Top Five Highlights of 2014-15 Oscar Season

Yesterday I unloaded most irksome bugaboos of the 2014-15 awards season in a flurry of list-ified rage. Venting is healthy, right? But if there's one thing healthier, it's accentuating the positive. So as my final word (I swear!) on the Oscar derby that ended almost a week ago, here are my five favourite treasures of the season:

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.

My Award Nominees: Best Picture

And the big category is at last unveiled. I don't know who these people are that say it was a weak year for cinema. It thought it was pretty great. Maybe not quite as many four-star knock-outs as last year, but more than your average year if you ask me.

These are the five that knocked me out. My five Best Picture nominees (plus the five runners-up that round out my top ten) are:

What to do about film editing and sound mixing?

I've already written my pieces about Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing, but it bears repeating:

These categories are really freakin' tough to predict. More so this year than usual.

Whiplash has the type of editing style that frequently wins Oscars, but have enough voters actually seen the scrappy Sundance alumnus that barely passed $10M at the box office? How many Academy members are buying the "12 years of footage" byline in Boyhood? American Sniper is certainly the wild card in the category and I may stick with it as my final prediction (hey, you need to allow yourself at least a few against-the-grain guesses), but it'll be a game time decision.

Best Sound Mixing is an equally frustrating three-way race. The driving musical rhythms of Whiplash certainly stand out, but it's a question of how many voters have seen it? Don't let J.K. Simmons' domination of Best Supporting Actor fool you; There are a ton of people who will vote for him without having seen his performance (dude's beloved). And will the sound really jump out at people on screener? Birdman has brilliant sound work that excels by not drawing attention to itself, but neither did the likes of Hugo or Slumdog Millionaire. And American Sniper looks strong in sound editing, so how does it makes sense not to predict it here, given how rare splits are?

All of this is simply to say: Don't be surprised if my prediction sidebar toggles back and forth on these categories over the next few days. I'm also having similar debates about Best Foreign Language Film, which I'll address tomorrow.

[UPDATE:] I'm also reneging on a couple of my initial thoughts in the shorts. All will be finalized by Sunday morning at the latest.

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.

'Birdman' Complicates Sound Mixing Race with CAS Win

In a busy guild evening that also included the WGA and the MHG, The Cinema Audio Society announced their picks for the best mixed soundtracks of the year last night. While the former two guilds decided on winners that basically align with the current pundit logic of who will win the respective Oscar categories for writing and makeup (The Imitation Game, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and possibly Guardians of the Galaxy), the CAS has thrown the Best Sound Mixing contest for a bit of a loop.

Birdman, with its artfully arranged sonic subtleties and crazy guild momentum, bested its louder competitors (and fellow Oscar nominees) American Sniper and Interstellar. Alejandro G. Inarritu's backstage dramedy is clearly the industry favourite overall, primed to claim the Best Picture Oscar in a week's time, but it would just make such an atypical winner in this field. Even Hugo had more conspicuous sound work.

My Award Nominations: Best Film Editing

Today I've got a couple of post-production elements to add to my growing awards ballot. Starting things off is Best Film Editing. The temptation was great, but I resisted the urge to merely load this category with Best Picture nominees (this ain't the Oscars!), and tried to branch out where I could. The following five films are not only extremely well edited, but they also display a very wide cross-section of editing styles. Variety is the spice of film awards!

Check 'em out after the jump.

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: Sound Mixing

The sound categories are one arena where the Academy and I haven't always seen eye to eye -- or heard ear to ear, if you will. Only two of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Sound Mixing are represented on my own personal ballot, which is at least two more than I can say about our complete lack of overlap in Best Sound Editing (which I'll dig into on Thursday).

Still, even if I don't agree that whatever they deem to be the best is actually the best, they've never voted for a movie whose sound mix is outright bad. But this year there's a very real possibility of that happening.

What's that, Matt? Speak up!

I can't hear you over this intentionally muddled sound mix!

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 Adapted Score / Music Supervision

I only began rewarding this less heralded corner of movie music just last year, and I can see why so few people even bother. Unlike last year, which had many great examples of movies using previously composed music to great effect, this year I could barely scrape together the minimum of three examples that I felt merited recognition. You can forgive me for allowing this to be my only award category with fewer than five nominees (now that I've finally come around on Best Makeup & Hair).

Anyhow, here they are: My Best Adapted Scores of the year:

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.

My Award Nominations: Best Director

These directors are all master storytellers, but what I particularly love about this group is how they've all told their stories in such different ways. They represent a rich array of stylistic voices and I can't wait to see what they churn out next!

But before looking ahead too far, one look back at the Best Directors of 2014:

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actor

I've already opined on how boring the Best Supporting Actor Oscar race is this year. The exact same five names have been almost unanimously nominated across the board, and fringe contenders didn't even bother to campaign. Perhaps they figured that it wasn't even worth gunning for a nomination when the eventual winner has been cut and dry for months.

My Award Nominations: Best Sound Mixing

You've seen -- well, heard -- which movies had the most well rendered sounds of the year, in my opinion. Now it's time to examine the movies that best put all of their sounds together into a synchronized whole. Behold the Best Sound Mixing of 2014! (You can't fully appreciate the mix of these clips unless you've got a six-channel surround sound system or something hooked up to your computer, but you get the gist.)

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actor

Onward we march in my drawn-out unveiling of 2014's best cinematic achievements. Today the focus is on Best Supporting Actor.

Unlike in my recently unveiled Best Original Screenplay ballot, I find there is a dearth of quality in this category. I'm sure you'll immediately notice that my top five are nearly identical to the SAG, Globes, BAFTA, and Oscar slate (save for one obvious non-contender who should've received more consideration anyway). It's not that I particularly enjoy lining up with the everybody else, but I couldn't find a whole lot of alternatives that I felt okay nominating myself. When different groups are in this much agreement at the nomination stage, it's often an indicator of a weak year.

But enough griping, because these five performances are still excellent -- whether or not they had any competition:

My Award Nominations: Best Original Screenplay

The Oscars are little more than five weeks away, so it's time to start compiling my own superlatives for the year, starting with Best Original Screenplay. Man, is this category stacked! Any of the five following films would have won in any other year. They're all available for downloading online, and I highly recommend giving them a look. They're all great reads.

You can keep track of my gradually growing list of nominees by clicking the Awards tab in the page header.

Let's dive in, shall we:

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:

Sunday Top Ten: Last Minute FYCs

Hard to believe that in a mere five days, Oscar ballots will be in. I'm sure there are no Academy members reading this, but it's still fun to bang the drum for one's favourite awards hopeful. Here are ten long shots (very long shots) that I feel would make inspired nominees: