One Category at a Time: Best Original Screenplay

Just like in Best Adapted Screenplay, this race feels like a tight one, except that it comes down to two scripts instead of all five nominees. I gotta tell ya, as much fun as true suspense on Oscar night can be, I'm having a rough go of predicting Best Original Screenplay lately, batting less than 0.500 over the last seven years.

Part of it is that the two main industry precursors are doing just as poorly when it comes to prefacing the Academy (which isn't their job, of course, and thank God for that). The WGA and the BAFTA have each anticipated the eventual winner only half the time in this decade, so maybe I'm looking at the wrong precursors.

My Award Nominations: Original Screenplay

The Academy's judgment that Moonlight and Loving be considered adaptations certainly thinned things out in this field (while I normally don't hold myself to taking Oscar's cues, it appears in both cases to be have been a reasonable decision), but on the plus side it freed me up to welcome a bubble contender or two into the fray. My five favourite Original Screenplays of the year are:

My Award Nominations: Leading Actor

It wasn't as slim a year for Best Actor candidates as many pundits would have you believe. There were some sterling performances out there beyond Casey Affleck's slam dunk Oscar nod, if you knew were to look. Here are my five:

My Award Nominations: Adapted Score

Being such a strong year as it was for original movie music, I have to admit I found myself struggling to find at least three worthy contenders that made effective use of preexisting music to tell their stories. But I ended up with some anyway, so here are my nominees for Best Adapted Score: