Oscar Postmortem Pt. 1: The Results

Happy New Year, everybody!

With the Oscars having come and gone (after three long hours at the end of three long months), it feels like 2014 is now officially over, and a new cinematic cycle has thankfully begun. But, since I, like most Oscar obsessives (or any kind of obsessive), have trouble letting go, it'll be about a week before I finally cease writing about 2014 in this space. Heed the lessons learned by Cheryl Strayed
(for whom they picked an awful Best Actress clip, btw); Closure takes time.
And so I must always allow myself several days to fully process the mad rush of euphoria and anguish that floods me before, during, and after this annual event.

My post-dated “live” blog of the Oscar telecast itself will arrive later this week, followed by my usual top ten of personal highs and lows of the 2014-15 awards season. But for today, its all about who won and who lost, and my immediate reactions to those, which I should document for posterity before my mind instinctively turns to 2015-16.

For starters, my own prediction results:

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.

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.

'Birdman' Closes Out Dominant Season with CDG Win

The last industry group to announce its winners in advance of Sunday night's Academy Awards was the Costume Designers Guild. They sprang for Oscar frontrunner Milena Canonero's stylized pre-war European threads from The Grand Budapest Hotel in period design, Colleen Atwood's theatrically informed fairytale garb from Into the Woods in fantasy design, and Albert Wolsky's character-serving vestments from Birdman in contemporary design (the movie's tenth and final guild victory of the season).

All three of these costumers are legends in their field, each having already been honoured by the CDG and won multiple Oscars before last night. And I honestly can't protest any of them winning again. Well done!

One Category at a Time: Film Editing

Well... I got nothin'.

I've been very hit-and-miss in this category as of late, failing to guess the retrospectively obvious win for Gravity last year and the forever unobvious win for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo two years before that. But I ain't never seen a Best Film Editing race as confusing as this year's, in which the Best Picture favourite isn't even in the running, and almost every nominee feels like a possible – heck, even a likely – winner.

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.

'Guardians' & 'Budapest' Each Win Pair of MHG Awards in Tight Race for Oscar

Of the five feature film categories that the Makeup & Hairstylists Guild uses to distinguish the year's best achievements in their field, two apiece were won by Oscar nominees Guardians of the Galaxy and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I suppose this does little to clear up that super tight category, except perhaps to confirm that the transformative work in Foxcatcher, though effective, is a bit too subtle to trump those showier accomplishments.

Birdman, meanwhile, got a nifty tip of the hat for contemporary hairstyling. Lots of wigs and stage dos in that movie. Nice call, MHG.

WGA Corroborates Pundits' Favs for Writing Oscars

The Writers Guild of America may not be the most reliable Oscar bellwether due to the their annual heap of ineligible screenplays, but when their winners coincide with the perceived frontrunners anyway, it still reassures any doubtful pundits.

This year, my predictions for both writing Oscars were mirrored by the WGA; Graham Moore's script for The Imitations Game in adapted and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel in original (more on that race on Monday).

The documentary field, for a refreshing change of pace, went to something other than CitizenFour, which wasn't nominated. Instead, it went to Brian Knappenberger's The Internet's Own Boy. I actually caught up with this doc just the other day, and quite liked it. It's often hard to assess how well a non-fiction film is "written", but I tend to think about how well it illuminates or explains its subject matter. That's one arena where Knappenberger's extensive, comprehensive study of free info on the Internet clearly has Laura Poitras' film beat.

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.

One Category at a Time: Director

Most years, the Oscar for Best Director goes hand-in-hand with the Oscar for Best Picture. It stands to reason that if you really love a movie, you love the way it's directed, but sometimes a tight race between two films can result in enough of a discrepancy for the categories to split. What we have this season is not simply a tight race between two films, but between four or five films, meaning dozens of winner permutations are possible.

Point is, we could see a Picture/Director split for the third consecutive year, and even though the critics have made it clear who their preference is, that frontrunner is not necessarily as safe in the hands of the Academy.

One Category at a Time: Makeup and Hairstyling

Usually, Best Makeup and Hairstyling can be a frustrating and unpredictable category at the nomination stage. Despite having the field of possible nominees pared down to a paltry seven in advance, many pundits fail to anticipate the final three nominees since this branch has a bit of a history of snubbing excellent makeup in excellent films in favour of commendable makeup in horrible films -- much to the vexation of Oscar completists everywhere, who hate having to sit through the likes of Click, Norbit, or The Lone Ranger.

Picking the winners, however, has usually been relatively easy. How can it not be, with only three options to consider (time to expand it to five, AMPAS!). I myself have guessed the winners correctly for eight consecutive years, a longer streak than I can boast in any other category, and I'm far from the only one with such a record. This is all very usual for Oscar prognosticators.

But this year, things are a bit unusual. In fact, they're downright topsy turvy. Not only are all three movies worthy contenders for their remarkable transformations, but all three movies are actually... good movies! And more unusual yet is that all three of them feel like potential winners, making this one of the true toss-up categories of the year.

Let's dive into the cases you could make for each nominee:

BAFTA Clarifies Some Races, Obscures Others

So the EE British Academy of Film and Television Awards just wrapped up not long ago, but you won't get to watch the ceremony until later tonight because for all their fine cinematic tastes, the organization still hasn't evolved past their daft custom of broadcasting the show after all the winners are all public knowledge. Get with the times, BAFTA!

Anyway, I'm not really interested in the program so much as the results. Boyhood shrugged off last night's possibly crippling DGA loss to keep its Oscar hopes afloat. Also winning for the film were Patty Arquette (lock) and director Richard Linklater (not so much a lock).

Other big winners include The Grand Budapest Hotel with five, and The Theory of Everything and Whiplash with three. Oscar frontrunner Birdman took home only a single honour for Emmanuel Lubezki's virtuoso cinematography.

But what I was hoping this last major precursor of the season could really do is help illuminate some of the Academy's more unpredictable races. The British Academy is, after all, similar in membership size to AMPAS, and can therefore offer some clues on what sort of films will appeal to a large group in certain categories.

My Award Nominations: Best Production Design

I tell ya, it broke my heart to omit just about every title that you'll see in the 'just missed' section of this post, but that's the type of year it's been for production design. Outstanding work in too many films. I ultimately had to choose those whose sets and environments were engrained into the narrative identities of the stories they were telling, but it doesn't make it any easier to snub some other worthy effort.

Anyway, enough mourning the snubbees. Onto the five that did survive this brutally competitive melee for only five slots in Best Production Design.

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!

'Budapest', 'Birdman', & 'Guardians' Take Top ADG Honours

Production designer Adam Stockhausen continued his unstoppable march towards the Oscar by picking up the Art Directors Guils Award in period design for his scrumptious work on The Grand Budapest Hotel. Honestly, enough said on this category already. Nothing's gonna beat this one. No one's gonna argue with that.

In the other categories, Birdman continued its recent guild surge by winning the award for contemporary design, thanks to Kevin Thompson's enormous Broadway recreations. And Guardians of the Galaxy's Charles Wood pulled off a mini-coup by snatching away the fantasy award from Oscar nominees Interstellar and Into the Woods.

My Award Nominations: Best Original Score

Happy Superbowl Sunday, everyone! Today's updates to my own personal awards ballot are all about the music.

It was a remarkably rich and diverse year for film scoring, and I had a tough time narrowing my preferences down to just the five Best Original Scores. It was a bit tougher find suitable candidates for the adapted scores, but I'll get to those this afternoon.

Here are the originals. Have a listen!

'Boyhood', 'Grand Budapest' Win with Editors Guild

The American Cinema Editors handed out their hardware last night, honouring Boyhood's Sandra Adair in the drama category and The Grand Budapest Hotel's Barney Pilling in the muscial/comedy category. Both were nominated by the Academy.

I gotta say this Oscar category is still a complete mystery to me. It used to be that the winner of the ACE drama award always went on to win the Oscar, but that pattern has been bucked twice in the last three years. True, Boyhood could pull out the win on account of its "12 years of footage" narrative (a bit of an oversimplification, as it's actually only 12 weeks of footage amassed over 12 years), but the Academy usually goes for editing that... stands out. The greatest thing about Boyhood's montage is how invisibly fluent it is. I could definitely see something with a more rigourous cutting style like Whiplash or American Sniper taking it.

Elsewhere, The LEGO Movie won the animated category, adding more salt to the wound of its Oscar snub, while Citizenfour won the doc category for Mathilde Bonnefoy (who will actually get to take home her own Oscar since she's also a producer on the film).

My Award Nominations: Best Costume Design

I unveilled my five picks for Best Hair and Makeup this morning, but that's only half of what goes into defining the look of a character on film. Costume designers have to do a lot of heavy lifting (or sewing, as it were) on that front too.

Similarly to my opinion of the Best Supporting Actor field, I can't help but think it's been a bit of a weak year. Not to say that any of the five costume designers listed below don't deserve the praise coming their way, but I found that there weren't that many worthy contenders to pick from, which I think is reflected in my ballot's similarity to the Oscar slate (again, like in Best Supporting Actor). Consensus is boring for awards watchers, I know, but sometimes it's because the best options really are that obvious. I suppose I should look at the glass as being half full and rejoice that costume designers branch mostly got it right this year.

Some for it's worth, here are my (and many other people's) Best Costume Design nominees for 2014:

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.

My Award Nominations: Best Makeup and Hair

For as long as I've been compiling my own personal Oscar ballots (feels like I've been at it since infancy), I've stubbornly limited myself to three nominees for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. I suppose it grew out of mimicking the Academy at first, but now it doesn't seem to make sense that it's the only category with such a restrictive number of contestants. If you ever read Nate Rogers at The Film Experience -- which of course you do, because what Oscar-loving film buff doesn't? -- you know what I'm talking about. For years he's made very a logical argument for why the makeup branch should finally get with the times and expand its field to five nominees.

So I'm taking a page out of that book and expanding my own field to reflect the rest of my awards -- five per category. Maybe if I'm bored one day, I'll even go back in time and retroactively add a couple of deserving hair+makeup efforts to my nominees from years past (though the boredom would have to be tremendous). But for now, peruse the best of what 2014 had to offer: