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.

One Category at a Time: Actor

It seems every year that Best Actor is, if not the most competitive Oscar category, then certainly the cruelest. Every season we see at least a half dozen nomination-worthy performances unable to make the final five. The whole Selma and #OscarsSoWhite controversy may have unwittingly made a thespian martyr of David Oyelowo for his tragic snub, but he's in good company with the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, Ralph Fiennes, Timothy Spall, Channing Tatum, Oscar Isaac, Ben Affleck, Miles Teller, Matthew McConaughey, Andy Serkis, and the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman on the sidelines. There just isn't enough room.

It makes it particularly true that it's an honour just to be nominated for these five men, a couple of whom can relax and enjoy the show with the knowledge that they won't be winning. For those of us who follow this awards madness closely, however, it will be the one suspenseful acting award of the night, as we nervously wait to see if a beloved veteran can fend off the late advances of younger A-listers with more typical Oscar roles.

"Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist, Oscar 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.

One Category at a Time: Actress

Can we call a moratorium on Best Actress always being called a "weak" category? More often than not this kind of talk stems from people who are too lazy to search for talented leading ladies flying well below the mainstream radar, and who balk at the notion of an awards-caliber performance coming from a less-than-awards-caliber film.

Yet nearly every year the Academy comes up with five terrific nominees, and if it seems like the pre-nomination field is thinner than that of the leading men on the other side of the gender divide, it certainly speaks more to the systemic male dominance of the film industry than to the quality of the lesser seen -- though not necessarily fewer -- Oscar-worthy female performances.

In fact, having a category in which the multi-nominated Oscar heavyweights don't figure in as prominently as they would in, say, Best Actor, can be a blessing, as it forces audiences and Academy members alike to seek out titles that could use the exposure. If this crop of nominees can encourage a few more people to go see Wild or Two Days, One Night, then it aught to be celebrated rather than dismissed as "weak".

One Category at a Time: Adapted Screenplay

The state of the writing categories for this year's Academy Awards really is a tale of two contests; One is as competitive and over-stuffed with quality as I've ever seen it, while the other is practically a wasteland of mediocrity (with the only truly exceptional screenplay appearing courtesy of an Academy error in its favour).

Today we're looking at the latter, Best Adapted Screenplay, which is so thin on genuine contenders that they had to poach one of the surefire nominees from the Original Screenplay camp just to fill things out!

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:

SAG Awards bolster 'Birdman' for Best Picture, but not Best Actor...

Well, if you don't count Best Stunt Ensemble (which went to the solid work in Unbroken where I had guessed The Hobbit), I aced my SAG predictions...

... and I'm not entirely happy about that.

First of all, let's not dwell on the supporting races or on Best Actress. Those categories are all but sealed up with Patricia Arquette, J.K. Simmons, and Julianne Moore all coming out on top in their respective categories.

Let's also not dwell on Birdman's well deserved victory in Best Ensemble. It may not have been my absolute first choice but its cast was excellent and makes a fine winner. If you want to theorize about how "easy" it is for a movie about ACTING to win with the Screen Actors Guild, go ahead, but this is a merited honour for an outstanding collective performance.

What I think we do need to talk about is Best Actor. I had an unsettling feeling that tonight would be the night when frontrunner Michael Keaton would finally be unseated by Eddie Redmayne for his much more awards-typical performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. I don't want to give the impression that I begrudge Redmayne any accolades he receives for his impressive physical transformation, but this is not the outcome I wanted to see.

Makeup and Hair Guild Nominations

The Academy's nomination balloting closes today, but the Makeup and Hairstylists Guild has chimed in before that final bell (there are four other guilds announcing next week, so their nominees will have no influence on Oscar).

This guild hadn't regularly given out awards for some time, until they decided to revive the tradition last year, honouring several films among which was the eventual Oscar winner Dallas Buyers Club.

Leading the field this year are Guardians of the Galaxy and Into the Woods, each receiving three nominations across five categories. Guardians is looking good for an Oscar nod (and possibly the win), but Into the Woods failed to even make the short list.

Besides Guardians, other Oscar finalists which find representation here include The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything each with a pair, and Foxcatcher and Maleficent each with a single citation for their transformative prosthetics. Noah and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were shut out entirely.

One final side note before we dig into the nominees: This guild needs to do a better job with their categorizations. How do they determine what counts as contemporary as opposed to period makeup/hair, and how do they account for fantasy offerings? Hunger Games gets called period, while Guardians of the Galaxy gets called contemporary? I haven't exactly seen a lot of modern day folks walking around looking like this:

This was a problem last year too, which saw The Butler classified as contemporary and Dallas Buyers Club as period, but enough of that. On to this year's slate:

WGA Announces Nominees

The final guild of the day is also the most inconsequential, by which I refer to the Writers Guild of America. I say "inconsequential" not as a slight on their organization, but merely as an observation that their finalists for Best Adapted and Original Screenplay have little to no bearing on the Oscar race due to their long list of ineligible titles.

This year, heavyweight writing contenders that were DQed by this guild include Birdman, Selma, Mr. Turner, and The Theory of Everything. So no, don't expect Guardians of the Galaxy to earn a surprise nomination for its script.

Read some additional thoughts on all the nominees below:

CDG Adds to Busy Day of Guild Announcements

The Costume Designers Guild have unveiled their 2014 nominees in three categories, so let's get right into it with the most Oscar-correlative category, Excellence in a Period Film:

Period Film
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Milena Canonero
The Imitation Game - Sammy Sheldon Differ
Inherent Vice - Mark Bridges
Selma - Ruth E. Carter
The Theory of Everything - Steven Noble

I can hear the groaning now, but I'll defend the nomination of Theory of Everything. I liked Noble's simple colour associations with the characters. For the win, however, I'd have a tough time deciding between Grand Budapest and Inherent Vice. The outfits in those two have so much personality!

Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel or Inherent Vice

Two more categories after the cut.

Seven finalists advance to Best Makeup and Hairstyling bakeoff

The makeup branch of the Academy has announced its seven finalists that will advance to the bake-off stage, from which three Oscar nominees will be chosen:

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Foxcatcher
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Guardians of the Galaxy
Maleficent
Noah
The Theory of Everything

The only semi-surprising snub is Into the Woods (sight-unseen, I'm not in a position to judge whether this is a travesty of justice or justice being served), but most of the surviving contenders are hardly unexpected. Although I guess not many people would've seen Spider-Man 2 coming.

Review - The Theory of Everything

"Cosmology," responds PhD candidate Stephen Hawking when asked about religion at a Cambridge mixer in 1963. "It's religion for scientific atheists."

This answer may seem like an odd way to pick up girls (especially proper Christian ones), but it strikes a chord for the young woman who's asking him – and who just so happens to be his future wife, Jane. Perhaps she too sees the beauty in his pursuit of a single universal equation that can explain all the mysteries of time and space; A 'theory of everything'.

It's not the equation, however, but the two lovers who become the subjects of The Theory of Everything, directed by successful documentary filmmaker James Marsh in his narrative feature debut. From that first cosmic spark of attraction to their gradual growing apart and everything in between (including the renowned physicist's long battle with disease and disability), the film chooses to deal more with humanistic romance than scientific philosophy, though packaged as a by-the-numbers biopic with Oscar aspirations for its stars Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne.