Top Five Pet Peeves of the 2015-16 Oscar Season

The Oscar derby has been dead and buried for over a week now, but as usual I still have a few nuggets to get off my chest before calling it a year. Read on, if you dare, and behold my final purge of negativity, after which I can say "Okay, I'm over it" (hopefully).

5. The Big Short's Adapted Screenplay sweep

I know I've been harping on Adam McKay and Charles Randolph's well-meaning housing crisis comedy for months, but I just don't see what made this such a unanimous choice for writing awards. Especially when the competition hasn't been this stacked in years. I mean, good God: Carol, Room, Brooklyn, The Martian, inexplicable snubbee Steve Jobs, and even the long shots from 45 Years to Mr. Holmes write circles around The Big Short's misguided gimmickry, which gets by on sounding a lot smarter than it truly is. The lone bone tossed to Aaron Sorkin by the Golden Globes is going to look very good ten years from now (Heck, it looked good the moment it happened). At least other season sweepers like Inside Out and Son of Saul can be justified on quality, but I'm not drinking the Koolaid on this one.

Oscars Post-Mortem: The Winners

The movies have been gilded and I've had my say – in concentrated tweets of rage or elation, at least. But now with the clearer eyes of a 4-hours night's sleep, I can start poring over the minutia of the now expired Oscar season.

I'll begin my post-mortem purge with a basic rundown of the winners, uncoloured by my yo-yo-ing feelings on the show itself (more on that in time). I need to allow the heat of the moment to subside before truly evaluating my thoughts on who was victorious and who should have been.

On the whole, I'd have to call it a fairly satisfying night, though not from a predictive standpoint. I was steeling myself for a face-plant this year, and with so much divergence among the major guilds, you could hardly blame my uncertainty. It bore itself out with a rather dismal 16/24; My poorest showing since 2011.

But I can hardly complain about such poor fortune when it's delivered in the form of Spotlight's nail-biting triumph in Best Picture, its refinement and intelligence ultimately besting the ostentatious hollowness of The Revenant and the misjudged gimmickry of The Big Short. For much of the season (ever since the PGA) I had never felt so disengaged in the outcome of the Academy's top category, but now I can't recall ever being this excited by it.

One Category at a Time: Best Picture

Usually by this point in the season, we've had enough indicators lining up behind one title to make calling Best Picture a mere formality on our Oscar night scorecards. The only instance in the last ten years that caused any confusion was two years ago, when the PGA ended in an unprecedented tie. The Producers Guild may not have split hairs this year, but they may as well have, because the rest of the industry has been so uniformly divided among the top three contenders that this may be an even tighter race than the famous Gravity/Slave sprint.

For starters, we can pare down the field of eight nominees. Figuring where they'd rank is an exercise in pure, unfounded speculation. But it's also kinda fun, so humour me.

One Category at a Time: Director

In the Academy's 88 years, only a couple of filmmakers have won back-to-back Best Director Oscars; John Ford in the 40s and Joseph L. Mankiewicz in the 50s. Since then... Not even close. But that all looks to change this year.

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actor

In most instances, the foundation of support behind Best Picture nominated films is a considerable factor in predicting Oscar winners in other categories. And in some instances, a completely different narrative takes hold that makes such things irrelevant. We may be seeing that this year in Best Supporting Actor, which houses four performances from Best Picture nominees, yet the frontrunner represents his movie's sole nomination.

One Category at a Time: Adapted Screenplay

After a lean couple of years, 2015 saw the race for Best Adapted Screenplay return to high competitive form: Terrific adaptations like Steve Jobs and 45 Years couldn't find room in a field crowded mostly by Best Picture nominees: Critics prizes have been split every which way: And until the PGA pointed to our Best Picture frontrunner, it felt as though any of the five nominees had a legit shot at winning. It's a shame the contest has devolved into such an open-and-shut case.

'The Revenant' and other BAFTA winners; How closely will Oscar follow?

Last year, the winners of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts were particularly noteworthy because they foretold a number eventual Oscar outcomes in categories that had pundits scratching their heads. This year, I may end up taking their cues in a few such races, especially the design and sound categories.

So what's the big takeaway from this year: The Revenant is the real deal. The Big Short may have the PGA's recent track record in its favour, but it looks like Inarritu's epic is a done deal in Best Actor, Director, Cinematography, and could possibly win both Sound prizes (or more) on top of that. Do we really think a movie with that kind of haul is going to lose to a film that may only win a single other category?

I'm going to be tossing and turning on this one folks, and in no small part because I happen to think either movie would we the worst Best Picture winner in decades.

But some of BAFTAs decisions have given me real hope -- albeit very cautious hope -- for Oscar night in their embrace of Mad Max's craft elements. Sweeping all three design categories plus Best Editing is a fine showing for George Miller's astonishing actioner, and should the Academy follow suit two weeks from now, well that'd be just fine by me.

Check out the list of winners after the jump, with a few remarks on what they may (or may not) mean in terms of the tightly contested Oscar race:

'Spotlight' and 'Big Short' win WGA Awards

Not much more to comment on in these races. The screenplay categories are probably the biggest locks of the night. The documentary prize featured none of this year's Oscar nominees, which was good news for Alex Gibney's Scientology doc Going Clear.

One Category at a Time: Editing

It used to be you could always count in the ACE winner to guide your prediction for Best Film Editing, but in the four years since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo stunned on Oscar night, this has become the hardest craft category to gauge. Sometimes they go with the Best Picture winner, sometimes the presumed Best Picture runner-up, sometimes something whose editing is just more conspicuous.

ACE winners and SAG Predix [UPDATE: Winners]

It's a busy weekend of guild activity. The American Cinema Editors handed out hardware last night to all the usual suspects: Amy and Inside Out received their due in the ghettoized doc and animation categories (but seriously, the editing in those two are good enough to be up for the Oscar), while the current fruntrunners for the Academy's editing prize, The Big Short and Mad Max: Fury Road, got to split the top honours due to comedy/drama distinctions. I'm leaning the way of The Big Short coming out on top in the end, but a BAFTA win for Mad Max may yet give me hope.

Both of those are also in the hunt for awards from the Screen Actors Guild tonight. Mad Max is sure to take the prize for Best Stunt Ensemble, but The Big Short has its eyes set on the more significant Best Ensemble category. If Spotlight is going to make a push back in the latter half of phase two, it must start here. If it loses, however, then it truly is a runaway train.

Three of the four individual acting categories feel locked into place, but for Best Supporting Actor due to the absence of presumed frontrunner Sylvester Stallone. If Mark Rylance or Christian Bale (the only SAG contenders nominated for the Oscar) win, then I think this is still a race to the finish.

My guesses:
Best Stunt Ensemble: Mad Max [WINNER: Mad Max] Because d'uh.
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale [WINNER: Idris Elba] So this ends up not affecting the Oscar race for the moment. Only the forthcoming BAFTA ceremony can shed any light on who Sly's greatest challenger really is.
Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander [WINNER: Alicia Vikander] Category fraud lives.
Best Leading Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio [WINNER: Leonardo DiCaprio] Cannot be stopped.
Best Leading Actress: Brie Larson [WINNER: Brie Larson] But will the Brits prefer her to Irish darling Saoirse Ronan?
Best Ensemble: The Big Short [WINNER: Spotlight] Thank God! This is enough to at least keep the Best Picture race interesting for another week. And even if this proves to be the only major prize that Spotlight claims over The Big Short, it's certainly the most satisfying and deserved prize to win.

Con Job: 'The Big Short' stuns as PGA winner

Well fuck.

The only fraud bigger than the one Wall Street perpetrated against the American public prior to the 2008 housing crisis, is the one The Big Short -- which "smartly" depicts that shameful recent chapter of history -- is pulling over on Hollywood as we speak.

And yet there it stands, as our new Best Picture frontrunner by "virtue" of having won the Producers Guild of America's top prize late last night in Los Angeles. Anyone who claims to have seen this coming is being a revisionist historian. Under no circumstance did this film -- as abrasive, impenetrable and, at its worst, condescending a comedy as you'll likely see -- have the qualities of a consensus pick. It's victory here, and its now inevitable victory at the Oscars, will baffle me for years to come.

Time's Up

Oscar voting closed today, capping off a busy week of industry nominations. I won't parse through them all, but merely highlight that the critical favour of Carol has not converted the way its fans (yours truly among them) hoped that it would, while sleeper contenders Straight Outta Compton, Ex Machina, and especially Sicario have turned up the heat at the tail end of this fertile voting phase.

What it all means in the Best Picture race... Hard to tell with that maddening variable-number-of-nominees system. All I know is that in five of the last six years, at least two PGA nominees have missed the Academy's cutoff, and at least one PGA-snubbed contender always squeaks in.

The good news: Carol seems a likely candidate to be this year's squeaker. The bad news: It could just as easily be something like Trumbo. I'm keeping the former in my predicted lineup for now, but it may be wishful thinking -- I've long since given up on Inside Out, Steve Jobs, Son of Saul, Room and Creed (looks like minimal overlap between me and AMPAS this year).

Last quarter 'true story' Oscar bait underwhelms

I can be a tough critic to please sometimes, but I get especially grinchy during the holiday crunch when awards season group-think forces me to seek out prestige-courting biopics and true-to-life narratives for which I'd gladly have waited. In the ten days since I first set eyes upon Todd Hayne's exquisite Carol, I've struck out thrice with other Globe/BFCA heavies Trumbo, The Danish Girl, and The Big Short; All of them capitalizing on year-end kudos, whether or not they should.

Trumbo is especially unfortunate. True Hollywood stories are of inherent interest to me (and many a cinephile, I should imagine), so it really says something when I despair at how unengaged I was by Jay Roach's shapeless biopic of the legendary screenwriter, who was infamously blackballed by McCarthy-era witch hunt politics. The man himself (likely Oscar nominee Bryan Cranston) would have shuddered at the screenplay's lack of structure and payoff. The film's strong SAG haul, particularly the Best Ensemble nomination, is baffling. Sure, there are a handful of droll impersonations in there -- David James Elliott's John Wayne and Dean O'Gorman's Kirk Douglas are aces -- but everyone is play acting instead of screen acting. Yes, there is a difference. The lone exceptions are Elle Fanning and Diane Lane as the key female figures in Trumbo's life, his daughter Niki and his wife Cleo.

SAG nominations scattered amongst the pretenders

The first big guild announcement of the season dropped this morning, but when all is said and done, it may not have been such an impactful announcement.

SAG's attention was splintered all over the place, and seems especially out of sync with pundit logic this season. Aggressively campaigned films like Trumbo and The Big Short performed well, but could both conceivably be shut out the Oscars. Some categories could even have as little as an 0/5 overlap with the eventual Oscar slate (especially that Supporting Actor category). For the time being, it keeps any frontrunners a happy mystery. Check out the nominees and my brief knee-jerks after the jump.

Is nomination leader Trumbo really an Oscar threat? Perhaps for Crantson...