One Category at a Time: Documentary

Last year's decision to send out screeners of the nominated docs and allow the entire Academy to vote on them made it a pretty easy category to predict. The dominance of Searching for Sugar Man with the guilds was further bolstered by the fact that it was clearly the nominee with the widest appeal, and would obviously do better with a larger voting pool. This year's race, however, is more up in the air. No one documentary has dominated industry precursors, and the presumed popular favourite might suffer from similarities to last year's winner.

My Award nominations: Documentary

As it is every year, I caught up with a lot of Documentaries after the Oscar nominations were announced, so these can also serve as capsule reviews for the ones I never had the time to write up properly.

Cuaron wins DGA; Momentum now in Gravity's favour

To the surprise of no one, Alfonso Cuaron took last night's top honour from the Directors Guild of America for his magnum space opus Gravity. After last weekend's stunning tie at the PGA Awards, this validates Gravity's position as the true frontrunner in the race for Best Picture, but am I being too hasty?

Many pundits are still predicting a split between Best Picture and Best Director, whereby Steve McQueen's revered 12 Years a Slave wins the former by virtue of its prestige clout and historical importance, but Cuaron wins the latter by virtue of the technical proficiency and degree of difficulty of his film.