ACE Eddie Winners, and PGA/SAG Preview

To the surprise of precisely no one, La La Land won the ACE Eddie Award last night for Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy). Tom Cross is likely en route to his second Oscar in three years.

The Dramatic Feature category was a bit more competitive, but prevailing pundit logic of Joe Walker's editorial of Arrival winning out proved to be correct. Can't argue with either of these winners. For me, they're easily the top two editing achievements of the year, with everything else eating their dust.

ACE winners and SAG Predix [UPDATE: Winners]

It's a busy weekend of guild activity. The American Cinema Editors handed out hardware last night to all the usual suspects: Amy and Inside Out received their due in the ghettoized doc and animation categories (but seriously, the editing in those two are good enough to be up for the Oscar), while the current fruntrunners for the Academy's editing prize, The Big Short and Mad Max: Fury Road, got to split the top honours due to comedy/drama distinctions. I'm leaning the way of The Big Short coming out on top in the end, but a BAFTA win for Mad Max may yet give me hope.

Both of those are also in the hunt for awards from the Screen Actors Guild tonight. Mad Max is sure to take the prize for Best Stunt Ensemble, but The Big Short has its eyes set on the more significant Best Ensemble category. If Spotlight is going to make a push back in the latter half of phase two, it must start here. If it loses, however, then it truly is a runaway train.

Three of the four individual acting categories feel locked into place, but for Best Supporting Actor due to the absence of presumed frontrunner Sylvester Stallone. If Mark Rylance or Christian Bale (the only SAG contenders nominated for the Oscar) win, then I think this is still a race to the finish.

My guesses:
Best Stunt Ensemble: Mad Max [WINNER: Mad Max] Because d'uh.
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale [WINNER: Idris Elba] So this ends up not affecting the Oscar race for the moment. Only the forthcoming BAFTA ceremony can shed any light on who Sly's greatest challenger really is.
Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander [WINNER: Alicia Vikander] Category fraud lives.
Best Leading Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio [WINNER: Leonardo DiCaprio] Cannot be stopped.
Best Leading Actress: Brie Larson [WINNER: Brie Larson] But will the Brits prefer her to Irish darling Saoirse Ronan?
Best Ensemble: The Big Short [WINNER: Spotlight] Thank God! This is enough to at least keep the Best Picture race interesting for another week. And even if this proves to be the only major prize that Spotlight claims over The Big Short, it's certainly the most satisfying and deserved prize to win.

Will DGA-BAFTA Weekend Clafiry Some Tight Races?

Final Oscar balloting started today, right on the cusp of a weekend that will unveil the winners of the Directors Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television. A number of the Oscar categories still feel maddeningly close a full three weeks after they were announced, so the pending results of this weekend's kudos could be the litmus test we need.

Or they could just be a bunch of red herrings.

Take the Best Actor race, for instance:

Awards Season Primed for Defining Weekend with 2 Key Guilds...

For many pundits, the Oscar race has already settled into a predictable groove, with many people picking Boyhood as the odds-on favourite.

I... am not convinced. Not yet, anyway.

Yes, Boyhood has been winning Best Picture prizes left, right and centre for the last two months, but let's put things into a bit of context: Every award it's collected all season has been from some critics or media group. It's the sort of ambitious, artistically inspired movie that was always going to appeal to them, but these people don't vote on Academy Awards.

There is an Oscar season from years past that immediately springs to mind when I consider the pattern of this season thus far: The 2010/2011 season, in which
The Social Network won every critics honour under the sun before its momentum was snatched away by The King's Speech. When was it that the eventual Best Picture winner made its move? --- At the Producers Guild of America Awards.

Golden Globe Preview

The Globes are tonight (yay!!!), starring Tina Fey and Amy Poeller in their last hosting gig for the show (no!!!).

I'll be live blogging the event same as I have the last two years, because this show is just so much more fun than the Oscars lately! And contrary to popular belief, their winners have been pretty respectable. I mean, just look at this year's Best Director lineup: Anderson, DuVernay, Fincher, Inarritu, and Linklater. How do you choose a bad winner amongst those? You can't!

The proceedings start around 7:00 p.m. EST, so check back here for the post and refresh it throughout the night. Below I've listed my sure-to-be-inaccurate predictions, but what else is knew.

SAG, PGA Preview

The first of the industry's top guilds to announce their winners for 2013 will be the Screen Actors Guild (broadcast live tonight) and the Producers Guild of America (tomorrow).

All eyes are on American Hustle to snatch SAG's coveted Best Ensemble award, but nothing's ever set in stone. Remember just last year that another starry David O. Russell ensemble piece, Silver Linings Playbook, was also pegged to take this category, only to be trumped by eventual Best Picture juggernaut Argo, despite it not winning any individual acting honours. So it is possible that 12 Years a Slave could still pull the same trick it did at the Globes and the Critics Choice; keeping a lower profile all night before popping up in the final envelope.

Globe predix and blogging preview

I must confess that with Oscar nominations less than a week away, I'm starting to feel the crunch. There are still movies I haven't seen yet (including the possible Best Picture winner American Hustle), and many more which I have seen but haven't had time to review (including Her and Short Term 12, both of which will make my top ten, so I want to write proper pieces for them). This is to say nothing of the movies I'll have to seek out and catch up with if there are surprise nominations on Thursday, which there will almost certainly be.

In addition, there are my award nominations to get done. Some categories are pretty well finalized and may be announced as early as this week, but most of them won't appear until after the Academy unveils their own nominations. Thank you for your patience.

But for tonight, I'm devoting my attention to a different set of awards entirely: The Golden Globes! Tina Fey and Amy Poeller were such a notable improvement over Ricky Gervais, if they're half as funny tonight as they were last year, we're guaranteed a good time. As usual, I'll be live blogging the ceremony because this relatively breezy two hour affair simply lends itself to live blogging much more easily than the Oscars.

You can check out my predictions below, not that I'm ever any good at predicting the Globes, but that's part of what makes them so much fun to watch!

SAG Preview...

Everything has been going Argo's way so far this season, but it might face a road block at tonight's Screen Actors Guild Awards. Actors make up the largest portion of the Academy's voting membership, and while a Best Ensemble win is not out of the cards for Argo's excellent cast, it's not favoured to win anything from SAG.

Rather, the two films poised to get the biggest boost from tonight's proceeding are Argo's stiffest competition for the Best Picture Oscar: Silver Linings Playbook and Lincoln. Either of these movies is in good standing to win the Best Ensemble category (with a slight edge to SLP), and both are first in line to collect a Lead Acting award as well. They'll probably be duking it out in Best Supporting Actor, although that category could go a completely different direction.

The only other film that seems assured of a win is Les Miserables for Anne Hathaway's Oscar destined performance. Still, Sally Field continues to feel like a legitimate dark horse.

Here's hoping Skyfall's fearless daredevils can triumph in the Stunt Ensemble category.

My predictions after the cut.

Producers Guild preview

Tonight the first major industry guild will announce its winners: The Producers Guild of America. Not only are they the first guild out the gate in this loooong phase 2, but they're arguably the most important, or at least the most indicative, when it comes to winning Best Picture.

When the Academy made the switch to ten nominees and the preferential ballot back in 2009, the PGA was quick to shadow their decision. In all three years since, the PGA and Academy have matched up. So it follows that tonight's winner should be considered in the driver's seat for Best Picture... for the moment.

CDG preview

The last guild to sound off this season is the Costume Designers Guild, which announces its winners tonight. It won't have any influence on the Oscar race because final ballots are due to the Academy today, but we can still have fun guessing what the costume designers will want to reward.

Excellence in Period Film contains four of the Oscar-nominated costumers, the odd one out being Sharen Davis' swell threads from The Help which fell pray to the grabby ruffles and frills of Anonymous with the Academy's costume branch. I'll guess that Hugo, my Oscar alternate, will rule the day, but a win for The Artist (which won the BAFTA a little more than a week ago) would be perfectly understandable and deserved.

I'm still miffed that Excellence in Fantasy Film found room for Thor and X-Men but not the year-best costumes of Captain America. At any rate, I'm guessing it'll end up being Harry Potter, simply on account of it being the best reviewed nominee of the five, and as a final tip of the hat to the series. With all the Oscar attention it gets in Art Direction, people forget that Jany Temime has indeed done outstanding work on the entire franchise as well.

Excellence in Contemporary Film usually serves only as an excuse for the guild to recognize a Best Picture contender, which leads me to believe they'll spring for The Descendants here, even if it should be Drive by a country mile.

ACE, CAS, WGA, MPSE preview

It's a busy weekend for guild awards looking to have their say before Oscar polls close on Tuesday.

The American Cinema Editors would be a more important announcement if it weren't for their separation of the nominees into Drama and Comedy categories. The Artist is obviously going to win in the Comedy category, while Drama is probably going the way of Hugo (although I could see it going to Dragon Tattoo as well). As for the Oscar, it'll be down to The Artist and whatever film does win for Drama, as the Oscar winner for Editing has won the ACE Eddie for the last ten years in a row.

The Cinema Audio Society only nominated two films that went on to receive Sound Mixing nods from the Academy; Hugo and Moneyball. I'm anticipating Hugo will take it from the Society, but am still sticking with War Horse to impress the Academy.

The Writers Guild of America is probably going to award Midnight in Paris for Original Screenplay and Moneyball for Adapted, a pair of winners I wouldn't be surprised to see repeat at the Oscars, though I am expecting The Descendants to come out on top with the Academy.

Finally, the Motion Picture Sound Editors have a few categories in which to acknowledge the year's best sound editing. The important category in terms of Oscar is Best Sound Effects and Foley, where I'm guessing it'll be War Horse. Interesting to note: for four of the last five years, the winner of that category with the MPSE as gone on to win the Oscar for Sound Editing, and since the two Sound categories so often go to the same film, this guild is possibly a more accurate bellwether of Best Sound Mixing than the CAS.

ADG, Annie preview

Not much to do nowadays but twiddle our thumbs waiting for February 26th, but at least some scattered guild announcements will keep us from nodding off to sleep.

The Art Directors Guild will have its say tonight, where I expect Oscar nominees Hugo and Harry Potter will come up big in the Period and Fantasy categories respectively. They seldom show much imagination in the Contemporary category, which usually goes to whatever nominee has the most Best Picture buzz. At that, I'll make my guess for The Descendants, even though it should be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by a country mile.

Meanwhile, the Annie Awards also land tonight. I'm not sure how they'll be distributed, but you can expect the feature film categories to be shared between Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots.

SAG predictions

The Screen Actors Guild sound off tomorrow night. Actor, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress seem fairly decided, but if a challenger is going to emerge in any of those categories, it'll have to happen tomorrow. Best Actress, meanwhile, is actually an uncertain showdown between Streep and Davis, after they split victories between the BFCA and Globes. Tomorrow's announcement is an important tie-breaker.

Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Best Actress: Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Best Actor: George Clooney, The Descendants
Best Acting Ensemble: The Artist
Best Stunt Ensemble: Harry Potter

Golden Globes preview

The Golden Globe Awards take to the air tonight, and it should hopefully be a less cluttered outing than last Thursday's Critics Choice Awards. I'll have plenty of opportunities to replenish my beverage whenever they announce those boring TV categories (tee hee), or whenever Ricky Gervais opens his gob. I know some people have dug his boldly abusive humour the last two years running, but don't count me among them. There are ways to make fun of celebrities without sounding so spiteful, as Billy Crystal will likely demonstrate at the Oscars in six weeks time, so my television will be happily muted when Mr. Gervais takes the stage.

As for the awards, my predictions are outlined below. Should be an easy win for The Artist in Musical/Comedy, but the Drama category promises to actually be exciting this year. I'll be back here tonight to comment on the proceedings as they happen.

Best Picture, Drama
The Descendants
alt: The Help

Best Picture, Comedy or Musical
The Artist
alt: Bridesmaids

DGA Predix

The Directors Guild of America will announce their nominees some time today, and it's always an important indicator of where the Academy, which is similar in both size and demographic, will place its support.

My guesses:
Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist
Alexander Payne for The Descendants
Martin Scorsese for Hugo
Steven Spielberg for War Horse
Tate Taylor for The Help

PGA Preview

Thought I'd rifle off a quick prediction before the PGA goes public with their ten nominees for Best Picture and three for Best Animated Feature later today.

My guesses for Best Picture:
The Artist
The Descendants
Drive long shot, but here's hoping!
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
War Horse

And for Animated Feature:
The Adventures of Tintin
Arthur Christmas
Rango

ACE, CAS, MPSE predictions

It's a big guild weekend. ACE and CAS announce tonight, MPSE tomorrow. Here are my guesses:

American Cinema Editors

Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic): The Social Network

The last ten Oscar winners for Editing all won an ACE Eddie first, so this prediction may be wishful thinking on my part. If The King's Speech wins it, there's your Oscar winner.

Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy or Musical): Scott Pilgrim vs the World

I firmly believe The Kids Are All Right deserves it here, but it would be so nice to see Scott Pilgrim come out of this awards season with something!

Best Edited Animated Film: Toy Story 3

Hard to argue with that, but it could be How to Train Your Dragon, which would be fine by me.

Best Edited Documentary: Inside Job

It's probably the Oscar frontrunner (hard to tell), but I'll do flips if Exit Through the Gift Shop takes it! Best. Editing. Of. The. Year.

Cinema Audio Society

I'm rooting for Black Swan, but it looks doubtful. Could be The Social Network, but I'm going with Inception. If True Grit wins it, look out on Oscar night!


Motion Picture Sound Editors just taking wild guesses here

Best Sound Effects and Foley in a Feature Film: Inception
Best Dialogue and ADR in a Feature Film: TRON Legacy
Best Sound Effects, Foley, Music, Dialogue and ADR in a Animated Feature Film: Toy Story 3
Best Music Editing in a Feature Film: Inception
Best Music Editing in a Musical Feature: Burlesque
Best Sound Editing in a Documentary: Restrepo
Best Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue and ADR in a Foreign Feature: Lebanon

BAFTA and ASC today.

Today we learn the winners of the British Academy of Film and Television Awards. I think most people are anticipating a sweep of sorts for hometown favourite The King's Speech, and so am I.

We will also learn which film the American Society of Cinematographers have decided has the best photography of the year. I'm firmly in Roger Deakins' cheering section (even if I feel Black Swan's Matthew Lebatique deserves it above all comers), yet I've got that horrible feeling it'll go to Danny Cohen for The King's Speech, possibly ruining Deakins' chances at that long overdue Oscar. Step up ASC. Do the right thing.

WGA, ADG, Annie Preview

Having won the USC Scripter prize just last night with Ben Mezrich, Aaron Sorkin is likely to continue The Social Network's screenwriting winning streak with an Adapted Screenplay win at tonight's WGA awards. Any winner other than him would be a total shock.

As for Original Screenplay, intriguing scenario. David Seidler's soon-to-be-Oscar-winning script for The King's Speech is ridiculously ineligible, of course, so who takes it? Could they tip a hat to Christopher Nolan in consolation of his Director snub by the Academy? Could the general affection felt towards The Fighter push its team of writers to a win? Or will this be the one major industry prize Lisa Cholodenko (along with Stuart Blumberg) can lay claim to this season? I'm hoping for and predicting the latter. The Kids Are All Right is just too good a movie for her to go completely unrewarded this year.

Let's not forget two other industry groups announcing their winners tonight; The ADG and the Annie Awards.

I see The King's Speech, Alice in Wonderland, and Black Swan emerging victorious with the art directors, while the animation academy will probably provide How To Train Your Dragon with a hearty love fest, given how much of their organization is composed of Dreamworks employees.

SAG preview

I don't know if I'm gonna watch these tonight. It's an awfully long show and there are only five categories I give a damn about, and even saying that is a stretch.

We know who's going to win Best Actor, Actress, and Supporting Actor (and probably Stunt Ensemble), but Best Ensemble and Supporting Actress are still very much up in the air.

If Melissa Leo triumphs here as she did at the Globes and the Critics' Choice, it looks like the Oscar is hers. But if anyone other than her wins, I think that gives an edge in the race to Hailee Steinfeld, who could benefit from vote splitting between Leo and her Fighter costar Amy Adams (who actually gives the better performance).

Best Ensemble could go three ways as I see it. If The Social Network wins, then it jumps back into a dead heat with The King's Speech for Best Picture. The actors make up almost a third of the Academy membership, and a vote of confidence from them is a powerful advantage. If The King's Speech wins, then it adds more fuel to the fire. Or it could go to The Fighter, if they don't think awards for Bale and Leo is reward enough, and that throws a whole new monkey wrench into the works.

My Predictions:
Best Ensemble: The King's Speech
Best Actor: Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Best Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Best Stunt Ensemble: Incpetion