway from this year's crop is that for the first time since shifting to the variable number of nominees, the Best Picture race yielded less than nine contenders. Instead, we have eight, all of which I predicted, but my ninth prediction (Nightcrawler) was obviously less beloved than all those guilds suggested.

The nomination leaders are Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel, racking up nine apiece. Close behind was The Imitation Game with eight, followed by Boyhood and American Sniper with six.

So what to glean from all this? To my eyes, this is now a three horse race between The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, and Boyhood. They are the only Best Picture nominees to additionally turn up in the three essential categories of director, screenplay, and editing.

The big losers of the day? Well, hard as it may be to think of a Best Picture nominee being a big loser, Selma has clearly underperformed with the industry, earning only two nominations total. The aforementioned Nightcrawler failed to translate its precursor love into Academy love, earning but a lone citation (at least a worthy one, for Dan Gilroy's screenplay, but ouch for Gyllenhaal!).

And what of the one-hit wonders? Films that you weren't expecting to get anything but suddenly pop up in single category thus earning the title "Academy Award nominee". There are a few of them in Best Visual Effects and Best Original Song, including The LEGO Movie which shockingly missed on a Best Animated Feature nomination (that's gotta smart for Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the presumed frontrunners until now).

Some other films did pretty well for themselves despite being outside the Best Picture conversation. Interstellar picked up five nods, including two contentious ones in both sound categories. Foxcatcher picked up five as well, but failed to gain entry to the Best Picture race. Mr. Turner picked up four in the craft categories.

I'll make some more commentaries on the individual categories throughout the morning, but I'll conclude for the moment with a quick list of best nominations and the worst snubs:

-Foxcatcher for director and screenplay...HELL YEAH!
-Captain America for visual effects...HELL YEAH!
-Ida for cinematography...HELL YEAH!
-Both Song of the Sea and Princess Kaguya for animated feature...HELL YEAH!
-Marion Cotillard for actress...HELL YEAH! (No offense to Jen, but I wasn't particularly looking forward to Cake)
-Whiplash for sound mixing...HELL YESSSSSS! Seriously, let's make this one happen.

-Glen Keane snubbed for animated short...HELL NO!
-No Theory of Everything for makeup...HELL NO!
-No Gyllenhaal for actor...HELL NO!
-No Force Majeure for foreign film...HELL NO!
-No Fury for sound...HELL NO!
-No Godzilla for, uh, anything...HELL NO!

[UPDATE:] I've tabulated my overall prediction results, and I correctly anticipated 81 of 106 nominations (I didn't attempt the shorts), identical to my results from last year! So as a tie breaker I decided to look at my early predictions to see how they compared to last year's. I guessed 34 nominees way back in May. Again, identical to last year! Am I plateauing?

Best Picture
American Sniper
Birdman
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash
It's kind of odd that there was enough passion for Selma to sneak in here but that it only received one additional nomination, while Foxcatcher (which I'm delighted to see pop up in five categories!) didn't have enough support to be a ninth nominee. Five of these eight are in my top ten, but the other three don't even come close. I can't help but feel that it's one of those three that will win, but we'll have to wait for the PGA until we can be sure.

ADG nominees

The announcement everyone will have their eyes on today is the Producers Guild nominations, but in the meantime the Art Directors Guild has sounded off on the year's best production design. Will our Academy's Best Production Design ballot be a sampling of these fifteen films, or will one or two titles passed over by the guild make their way to an Oscar nod? I notice that Mr. Turner was ignored in the Period category (um... what?), but there's always one guild snubbee that gets a second wind.

Check out the nominees with some commentaries/wild guesses after the cut.

Christmas Capsules (Reviews)

Things are probably going to get a bit quiet on this blog (and other award news outlets) over the next couple of weeks. All the Academy shortlists have been unveiled for applicable categories, top ten lists from most critics have been published, and at this point there's not much left to do but wait for the guilds to start piping up in the New Year.

Me, I'll be catching up with all sorts of early releases from this year as well as new ones as they open up in their plush holiday time slots. As I do, I'll keep adding my brief capsule reactions to this space, which you can check up on from time to time (I'll make an effort to tweet new entries). Consider it my Non-Denominational Mid-December Holiday Special to you, whose readership I appreciate all year round!

So have a merry Christmas, a happy Chanukah, a kwazy Kwanza, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn yet dignified Ramadan.