They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don’t They?
The 2014 Oscars Race: The Final Stage Begins
By J. Don Birnam
January 21, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The Nominations: What They Reveal About the Academy
Every year, it’s worth looking at the nominations to see what we can learn about the Academy. Most of the lessons repeat each year and yet somehow do not seem to enable us to 100% predict what they will do. Humans are funny that way.
Guilds work but have their limits.
The Guilds loved Gone Girl, but the movie was essentially snubbed by the Academy. By contrast, the Guilds were not impressed with Mr. Turner, but it landed a decent slew of technical nominations. The overlap between the guilds and the Academy branches is sufficient to give us clues but never an exact correspondence.
The Critics hold a lot of power.
In the 1990s, people would complain that the Academy was out of touch, picking too many commercial movies and not enough “quality” films, with Titanic vs. L.A. Confidential being the crowning moment of this narrative. Today, the Academy has made a complete 180. Despite complaints about the quality of their picks, look at most critics’ top ten lists. Boyhood, Grand Budapest Hotel and Birdman appear in nearly every critic list. It’s true that there is, like with the guilds, not 100% correspondence. The critics will always include left-field, little known movies completely out of the mainstream (some loved, for example, Jean Luc Goddard’s Goodbye To Language), while the Academy will also always go its own way in one or two entries (American Sniper is this year’s lowest rated Best Picture nominee, of which there is usually one or two each year). But, beyond that, it is clear that critical pics get the Academy’s attention and for the most part make the nominations.
This is definitely a “spread the wealth” year.
It is counterintuitive to think that the Academy loved a lot of movies this year given that it only nominated eight for Best Picture - the lowest since the expansion. But the signs point to a truly spread the wealth year. The first sign is that no movie received double-digits in nominations - with only The Grand Budapest Hotel and Birdman reaching nine. This happened last in 2009 when Avatar and Hurt Locker reached nine, and it was not that rare an occurrence in the 2000s.
One obvious explanation for this is that in a year when the “showy”, or craft-rich movies have little known acting performances, and the acting movies are not very crafty (such as, indeed, this year) you’re not going to see a movie crack the double digits. This does explain why the 1990s saw essentially every year with a 10+ nominee. The acting movies were also epics - Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Schlinder’s List, Titanic, The English Patient, and so on. Thus, 1990s movies got at least 10 nods in all years but two, when Unforgiven got nine and American Beauty eight. The 2000s, by contrast, were actors’ movies - A Beautiful Mind, Crash, Million Dollar Baby, The Departed, and so on. Thus, 2000s movies failed to get 10 nominations four times (twice as many as the previous decade), with some years yielding as low as seven nods.
If you need more convincing, consider that this may be the first year in a long time (in fact, I could not find a year in which the following had occurred in a search of the last 25 years) in which all Best Picture nominees walks away with at least one Oscar. For all the spread the wealth narrative that the papers tell you about the last couple of years, when you take out the acting categories, a different story emerges. Gravity and 12 Years a Slave dominated their year. Hugo and The Artist split most awards. Life of Pi and Argo did the same. Each of those years, when all was said and done, was the narrative of two movie - the ultimate winner and the beloved favorite.
Not so this year. As my predictions become clearer, there is a real chance that each of the eight movies will win one statuette, which would be extraordinary.
They like “surprises.”
Or, at the very least, they don’t like to be told what to do all the time. For all the complaints about the predictability of the Oscars, picks like Marion Cotillard or the snub for The LEGO Movie show that there is enough diversity in the tastes of the Academy members and in what they are exposed to that not all votes go for what pundits and prognosticators tell them they “likely will” or “should” nominate. Arguably, then, the nominations are the space where the surprises have all gone in the Academy Awards.
There’s a diversity problem—even if it’s just a problem of perception.
#OscarsSoWhite became the most trending hashtag on Twitter on nominations morning. The topic has been debated endlessly in the media in the days since the announcements and bears repeating as one of the lessons of the 2014 nominations. Movies about male, mostly white heroes, resonate, not surprisingly, with the mostly male and mostly white Academy membership. Is this a problem from the Academy or the industry at large? Is this a problem at all? If it is, how do we fix it? I can’t provide the answers but it is clear that at the very least as a matter of public perception, the Academy skews towards these films and filmmakers in most years.
Hollywood Insiders are In.
The more benign explanation for some of the perceived snubs is that the Academy loves to rewards insiders like Clint Eastwood, and is less likely to welcome quirkier filmmakers they either don’t know well (Ava DuVarney) or don’t trust (David Fincher). The explanation is of limited value of course - both because in the past they have exhibited a penchant for taking risks (think of the Best Director nomination for Ben Zeitlin for Beast of the Southern Wild) and because the fact that they like Hollywood insiders only exacerbates a system that favors a certain insider demographic.
Still, for purposes of understanding the process, it is helpful to realize that tried filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Eastwood can more easily break in to the Oscar race late - they are respected and well-known than unknown quantities like Angelina Jolie or Ava DuVarney.
Box Office is almost completely irrelevant.
We shall see if the obliteration of records by American Sniper affects the outcome of the races, but almost complete shutouts of epic films that were very popular with audiences - Gone Girl, Interstellar, and Unbroken - show that the Academy just does not really care about box office gross anymore, for better or for worse.
Developments Since Nominations
On the night of the Oscar Nominations, the Critics’ Choice Awards were handed out. Essentially all of the expected winners emerged victorious: Boyhood took Picture and Director, Julianne Moore, Michael Keaton, Patricia Arquette, and J.K. Simmons continued their marches to the podium, and Birdman and Gone Girl took the screenplay awards. With the latter snubbed at the Oscars, that category is anyone’s guess, as is Animated Feature, as The LEGO Movie won the Critics’ Choice but was left out by the Academy.
The London Critics, among other groups, also announced their winners. All the way down the ballot: Boyhood, Linklater, Moore, Keaton, Arquette, and Simmons. People like a winner, folks. They like to be a part of the winning team. Don’t forget this before we criticize the Academy for making the predictable choices. Someone, somewhere out there decided those were the anointed six, and most organizations - critics, guilds, etc. - have been happy to oblige and fall into place since then.
Finally, the biggest development: American Sniper took the MLK weekend box office by storm and made over $90 million in just three days. I don’t think the Academy cares enough about audience perception at this point (Avatar’s defeat or Interstellar’s lack of nomination support this), so I doubt this makes a difference in terms of its high-category Oscars chances, but at the very least it does cement it in the conversation as a serious contender for the Best Picture and other Oscars.
Initial Gut Predictions
Somehow, my gut predictions last year - given right after the announcements - proved closer to the final results than my day-of predictions, which proves both that there is such a thing as over-thinking this and more important, that there is perhaps little to no room for movement in the main races. Whatever the reason, I thought it would be at least amusing to give my gut-check reaction to what I think is out ahead this year in each race - and then see if these ideas change as I go through each category in depth or as I make final adjustments on Oscars eve.
Best Picture – Boyhood, all else is wishful thinking unless and until a guild says otherwise.
Best Director – Richard Linklater, Boyhood. It’s easy to look back at the least two years of splits and see a pattern but I think we are back to the usual behavior. And Linklater is beloved.
Best Actress – Julianne Moore. Neither the best performance of the group nor of her career, but assuredly the most overdue. I will applaud cheerfully.
Best Actor – Michael Keaton. I honestly believed Redmayne would win this but Keaton’s speech at the Globes annihilated that view. And look out for three-times-in-a-row nominee Bradley Cooper with the box office streak of his vehicle.
Best Supporting Actor – J.K. Simmons.
Best Supporting Actress – Patricia Arquette.
Best Original Screenplay – The Grand Budapest Hotel. This is the toughest call of the night. They love to anoint Best Picture as Best Story and the correspondence between Picture and Screenplay in the Academy’s 87 years is higher than the correspondence with Directing. But I feel like with this complex year, they will look to reward other movies they loved.
Best Adapted Screenplay – The Imitation Game. Whiplash will get its consolation nod with Simmons and category confusion over whether the script is original (as the WGA thought) or adapted (as the Oscars and BAFTA did) will hurt it.
Best Editing – American Sniper.
Best Cinematography – The Grand Budapest Hotel. This movie will be the Hugo, the Life of Pi, the Gravity of its year (a theme, it seems), and sweep the technical regardless of merit.
Best Art Direction/Best Costumes The Grand Budapest Hotel. See above.
Best Original Song Glory, from Selma. The narrative around the movie is just too strong.
Best Original Score The Theory of Everything.
Best Sound Mixing/Sound Editing American Sniper. War movies do well here, as to Best Picture nominees. Lone Survivor swept these when it had the chance, and I expect Sniper to do the same easily.
Best Visual Effects Interstellar.
Best Make-up Guardians of the Galaxy.
Best Documentary Citizenfour. More when I see them all.
Best Foreign Language Film Ida. Same.
Best Animated Short Feast. It’s that cute.
Next weekend, the PGA and SAG will speak for important guilds and we will know for sure if Boyhood will win it all or if there is still room for suspense. But, right now, it all seems pretty settled amongst the main races.