One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

With the writing on the wall for Birdman as Best Picture and with all four acting races more or less calcified, the screenplay contests are now the biggest question marks of the major categories, and Best Original Screenplay may be the most perplexing of them.

Most years, with prestigious adaptations duking it out in their own ring, this award serves as a nifty consolation prize for a film that stands out for its uniqueness of premise or snazziness of dialogue, but is just slightly too left-of-centre to win in the top category. Even Best Picture winners Million Dollar Baby and The Artist were trumped in this arena by decidedly more imaginative efforts.

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:

My Award Nominations: Best Actor

It seems that every year there are more brilliant leading male performances than five spots can possibly do justice to. Hey, Academy, forget Best Picture... THIS is the category you should expand!

I had no easy task settling on five for Best Actor. Ask me again tomorrow and there could be five new names entirely!

My Award Nominations: Best Supporting Actress

Unlike their male counterparts over in Best Supporting Actor, the five actresses chosen for my own personal ballot had a lot of competition to rise above in order to secure this nomination, and even as I write this they're not that secure. Ask me again tomorrow and I may have three or four new names surfacing as my favourites. That's because there's been a deep well from which to draw this year. So much so, that overlap between me and the Academy has been limited to a single performance (which is obviously going to win that Oscar, so you won't hear me complaining).

Check out my Best Supporting Actress contenders for 2014:

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.

Makeup and Hair Guild Nominations

The Academy's nomination balloting closes today, but the Makeup and Hairstylists Guild has chimed in before that final bell (there are four other guilds announcing next week, so their nominees will have no influence on Oscar).

This guild hadn't regularly given out awards for some time, until they decided to revive the tradition last year, honouring several films among which was the eventual Oscar winner Dallas Buyers Club.

Leading the field this year are Guardians of the Galaxy and Into the Woods, each receiving three nominations across five categories. Guardians is looking good for an Oscar nod (and possibly the win), but Into the Woods failed to even make the short list.

Besides Guardians, other Oscar finalists which find representation here include The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything each with a pair, and Foxcatcher and Maleficent each with a single citation for their transformative prosthetics. Noah and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were shut out entirely.

One final side note before we dig into the nominees: This guild needs to do a better job with their categorizations. How do they determine what counts as contemporary as opposed to period makeup/hair, and how do they account for fantasy offerings? Hunger Games gets called period, while Guardians of the Galaxy gets called contemporary? I haven't exactly seen a lot of modern day folks walking around looking like this:

This was a problem last year too, which saw The Butler classified as contemporary and Dallas Buyers Club as period, but enough of that. On to this year's slate:

Producers Guild anoint ten, 'Selma' not among them

The PGA's nomination have landed, and the big ten are:

American Sniper - Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Andrew Lazar, Robert Lorenz, Peter Morgan
Birdman - Alejandro G. Iñárritu, John Lesher, James W. Skotchdopole
Boyhood - Richard Linklater, Cathleen Sutherland
Foxcatcher - Megan Ellison, Jon Kilik, Bennett Miller
Gone Girl - Ceán Chaffin
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Wes Anderson, Scott Rudin, Jeremy Dawson, Steven Rales
The Imitation Game - Nora Grossman, Ido Ostrowsky, Teddy Schwarzman
Nightcrawler - Jennifer Fox, Tony Gilroy
The Theory of Everything - Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lisa Bruce, Anthony McCarten
Whiplash - Jason Blum, Helen Estabrook, David Lancaster

Par for the course. I anticipated nine of these. With American Sniper and Nightcrawler picking up steam heading towards Thursday's voting deadline, I'm inclined to believe at least one of them will crack the Academy's Best Picture lineup. But which one? I think Nightcrawler might be a touch too cool for the older demographic that dominates AMPAS, and that many of them will be eager to vote for a decent Clint Eastwood movie (his first in years, so I'm told).

ACE Eddie nominees yield a couple of surprises

Next week promises to be a crazy busy one for awards watchers with no less than six guilds announcing their nominees. But getting a jump on all of them are the American Cinema Editors, who offered up their opinion of the best edited films of the year this morning.

Most of the biggest players in the Best Picture race found some love from the editors, except for Selma which might be suffering the effects of a super late release.

But the more interesting than any snubs are the entrants that weren't entirely expected: Nightcrawler and American Sniper both turned up in the Drama category -- which has six nominees due to a tie -- and that can only be a good omen for these Best Picture dark horses during this crucial voting period (ballots went out on Monday and are due next Thursday).

Check out all the nominees with some additional comments after the cut.

Review - Nightcrawler

Just a quick take on this one, before the deluge of prestige biopics and foregone Oscar nominees start creeping their ways into theatres. Speaking of creeping, Jake Gyllenhaal does his fair share of it in this slick thriller, in which he plays a ghastly parody of the self-made man.

Louis Bloom is a tenacious young go-getter who accurately pitches himself to prospective employers as a fast learner who's willing to do whatever it takes to get a job done and done well. Yet even the most positive corporate attitude isn't worth the paper it's printed on if nobody's hiring.

Ever the entrepreneur, Lou tries his hand at the nocturnal profession of nightcrawling, an ethically borderline job that has him tracking down violent crime stories and shooting video for the highest bidding news network. If Lou is one thing, he's driven.