Top Five Pet Peeves of the 2014-15 Oscar Season

The Oscar season is always draining – emotionally and physically, given the length of the broadcast – but there's still one last drop of blogging to be drained from my fingertips before officially calling it a year: My annual rundown of personal highs and lows from the season that was. I find it the perfect way to purge any lingering feelings before psyching myself up for the coming cinematic calendar, which is sure to have its own slate of travesties and triumphs.

I'll be posting my top ten in the form of two top fives. We'll get the ball rolling with the five things that bugged me most during the 2014-15 film awards circuit:

One Category at a Time: Best Picture

Ordinarily, any self-respecting Academy Awards prognosticator (is there such a thing?) would be mightily embarrassed to guess Best Picture -- often the most predictable of categories -- incorrectly for two straight years.

But these last two years have been anything but ordinary.

A mere twelve months ago, many pundits, stunned by the unprecedented PGA tie between Gravity and 12 Years a Slave, were calling it arguably the closest race in Oscar history. Flash forward and we have another Oscar race that, while perhaps not the closest of all time, is certainly not at a lack of suspense when it comes to the top prize. It's a good thing.

Traditionally, I've broken down the Best Picture contest by analyzing which films have the requisite trifecta of nominations; Best Editing, Best Screenplay, and Best Director. This year, for reasons that will be discussed, I have to throw all that out the window. The preferential ballot has made it possible for a movie to win without being cited in all three of those categories. A film-by-film rundown seems more appropriate.

My Award Nominations: Best Original Song

There weren't that many films with good original songs this year (basically there was Begin Again and then everything else), but the songs that did I decide upon I rather like. Have a listen to my five Best Original Song nominees after the cut:

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 Adapted Score / Music Supervision

I only began rewarding this less heralded corner of movie music just last year, and I can see why so few people even bother. Unlike last year, which had many great examples of movies using previously composed music to great effect, this year I could barely scrape together the minimum of three examples that I felt merited recognition. You can forgive me for allowing this to be my only award category with fewer than five nominees (now that I've finally come around on Best Makeup & Hair).

Anyhow, here they are: My Best Adapted Scores of the year:

One Category at a Time: Original Song

It feels strange whenever there's a year in which the music branch doesn't do something outright embarrassing. I guess you could disparage the disqualification of Antonio Sanchez's percussive Birdman score, but that's not so much a fresh embarrassment as the branch simply continuing to follow their own foolish rules.

But in regards to their Best Original Song selections, we have nothing on the level of 'Alone-Yet-Not-Alone-gate' from last year, or the hilarious two-nominee field from 2011. The music branch mostly obeyed the rules, singling out the three main songs that most people expected to be nominated, plus shining a light on couple of lower-profile tunes without any embarrassment.

Or at least without any overt embarrassment.

My Award Nominations: Best Acting Ensemble

The nominations keep chugging, and today's category is for Best Acting Ensemble. A couple of these films have already had plenty of recognition on the circuit for the group acting, a couple others deserved much more, and the fifth never stood much a chance of getting any sort of awards outside of foreign language prizes.

My Award Nominations: Best Director

These directors are all master storytellers, but what I particularly love about this group is how they've all told their stories in such different ways. They represent a rich array of stylistic voices and I can't wait to see what they churn out next!

But before looking ahead too far, one look back at the Best Directors of 2014:

Review - Selma

The image we're greeted with at the onset of Selma, staring directly at us, is the face of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But this is not the Dr. King we know from the sound bites and TV footage that immortalized him as a mighty orator with a famous dream. This Dr. King looks uncomfortable, restless and out of his element as he rehearses his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech in the privacy of his hotel suite.

The Dr. King he himself sees in the mirror is unfamiliar to him as well; All dressed up to accept an award for peace when he knows how much violence and struggle is yet to be endured in his campaign for civil rights. Just as he gazes at his reflection, contemplating how far he's come and how far he's still to go, so too does Selma hold a mirror up to modern America and ask its people to consider the same questions.

Director Ava DuVernay (working from her largely rewritten draft of an original script by Paul Webb) has no intention of taking the easy way around the story of the protest marches King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, or of dampering its echoes in the troubled racial politics of today. Though set in the summer of '65, it is a film very much about the here and now, told with a verve and vitality that historical docudramas often lack.

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.

'Selma' Stumbles Again With BAFTA Miss

The British Academy of Film and Television announced their annual list of nominees early this morning (or late last night), and as always there are a few interesting things to sift through.

The biggest takeaway is the complete snubbing of presumed Oscar heavyweight Selma in every category. Screeners were only sent to Academy members, of which there is some overlap with BAFTA, but obviously not enough to make a difference. Or perhaps the geographically specific story of Dr. King's political battles in the Jim Crow South doesn't resonate as strongly with the Brits as it would Stateside. Or perhaps it didn't open yet overseas and would not qualify anyway.

At any rate, the film has been virtually absent from industry nominations thus far, save for a couple of nods from the Costume and Hair/Makeup guilds. It makes it tremendously difficult to anticipate just how big or small its Oscar showing is going to be.

Films that we know will have a big showing with the Academy have also done so with BAFTA (10 nods for Birdman, 9 for The Imitation Game), but the official nomination leader is a bit of a surprise: The Grand Budapest Hotel with a field-leading 11(!) nominations! Do its European influences sing louder to the British demographic than they will with AMPAS? We'll know in less than a week, but I think it may be safe to assume that it will become Wes Anderson's first Best Picture nominee (and, I've been pondering lately, maybe even bring him a win in Best Original Screenplay).

Read up on all the nominees with some additional commentaries from me:

Best Film
Birdman - Alejandro G. Iñárritu, John Lesher, James W. Skotchdopole
Boyhood - Richard Linklater, Cathleen Sutherland
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Wes Anderson, Scott Rudin, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson
The Imitation Game - Nora Grossman, Ido Ostrowsky, Teddy Schwarzman
The Theory of Everything - Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lisa Bruce, Anthony McCarten
Grand Budapest is the real deal. I wonder if the love felt for this film might actually lead it to win something else in addition to production design... original screenplay perhaps?

Outstanding British Film
’71 - Yann Demange, Angus Lamont, Robin Gutch, Gregory Burke
The Imitation Game - Morten Tyldum, Nora Grossman, Ido Ostrowsky, Teddy Schwarzman, Graham Moore
Paddington - Paul King, David Heyman
Pride - Matthew Warchus, David Livingstone, Stephen Beresford
The Theory of Everything - James Marsh, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lisa Bruce, Anthony McCarten
Under the Skin - Jonathan Glazer, James Wilson, Nick Wechsler, Walter Campbell
Easy win for The Imitation Game?

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.

Golden Globe nominations: Big gain for 'Selma', death knell for 'Unbroken'?

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association have announced the their nominees for the Golden Globe Awards, adding fuel to the campaign fires of some borderline contenders, but also dousing those of others.

I'll mention my specific commentaries for each individual category after the cut, but for now, a few immediate observations:

-Yesterday's SAG shutout of Selma proved merely to be a byproduct of its late entry into the race, as it popped up in four categories today (including Picture and Director).

-Conversely, Unbroken pulled up a big ole goose egg with both organizations. If any group was gonna chomp at the bit for Angelina Jolie's celebrity, it was the HFPA. It could still squeak out a Best Picture nomination a la War Horse -- another perfect-on-paper Oscar bait movie that disappointed on arrival -- but its hopes are dwindling fast.

-All of yesterday's SAG nominees repeated except for Naomi Watts, which means it'll be hard to anticipate who gets edged out come Oscar time. There's no way we're gonna have a perfect match-up across all three groups.

-The most unhappy snub of the day: John Carney's wonderful Begin Again being completely shut out of the Comedy/Musical categories and even Best Song! Criminal.

Check out all the film nominees and my quick thoughts below: