I Am DB

 

It’s a cold, grey, occasionally rainy weekend in Hollywood, so while the Oscar nominees are fretting their fashion choices, you get to curl up with a hot drink and settle in for a few hours of…I don’t know what, but hopefully something more entertaining than reading my predictions. If this is the best you can do, maybe skip the hot drink. You don’t want to spill it all over yourself when you nod off…
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BEST SOUND MIXING AND SOUND EDITING

Sound Mixing:
Baby Driver – Mary H. Ellis, Julian Slater, Tim Cavagin
Blade Runner 2049 – Mac Ruth, Ron Bartlett, Doug Hephill
Dunkirk – Mark Weingarten, Gregg Landaker, Gary A. Rizzo
The Shape of Water – Glen Gauthier, Christian Cooke, Brad Zoern
Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Stuart Wilson, Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick

Sound Editing:
Baby Driver – Julian Slater
Blade Runner 2049 – Mark Mangini, Theo Green
Dunkirk – Alex Gibson, Richard King
The Shape of Water – Nathan Robitaille, Nelson Ferreira
Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Ren Klyce, Matthew Wood

As you can see, the same five films are nominated in both categories this year. I was sure this was a relatively common situation, but in reviewing years past I realized it was actually a first. That said, it was only in 2006 that the Sound Editing category was expanded from three nominees to five, so there have only been 12 times where there could have been an exact match up. Not that this has anything to do with what will win. Usually there’s only one difference between the two line-ups, and since 1990 the awards have gone to the same movie almost as often as they’ve been split. As I probably say every year, most voters don’t understand the categories, which means they could always surprise us. But the pervading sense this year is that both will go to Dunkirk. I agree.

Personal: Sound Editing recognizes the creation of sounds in post-production that couldn’t be captured during filming. That makes me feel like this is the more creative of the two disciplines, because when it comes to science fiction or fantasy films, the Sound Editors must come up with what alien creatures and droids and spaceships sound like. Not that those are the only sounds which need to be manufactured in post; there could be practical reasons why real world sounds like gunfire or tires screeching must be re-created. Still, the requirement for complete fabrication makes me lean towards the fantastical, so my Sound Editing pick would be Star Wars: The Last Jedi. For Sound Mixing, which rewards the combination and interaction of dialogue, sound effects and music, I’d go Dunkirk. As with all of Christopher Nolan’s films, the music score by Hans Zimmer feels like a more integrated part of the soundscape then a score usually does, plus the ticking clock motif adds to the tension. It’s the nominee in which all of the sound elements work together most effectively.

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BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Blade Runner 2049 – John Nelson, Paul Lambert, Richard R. Hoover, Gerd Nefzer
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 – Christopher Townsend, Guy Williams, Jonathan Fawkner, Dan Sudick
Kong: Skull Island – Stephen Rosenbaum, Jeff White, Scott Benza, Mike Meinardus
Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Ben Morris, Mike Mulholland, Chris Corbould, Neal Scanlan
War for the Planet of the Apes – Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, Daniel Barrett, Joel Whist

This category comes down to Blade Runner 2049 and War for the Planet of the Apes, and I want so much to think the latter will triumph and Weta Digital’s amazing work on this series will finally take the gold after the previous installments were criminally passed over. But I’m afraid it won’t happen. For one thing, I never get the sense that the Apes movies are widely seen by Academy members. In 2011, Rise of the Planet of the Apes bafflingly lost to Hugo, a Best Picture nominee. In 2014, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes lost to Interstellar, which had effects that were impressive but fairly standard for “outer space” fare. Although there was no Best Picture nominee in the running that year, Interstellar still carried a hint of prestige that may have helped its chances. It was also nominated in four other categories, demonstrating that attention had been paid across multiple branches. The Apes movies have not broken out beyond visual effects, though each film has deserved additional nominations. That’s true this year as well, where Blade Runner 2049 has five nominations and, like Interstellar before it, carries an intangible prestige factor that while not substantial enough to land it in any of the top categories, is probably enough for it to succeed here.

Blade Runner features beautiful and seamless visual effects, so it’s hardly undeserving. But the Planet of the Apes movies are simply in another league, and if enough voters were paying attention, how could they not realize it? Every main character in this movie, save for two, are achieved through visual effects. Actors like Andy Serkis and Steve Zahn perform the characters using performance capture technology, so we can watch the movie and connect with the emotions these actors are putting out. But we also have to connect with what we’re actually looking at, and what we’re looking at in the case of these films was created in a computer. Main characters, holding the screen in dramatic, compelling moments of rage, warmth, loss, fear…it’s astonishing work. These characters – realized “in the flesh” entirely by computers – never for an instant seem anything less than completely, 100% real. There is no uncanny valley in this planet of apes. These movies, and their fate in this category, are a textbook case for why the Oscars might be far more meaningful if the winners – like the nominees – were chosen by the members of each respective branch rather than the membership-at-large. There is no way this series wouldn’t have picked up at least one Oscar by now if the decision was being made solely by visual effects artists.

I should be more optimistic. I’m writing about the movie as if it’s already lost, when in fact this is not a done deal. The primates do have a fighting chance. But I’m feeling like Blade Runner 2049 will win. I would love to be wrong.

Personal: Hmm, let me think about it.

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BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
Darkest Hour – Kazuhiro Tsuji, David Malinowski, Lucy Sibbick
Victoria & Abdul – Daniel Phillips, Lou Sheppard
Wonder – Arjen Tuiten

This is one of the easier picks of the year. The transformation of Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill was as talked about as the performance Oldman delivered through the prosthetics. Darkest Hour has this in the bag.

Personal: Darkest Hour. And now I want to see Oldman made up as Churchill and then transformed from that starting point into the ancient Transylvanian count he played in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

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BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Dunkirk – Hans Zimmer
Phantom Thread – Jonny Greenwood
The Shape of Water – Alexandre Desplat
Star Wars: The Last Jedi – John Williams
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Carter Burwell

If this award were being given out by film critics, I’d call it for Jonny Greenwood’s Phantom Thread, and it could turn out to be the Academy’s favorite too. Or Dunkirk admirers could push Hans Zimmer into the winner’s circle for his essential contribution to the movie’s nonstop tension, as well as for unifying its three storylines. But while Greenwood in particular poses a threat, I think Alexandre Desplat will take the Oscar for his romantic, Parisian-accented score that evocatively captured the playfulness, the love story and the otherworldliness of The Shape of Water.

Personal: Hans Zimmer’s collaborations with Christopher Nolan yield scores that do much more than support the films musically. The scores are almost like another character, and their impact on Nolan’s ability to grab his audience and get their hearts racing can not be understated. So I would be happy to see Dunkirk win. But I’d go with The Shape of Water. At every moment, Desplat’s charming score is the note-perfect complement to what we’re watching. Plus it works better as a listening experience apart from the movie than Dunkirk, which tends to be a consideration for me. And I could listen to “Elisa’s Theme” on an endless loop.

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BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Mighty River – Mudbound – Music and Lyric by Mary J. Blige, Raphael Saadiq and Taura Stinson
Mystery of Love – Call Me By Your Name – Music and Lyric by Sufjan Stevens
Remember Me – Coco – Music and Lyric by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez
Stand Up For Something – Marshall – Music by Diane Warren; Lyric by Lonnie R. Lynn and Diane Warren
This is Me – The Greatest Showman – Music and Lyric by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul

Poor Diane Warren. Her nominated song from Marshall marks her ninth time at this dance, but she has yet to win and that’s not going to change this year. In fact, “Stand Up for Something” is the least likely of the five to take the prize. Salt on the wound: while she awaits her first victory, she will likely lose to a pair of repeat winners. Either husband-and-wife team Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who won for Frozen‘s inescapable “Let it Go,” or Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who took the prize last year for “City of Stars” from La La Land.

The problem with “Remember Me,” the effort from Team Lopez, is that it’s rather slight. It appears during Coco in three different versions, two of which are barely over a minute long, with the third falling short of the two-minute mark. It’s charming and sweet and I like it, but there’s not much to it. It’s power and effectiveness is less about the song itself than about the role it plays in the movie, especially in its final incarnation. The song could almost be anything; what packs the punch is how it’s used. Will voters make that distinction? Some, maybe. Regardless, my guess is that more of them will be engaged by the energy and aspirational nature of “This is Me,” which is a full-blown production number in The Greatest Showman, and which has taken on a life of its own apart from the movie, thanks in no small part to its prominent use in commercials for the Olympics. Having a platform like that smack in the middle of the voting period couldn’t hurt. That benefit aside, the song is an anthem for underdogs and people who feel unseen, making it as powerful and inspiring as it is jubilant. We’re experiencing a moment right now where those who have felt silenced or victimized are standing up and calling for change, whether it’s women fighting for pay equality and an end to harassment, or African-Americans demanding fair treatment from systems that have historically oppressed them, or students refusing to become casualties of gun violence…this song speaks to all of them, even without directly addressing any of those struggles. It feels like a song for this moment. But who knows. I may be taking away more than the average listener…or Oscar voter.

Personal: Although I seem to have just made a case for “This is Me,” that would be my second choice after “Mystery of Love,” Sufjan Stevens’ airy, haunting ballad that exquisitely captures the mood and tone of Call Me By Your Name.

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BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Beauty and the Beast – Jacqueline Durran
Darkest Hour – Jacqueline Durran
Phantom Thread – Mark Bridges
The Shape of Water – Luis Sequeira
Victoria & Abdul – Consolata Boyle

In Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, an esteemed fashion designer who creates dresses for royals and ladies of highest society. It’s a tall order for any costumer to create an array of outfits that could have believably been designed by a world famous couturier, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s longtime collaborator Mark Bridges met the challenge with flying reds, golds, pinks and greens. Unless The Shape of Water gets caught in a sweep, expect Bridges to take the statuette…which, if I were him, I would then dress in a little House of Woodcock replica. He’s already got one Oscar, so he can display that one in its au naturel glory while the new one is dolled up.

Personal: The category features nice work all around, but nothing really stands out like the beautiful designs of Phantom Thread.

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BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Beauty and the Beast – Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer
Blade Runner 2049 – Dennis Gassner, Alessandra Querzola
Darkest Hour – Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer
Dunkirk – Nathan Crowley, Gary Fettis
The Shape of Water – Paul Denham Austerberry, Jeffrey A. Melvin, Shane Vieau

In the Best Visual Effects section, I suggested Blade Runner 2049 would win partly because it was embraced more broadly within the Academy than its primatey primary competitor, which I argue is more deserving. Here somehow the opposite applies. The world created in Blade Runner 2049 through the production design is at once familiar and alien, at times grand and imaginative while at others intimate but still idiosyncratic. It’s even more impressive considering that the sequel’s design carves out its own identity despite having to fit with what came before, even though 30 years have passed in the story. The movie pays homage to the original, but still feels fresh in its look. Yet it appears to be facing an uphill battle against The Shape of Water, which takes place in a world more grounded and ordinary but still sports terrific design work and would definitely be a worthy victor. Both films present bold colors that work in concert with all other visual elements of the films to tell their stories, and both films took home awards from the Art Director’s Guild, with Shape of Water winning in the Period category while Blade Runner scored in the Fantasy race. It’s probably the more creative accomplishment in this particular area, and it could win, but The Shape of Water seems to have the edge, perhaps because it’s more popular across the Academy’s ranks.

Personal: As much as I admire and enjoy The Shape of Water‘s design elements, I want Blade Runner 2049 to take this.

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BEST FILM EDITING
Baby Driver – Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss
Dunkirk – Lee Smith
I, Tonya – Tatiana S. Riegel
The Shape of Water – Sidney Wolinsky
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Jon Gregory

As I mentioned in the nomination predictions post, this award almost always goes to a Best Picture nominee, but every once in a while a particularly skillful action movie (The Matrix, The Bourne Ultimatum) or let’s say “near-action” movie (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) can emerge victorious. This year, Dunkirk would seem the clear choice, as it’s both a Best Picture contender and something of an action movie. But watch out for Baby Driver. Although probably seen by fewer voters than Dunkirk, it’s the kind of movie whose reputation precedes it, and even those who haven’t seen it might have awareness enough to admire and vote for the precision with which the images are cut to the pop soundtrack. It’s not your typical Oscar-caliber movie, but it’s exactly the kind of action piece that could take this prize. The precursor awards  do little to illuminate a clear choice. Dunkirk won the American Cinema Editors award in the Drama category, while Baby Driver surprisingly lost to I, Tonya in the Musical or Comedy field. I would read less into that, however, than into the fact that Baby Driver beat Dunkirk at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, which have a pretty decent – though not perfect – record in recent years of matching the eventual Oscar winner. It’s a tough call. I’m going with Dunkirk, but I might as well toss a coin.

Personal: Tough call here too. I’d be perfectly happy to see Lee Smith win for his excellent work on Dunkirk – and to make up for him not getting nominated for Inception. But Baby Driver is probably the more impressive, difficult achievement and it would be great to see it rewarded.

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BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Blade Runner 2049 – Roger Deakins
Darkest Hour – Bruno Delbonnel
Dunkirk – Hoyte van Hoytema
Mudbound – Rachel Morrison
The Shape of Water – Dan Lausten

Roger Deakins is one of the most lauded lensers of all time. 15 nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC); 4 wins. 8 BAFTA nominations; 4 wins. 14 Academy Award nominations; 0 wins. That’s right. Deakins, one of the greatest ever seated behind a camera, has yet to win an Academy Award. Many think this could finally be the year he takes it, thanks to his dazzling work on Blade Runner 2049. He’s already collected the prize from at least 22 critics organizations, as well as the ASC and BAFTA. Should be a slam dunk, right? Much as I’d like to think so, there’s reason to be wary. As mentioned above, Deakins has won BAFTA awards and ASC awards before, only to lose the Oscar. He’s won them both in the same year before, and still gone on to lose the Oscar.

Why might it happen again this year? For the same reason Blade Runner 2049 will probably lose Best Production Design: it’s up against two widely admired Best Picture nominees – Dunkirk and The Shape of Water – that also boast highly impressive work. Dunkirk was shot almost entirely with IMAX cameras, giving the film an epic sweep that still managed to be intimate and place the audience right alongside the characters. In addition, much of the movie’s photography is handheld, which is no easy feat to pull off with cumbersome IMAX equipment. And to get those big, bulky cameras into the cockpits of the planes for the RAF storyline? Quite a challenge. The Shape of Water, meanwhile, may not have posed the same level of physical complexity, but its camerawork and lighting interacts beautifully with every other visual element of the movie. Of course, the same is true for Blade Runner 2049; they both happen to be especially eye-popping films. I’d just argue that Blade Runner‘s imagery is a little more striking a little more often, particularly in its lighting.

With no clear and present frontrunner, this does seem like it might finally be Deakins’ year. But with Dunkirk and The Shape of Water showcasing wonderful work and being in the thick of the Best Picture hunt, either could find more support amongst voters. It should be noted that on the ballots, only the name of the film appears, not the name of the actual nominee. In the end, I’m cautiously predicting that Deakins’ losing streak is about to give way, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it extend yet again.

Personal: I can’t really be disappointed if Dunkirk or The Shape of Water took the prize. Each is immaculately shot and eminently worthy. But so is Blade Runner 2049, and when you factor in how overdue Deakins is, and how in the zone he is with this film, it would be crushing to see him miss yet again.

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BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
The Boss Baby – Tom McGrath, Ramsey Ann Naito
The Breadwinner – Nora Twomey, Anthony Leo
Coco – Lee Unkrich, Darla K. Anderson
Ferdinand – Carlos Saldanha
Loving Vincent – Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, Sean Bobbitt, Ivan Mactaggart

Not a whole lot to debate or deconstruct in this category. Coco is way out in front, and should easily deliver Pixar its ninth win in this category.

Personal: I’m torn. I loved Coco, even more than I expected. It moved me to tears…several times. But as a work of animation, Loving Vincent is staggering. An entire feature-length film, hand painted in the thick, swirly style of Van Gogh’s art and integrating live performances by actors like Saorise Ronan and Chris O’Dowd rendered as Van Gogh subjects. It’s a painting come to life, and it makes me wonder what the category should be judged on: the film itself, or the achievement of the animation? I suppose the former; the category is called Best Animated Feature, not Best Animation in a Feature. But maybe occasionally, with something as unique as this, the technique or style deserves to come first. So for its strikingly original artistry and its dramatically compelling content (a skeptic investigates Van Gogh’s mysterious death), I’d give the win to Loving Vincent.

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BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Call Me By Your Name – James Ivory
The Disaster Artist – Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber
Logan – Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
Molly’s Game – Aaron Sorkin
Mudbound – Virgil Williams, Dee Rees

Here’s another category where there really isn’t a lot to grapple with. It’s not even roughly a two-way race. Call Me By Your Name might as well be engraved on this Oscar as I type. James Ivory will become the oldest winner in Oscar history at 89, besting Ennio Morricone, who was 87 when he won Best Original Score for The Hateful Eight. Then again, if Agnès Varda wins in the Best Documentary Feature category, she’ll be the oldest winner ever. She’s got eight days on Ivory. Regardless of who holds what record, it will be nice to see Ivory win an Oscar after a long and celebrated career that saw him nominated three times for Best Director, but always for films (A Room with a View, Howard’s End and The Remains of the Day) that were considered also-rans in the Directing and Picture categories despite winning in other top races. His moment has finally come.

Personal: It’s great to see Logan nominated, but Call Me By Your Name is the crown jewel among these contenders. A beautiful movie across the board, and it begins with André Aciman’s novel and Ivory’s script.

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BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Big Sick – Emily V. Gordon, Kumail Nanjiani
Get Out – Jordan Peele
Lady Bird – Greta Gerwig
The Shape of Water – Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Martin McDonagh

Any of these nominees would be a deserving winner, but The Big Sick will have to be content with its nomination. So too will The Shape of Water, despite being a frontrunner in other categories both above and below the line. It’s lovely and imaginative and full of meanings that may go unnoticed but which are carefully layered in by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, and in another year it might have had a better chance. As it is, there just happen to be three dominant writing contenders this time around. Two of them, Jordan Peele and Greta Gerwig, have been lumped together quite a bit throughout the season (as in this Vanity Fair photo shoot and cover story), forced by circumstance to carry the torch for their respective chronically underrepresented demographics. Both are nominated here and for Best Director. The screenplay nominations were expected, but the Director nominations were question marks. Receiving that recognition is as far as they’re expected to go in that category, meaning this is the best chance that both of them have to win…and like the Highlander, there can be only one. (Well…technically they could tie, but that’s unlikely.) Oh, and there’s still Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri to consider.

This is also Martin McDonagh’s best shot, as he was rather surprisingly omitted from the Best Director line-up. Three Billboards has been a formidable presence in the top races throughout Phase Two, and took Screenplay honors at the Golden Globes and BAFTA (the former does not distinguish between Original Adapted). It did not win the Writers Guild of America (WGA) award, but it wasn’t eligible for a nomination.  The big question with Three Billboards is whether the controversy that surrounds it has made a significant impact on Academy members. What controversy, you may ask? Many critics and viewers have a big problem with how the movie handles race. This piece from /Film nicely summarizes the issue, and contains links to several of the critiques, including prominent articles by New York Times critic Wesley Morris and The Daily Beast‘s Ira Madison III. The movie has its defenders, however, including Kareem Abdul- Jabbar, who argue in part that these excoriations miss the movie’s point. So again, will the controversy make a difference? Some voters may think twice, but I’d wager it’s more likely that if they consider this at all, it will be less about their own opinion being swayed than about not wanting to be perceived as endorsing a film that many find racially insensitive or outright ignorant.

So there’s that.

Peele and McDonagh are both among their films’ nominated producers, so if either loses this award, they still have a chance to take home an Oscar if their movie wins Best Picture. Not so for Gerwig, who is not a producer on Lady Bird. So with Best Director likely out of reach, this is her chance. But as perennial as it is for Oscar pundits to think a given person and/or their film might win in one category while their closest competition will win in another, thereby spreading the wealth, this scenario seldom plays out. People vote for what they want to vote for category by category; they don’t play their Oscar ballot like a chess board. So the fact that this is Gerwig’s best hope to win an Oscar this year doesn’t matter. As funny, acutely observed and delightful as Lady Bird is, it’s outmatched by the cleverness and social commentary of Get Out and the originality and potency of Three Billboards. Between those two, it could go either way…but Get Out just feels too relevant and too fresh to lose.

Personal: It’s not my favorite movie of the five nominees, but I still have to give this up to Get Out. It’s such a smart premise; simple but ingenious, and a whole lotta fun.

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Woody Harrelson – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Richard Jenkins – The Shape of Water
Christopher Plummer – All the Money in the World
Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The way things were going waaaaay back in December, Phase One, the early days of the awards season, it seemed as if veteran character actor Willem Dafoe might earn a sort of career achievement Oscar for his role as a beleaguered motel manager in The Florida Project. But as often happens as the season stretches on, the winds shifted. Sam Rockwell (a veteran character actor himself, if not quite one with as many years logged as Dafoe) came up from behind to establish a lead, and is now the firm favorite. Given that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was built as a showcase for a dynamic female lead, it’s a testament to Rockwell’s impact that he’s as much a reason to see the movie as Frances McDormand. And even though his character is at the center of the aforementioned controversy, no one seems to have a problem with his performance. Having overtaken Dafoe’s early lead and captured every major prize along the way – Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA), Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and BAFTA – at this point it’s hard to envision any other outcome.

Personal: Rockwell. I have loved this guy for ages. The Green Mile, Galaxy Quest, Charlie’s Angels, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Choke, Moon, Conviction, The Way Way Back…he’s just one of those magnetic performers who always commands attention, no matter the quality of the movie he’s in. Still, none of his past achievements are reason to vote for him here. I choose him because Three Billboards gives him one of his best roles, and as expected, he crushes it.

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Mary J. Blige – Mudbound
Allison Janney – I, Tonya
Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water

Even more starkly than in the Supporting Actor race, this one saw a shift as time went on. Allison Janney did well with the critics groups, but Laurie Metcalf dominated. Yet it was Janney who took the Golden Globe, SAG, BFCA and BAFTA awards, and there’s no reason to expect that she won’t take the Oscar as well. She has the showiest role of the bunch by far, and perhaps more importantly, she’s never played a part like this. There are moments in this movie when her eyes are so icy and frightening she could make Game of Thrones‘ Night King tremble, and she conjures the attitude to match. Some have pointed out that the character is pretty much one-note, and maybe it is…but take that up with the screenwriter. Janney went the distance with the part, and because she’s so well known across film and television, voters are likely to note what a change of pace the role is for her. She also has the advantage of being more familiar to film audiences than Metcalf, who is active on television and the stage but hadn’t appeared in a theatrical movie since 2008. From all angles, this seems like a sure thing for Janney. Still, proceed with caution. The very fact that all four acting frontrunners seem so locked could belie the possibility of a surprise, and if something unexpected happens, it could be here. Metcalf could still pull it off, and word is that Lesley Manville is gaining ground among voters who are just catching up with Phantom Thread.

Personal: I’ve got nothing but love for Janney and I’d be fine with her winning. I’d also be happy with Lesley Manville, who did so much with looks and posture. But I’d be happiest to see it go to Metcalf. She made that character so real. Flawed, kind, pained, petty, generous…loving. Not always in the right way, but always. Sometimes the most impressive feat isn’t nailing a big showstopper scene, but making all the ordinary and mundane moments so memorable. Metcalf does that here, over and over again.

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BEST ACTOR
Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Denzel Washington – Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Gary Oldman has pretty much had this thing locked up since Darkest Hour premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September. The Toronto Film Festival followed within days, and the buzz was out of the bag. Oldman checks off all the classic Oscar boxes. Real life/historical figure? Check. Physical transformation? Check. Big speeches/scenery chewing? Check. Quieter, subtler, more interior moments to balance out big speeches/scenery chewing? Check. Respected actor, long career, lots of great performances, hasn’t won yet? Check. As time goes on and the Academy’s old guard becomes the minority, these boxes may go away. But for now they remain intact, and they all point to victory for Oldman. Not exactly victory at all costs or in spite of all terror…but victory nonetheless.

Personal: It’s hard to deny Gary Oldman. Just because the performance checks off those predictable boxes doesn’t diminish its impact or suggest that voters who choose him are simply going through the motions. Oldman is tremendously entertaining and wholly committed in Darkest Hour, and having reached a point in his career where he tends to play primarily supporting roles, his work as Churchill is a reminder of his power as a lead. He’s also one of those guys who you assume must have won an Oscar somewhere along the line, but hasn’t, which fuels a classic “it’s time” narrative. It’s hard to put all the side factors out of your mind and just vote purely for the performance, but if I did I would probably go with Timothée Chalamet. Like Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird, he’s just so authentic. In his portrayal of a teenager overtaken by unexpected romantic desire, he makes some choices that are so surprising and impeccable, yet so straightforward. None of the performances present an existence so believable and fully lived-in as his.

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BEST ACTRESS
Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Margot Robbie – I, Tonya
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Meryl Streep – The Post

Almost every year at least one of the acting categories comes down to a tight race between two nominees, with either outcome completely plausible. This year, not so much. All four acting categories seem to have clear outcomes, with Rockwell, Janney, Oldman and now Frances McDormand having taken Golden Globes, BFCA, SAG and BAFTA prizes. That factoid is, I believe, a first. It doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be an upset; only that they all have a significant advantage going into the big night.

Unlikely as a loss for McDormand seems at this point, there’s a case to be made that she could miss. For one thing, it’s clear each time she takes the stage that while she is happy and grateful, it’s not too important to her. Frances McDormand does not need your trophy, thank you very much. While accepting her SAG award, she even encouraged voters to support younger, newer talent. For another thing, this acting category might be the one where the frontrunner’s lead is the slimmest. Sally Hawkins and Saoirse Ronan are likely to pick up a lot of votes, and Margot Robbie will get her fair share as well. If enough people who are torn decide not to vote for McDormand, figuring she’ll already get enough support, the tide could turn. Also worth considering…

Oh hell, who are we kidding? Making a case for McDormand to lose is pointless. Yes, yes, anything could happen, but c’mon. People love her in this movie, they love her in general…you watch her give her other speeches – BAFTA, Golden Globes…this lady is just oozing swagger.

Personal: I’ve long wanted to see Academy Award Winner Frances McDormand become Two-Time Academy Award Winner Frances McDormand, so if she wins, it’ll be aces with me. But in a tough, tough choice between her, Hawkins and Ronan, I’d pick Ronan. Her character is more average and grounded than those played by some of her competitors, but her inhabiting of this girl facing typical struggles of adolescence went so deep and was so relatable. Her portrayal was as universal as it was particular, and her deadpan comic timing and delivery is a marvel.

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BEST DIRECTOR
Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Jordan Peele – Get Out
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Paul Thomas Anderson – Phantom Thread
Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water

It’s great to have Paul Thomas Anderson back in this category, and great to have Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro here for the first time. One day, this award surely must go to Anderson and Nolan. But it won’t be this year. Like the four acting categories, this one includes a nominee who has won every major precursor. Guillermo del Toro took the BFCA, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Director’s Guild of America (DGA) awards, the latter of which is the most reliable harbinger of Oscar victory in all of awardom. His close compadres Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu have each won this award in the last five years (Iñárritu did it twice), and now del Toro will complete the trifecta.

Personal: Guillermo del Toro. Every detail in every frame of The Shape of the Water, and every thought behind every word, shot, cut, sound effect and so on, is significant and can be explained in passionate detail by del Toro. When I hear him interviewed about this or any other of his films, I’m always struck by how nothing is without meaning or careful intention. And it all comes together so gorgeously in this movie.

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BEST PICTURE
Call Me By Your Name – Peter Spears, Luca Guadagnino, Emilie Georges, Marco Morabito
Darkest Hour – Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lisa Bruce, Anthony McCarten, Douglas Urbanski
Dunkirk – Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan
Get Out – Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, Edward H. Hamm, Jr., Jordan Peele
Lady Bird – Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, Evelyn O’Neill
Phantom Thread – JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson, Megan Ellison, Daniel Lupi
The Post – Amy Pascal, Steven Spielberg, Kristie Macosko Krieger
The Shape of Water – Guillermo del Toro, J. Miles Dale
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin, Martin McDonagh

The most difficult prediction of the year is for the top award. Races like Best Visual Effects, Best Original Song and Best Original Screenplay have boiled down to two strong possibilities (maybe three in the case of Screenplay), but four of these nominees are widely thought to be serious players. Of those four, Dunkirk faces the toughest odds. It hasn’t won any major awards on the road to the Oscars, but many pundits who are out there talking to Academy members consistently hear that it’s a popular choice, admired by many. This matters when dealing with the preferential ballot, the method employed to choose the Best Picture winner. All other categories are determined by a simple popular vote; the nominee with the most votes wins. But in 2011, the Academy introduced the preferential ballot in the hopes of reaching a Best Picture winner that represented as wide a group of voters as possible. Once again, I offer this video from The Wrap‘s Oscar whiz Steve Pond, who uses visuals aids to explain how it works.

So…it’s better to be a movie that’s admired and liked by a whole bunch of people than a movie that’s loved by a smaller faction. Based on reports from the trenches, Dunkirk appears to fall in the former group, and it surely has a lot of support from below-the-line members (cinematographers, editors, sound mixers, etc.). Actors make up the largest voting bloc of the Academy, but combine all of the crafts categories and you’ve got an even larger group. Working against Dunkirk? It didn’t receive any nominations for writing or acting. It’s considered almost impossible to win Best Picture without either.

Get Out. It’s seen as one of the most relevant nominees, which can be a huge benefit in these troubled times when social consciousness is on everybody’s mind. Many members want their vote to make a statement. Get Out spotlights an exciting new voice in filmmaking, provides a rare blessing of legitimacy on a genre that seldom gets this level of respect, and demonstrates that an “issue movie” can also be a popular crowdpleaser. And as with Dunkirk, many pundits report that their Academy contacts keep talking about it….though whenever I hear that I think, “Ok, but there are roughly 8,300 members of the Academy. How many are you talking to? A few dozen? Even if it’s a couple hundred, that’s a small percentage.”

Next, The Shape of Water. With a leading 13 nominations, it has broad appeal across the below-the-line categories as well as with actors, who nominated three of its stars. It’s a common mistake to think that the most nominated movie is also the most popular or the most likely to win. This often proves false. The movies that get the most nominations are the ones that not only find success in the top categories, but also hit several below-the-line boxes. Costumes, set design, music, makeup, visual effects, etc. In other words, period pieces and sci-fi or fantasy. So when it comes to The Shape of Water, it doesn’t hurt to have all those nominations, but they don’t necessarily signify anything. While many people love the movie, there are also many who don’t get it or just don’t care for it. One deterrent cited over and over is that despite its acclaimed ensemble and their praised performances, the movie did not receive a SAG nomination for Best Cast. No movie has won Best Picture without that since 1995’s Braveheart. But it did win the Producer’s Guild of America (PGA) award, which is the only major precursor that also uses the preferential ballot. And it won the BFCA award, which comes from an organization whose size is closer to the Academy than any other entity, and therefore probably consists of a similarly diverse and divided voting membership.

Finally, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which has the clearest momentum going into Oscar night, thanks to Picture and Screenplay wins at BAFTA and the Golden Globes, as well as McDormand and Rockwell steamrolling their way through Phase Two. It also won the SAG award for Best Cast. If not getting nominated for that could hurt The Shape of Water, winning it surely helps Three Billboards. On the other hand, Martin McDonagh was passed over for Best Director. A movie can win Best Picture without a directing nomination, but it doesn’t happen often. I’ve also read some interesting comments suggesting that the movie’s depiction of America is not all that realistic, representing an outsider’s view (McDonagh hails from Ireland) that misses certain key cultural nuances, particularly of the American south, and that the top prizes from BAFTA and the Globes are not surprising given that both voting groups are comprised of non-Americans. There’s also the controversy discussed previously. Here, it gives me pause. If the story has permeated the ranks of the Academy, they may be more wary of what they choose to represent them as a Best Picture winner than they will be with Best Screenplay. To whatever extent Oscar wins are remembered over time by those outside the realm of obsessives like me, a Best Picture win is more prominent than Best Screenplay. What kind of movie does the Academy want to bestow its ultimate validation upon? It’s the same question they face with Best Original Screenplay – if they face it at all – but it might matter to them more here, especially when they’re still in the shadow of #OscarsSoWhite.

Nine Best Picture nominees, four thought to have a real chance, all four facing precedents that say they can’t win, or at least are highly unlikely to win. They’re sometimes worth mentioning, but you can drive yourself mad trying to decipher all of these equations for victory that rely on the idea of voters actually stopping to think if the movie they’re selecting for Best Picture was nominated for SAG’s Best Cast Award or received an Editing nomination or is likely to win at least one other award, which is another supposed necessity. All of these rules will fail eventually. Which will it be this year? I have no idea. But my Best Picture guess, after much hand wringing, is The Shape of Water. Not because Guillermo del Toro is likely to win Best Director; the preferential ballot has upended the long-standing correlation between Best Picture and Best Director. The awards have gone to different movies in four of the last five years…and I feel more than a little stupid for not making the connection until last year. The categories are being voted on in two completely different ways now, so of course it’s going to be less likely that they will match up as often as they used to. No, I’m picking The Shape of Water because I suspect the arguments against it are weaker than the arguments against the other nominees, and because I think it’s the most likely among the four pack-leaders to benefit from the preferential ballot. But Three Billboards, especially, is a major threat, and if all the controversy and outsider viewpoint theories turn out to be sound and fury signifying nothing, it could go all the way.

Personal: The Shape of Water. This was the one I loved the most. The story, the production values, the humor, the characters and performances, the music, the bold swing of the romance…top to bottom and everything in between, this was my favorite movie of the year.

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FINAL THOUGHTS
As usual, you’re on your own with the Best Documentary, Best Foreign Language Film and the short film categories. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the feature-length narrative movies.  But there are a couple of other things I want to mention. Each year, you’ll find a few entertainment news sites that publish the opinions of some anonymous Academy members, who talk frankly through their choices and their feelings about what was and wasn’t nominated. There were several this year, and it’s always enlightening and frustrating to read them. What they prove is that despite all the time and energy that Oscar geeks like me, professional or otherwise, spend on calculating and predicting what “The Academy” or “The Voters” will do, this is ultimately – and I’ve hit this point before – several thousand individuals just expressing their own random opinions. Every nominee in every category will have some people who love it, some who hate it, and others whose feelings fall somewhere in the middle. Some voters are retired or work less and probably have a chance to see every nominee. Others are busy, active in the industry, and may not get around to everything. Some people will vote for a friend or a colleague, some people will vote to promote an agenda. Some people will vote for the nominee they enjoyed the most, others will wield their vote politically. I said earlier that people don’t play their ballot like a chess board, and while I believe that to be generally true, I’m sure that sometimes a voter might make a choice because they want to see a multiple-nominee win something, even if they preferred another choice in that given category. The reasons are all over the map, as you see when you look at these anonymous comments. (Year after year I read some of these and think there are certain people who don’t deserve the privilege of voting. Their comments also frequently come off as bizarre streams of consciousness that make little sense. But what can you do?)

The point is, for all the words I’ve vomited into this post talking about what voters might do and how the Academy thinks, there is no typical voter or Academy hive mind. It’s just a bunch of people marking a ballot according to their own personal preferences and reasoning. Every voter has their own criteria for determining what constitutes great work. If you’re interested, here’s some insight. IndieWire published a whole series of these interviews, speaking to a costume designer, film editor, publicist, executive, visual effects supervisor and producer. One especially telling detail from all but one of these is that they don’t understand or care for the preferential ballot. I have my issues with it as well, but now is not the time. The Hollywood Reporter, which usually publishes several of these in the week or so before the ceremony, has posted just two so far this year, one from a producer’s branch member and one from an actress, while The Daily Beast interviewed a member of an unspecified branch. Lastly, Vulture published a compelling two-part piece for which they interviewed 14 Academy members who joined within the last two years, several of whom represent the Academy’s push for greater inclusion (over half of their subjects are women and more than a third are people of color). The first article is a wide-ranging conversation about how they feel the Academy’s effort to diversify the voting ranks is affecting the nominations and the organization’s outlook in general. The second focuses on this year’s top eight categories and how these members are voting. These are definitely worth checking out. There’s so much in these two pieces I want to address and comment on, but that would have to be for another post that I’m sure I’ll never have time to write.

There’s one other thing I wanted to touch on, and then I will leave you in peace. Last year’s Oscar night concluded with the infamous clusterfuck of La La Land being mistakenly announced as Best Picture instead of the actual winner, Moonlight. It transpired that one of the PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants who hands the envelopes to the presenters gave a duplicate copy of the Best Actress envelope to Warren Beatty and, well, we all know what happened.

There’s so much more to say about what happened, but that all belonged in yet another piece that I never had time to write. As it pertains to this year’s awards, I wanted to express a hope that last year’s event isn’t leaned on too heavily this year or played for repeated laughs. Returning host Jimmy Kimmel has already used it in an amusing promo…

…and there are bound to be some of jokes and references, and that’s fine. You can’t not acknowledge what happened, as new Academy president John Bailey and Kimmel have both expressed this week. And hey, what happened made for fantastic viewing and probably the single most memorable Oscar moment ever. But at the end of the day, it was huge embarrassment that resulted in three people thinking they had won Oscars only to have to give them up, gracious as they may have been, and another group of people not really getting to have the pure moment they deserved. We’re not talking about tragedy here, obviously. No one died, no one’s career was ruined (not even that accountant, who was not fired…but will most definitely never step foot near an Oscar ceremony again), and it was simply human error on a massive scale. It wasn’t Warren Beatty or Faye Dunaway’s fault, it wasn’t Jimmy Kimmel’s fault, it wasn’t anyone in the Academy’s fault, but the result was a pretty shitty situation for a small group of people. So my advice to Kimmel, show producers Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Todd, and the Academy leadership – because, you know, they’re all reading this – is to not overdo it. Word broke yesterday that Beatty and Dunaway are returning this year, but in what context – genuine presenters, or part of a gag? – is unclear. Have a little fun with it, but be respectful enough to remember that it kinda sucked for some people. They’ll live…but they’ll never live it down.

As for what Kimmel has in store, he hasn’t revealed much, but we are in such fiercely political times right now and you know the show will touch on some of it. #TimesUp, #MeToo, Parkland, Russia attacking our democracy…tough stuff to deal with, but Kimmel has addressed non-entertainment events with great compassion on his nightly show, so I’m sure he’ll handle his second time at the Oscars with finesse. Seth Meyers set a strong example at the Golden Globes, so the path is lit.

Ok, I’m done. Here’s a link to a ballot, here’s a link to an Oscar-themed crossword puzzle, and here’s that Golden Globes monologue from Seth Meyers, to leave you with something more interesting than anything I’ve said.

 

 

Better late than never, right? I’d promise you that one day I will actually complete this post more than 24 hours before the show begins, but I don’t know if I have it in me to keep doing these long enough to fulfill that pledge. So for what it’s worth at this point, here are my Oscar predictions and requisite over-explanation.

BEST SOUND MIXING AND BEST SOUND EDITING

Sound Mixing:
Arrival – Bernard Gariepy Strobl and Claude La Haye
Hacksaw Ridge – Kevin O’Connell, Andy Wright, Robert Mackenzie and Peter Grace
La La Land – Andy Nelson, Ai-Ling Lee and Steve A. Morrow
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – David Parker, Christopher Scarabosio and Stuart Wilson
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi – Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush and Mac Ruth

Sound Editing:
Arrival – Sylvain Bellemare
Deepwater Horizon – Wylie Stateman and Renee Tondelli
Hacksaw Ridge – Robert Mackenzie and Andy Wright
La La Land – Ai-Ling Lee and Mildred Iatrou Morgan
Sully – Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman

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Get ready — you’re going to see the words La La Land a lot in this post. (Is La even a word?) Here in the Sound categories, it throws us a curveball. I pointed out when predicting the nominees that musicals have a great track record getting nominated for Sound Mixing, and not such a great one getting nominated for Sound Editing. This year, however, the Sound branch cited La La Land in both categories. I have to assume that most voters from other branches don’t much understand the difference between the two categories, nor what constitutes a great achievement in either of them. If La La Land had just been nominated for Mixing, I’m sure they would have voted for it, and the Sound Editing award would have gone elsewhere. But now that they can vote for it in both categories, will they? And if they decide to go with two different movies, will they honor La La Land in Mixing, where musicals have traditionally succeeded? Or will they honor it in Editing because, hey, they’re actors and cinematographers and costume designers, and they don’t know in which category musicals have traditionally succeeded? Since the impossibility of knowing is even more acute here than in other categories where it’s impossible to know but you still kinda know, I’ll be a traditionalist and predict that La La Land takes the award for Sound Mixing, but not Sound Editing. In that category, any of the nominees feel like viable winners, but I’m going with Hacksaw Ridge. When in doubt, voters might equate the chaotic noise of war with the best achievement in sound. Or, you know…not.

Personal: I rarely have strong feelings about the outcome of these races, being admittedly ignorant about how to judge the work. However, knowing that Sound Editing involves the creation of the aural components, my vote in that race would go to Arrival, as the only nominee of the five that had to imagine otherworldly sounds as opposed to re-creating earthbound ones.

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BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Deepwater Horizon – Craig Hammack, Jason Snell, Jason Billington and Burt Dalton
Doctor Strange – Stephane Ceretti, Richard Bluff, Vincent Cirelli and Paul Corbould
The Jungle Book – Robert Legato, Adam Valdez, Andrew R. Jones and Dan Lemmon
Kubo and the Two Strings – Steve Emerson, Oliver Jones, Brian McLean and Brad Schiff
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – John Knoll, Mohen Leo, Hal Hickel and Neil Corbould

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All five nominees boast stellar work that seemed to take certain VFX challenges further than they had been taken before, but the complexity and sheer amount of work that went into The Jungle Book has to be acknowledged. This wasn’t just about adding talking animals that looked believable. This whole damn movie was shot on a soundstage in downtown Los Angeles. The young star Neel Sethi was working on bluescreen and greenscreen stages with only small portions of the jungle set constructed for him to interact with. A boulder here, a small patch of grass there, a short sandy pathway over there….everything else around him was created in a computer. EVERYTHING. Think about that for a minute. Here’s the trailer for the movie. Watch it, and realize that other than what Sethi is actually physically touching at any given moment (not including the animals, of course) and perhaps what’s in his immediate vicinity, the rest of it is computer-generated. That, ladies and gentlemen, is Movie Magic at its most astonishing.

The problem is that voters don’t have the best track record of recognizing Movie Magic at its most astonishing. The good news this year is that there isn’t a Best Picture nominee to muddy the waters, as the inclusion of a prestige film often hijacks this award from a movie that features truly amazing and/or groundbreaking work. That’s how you get Gladiator beating The Perfect Storm, or Hugo over Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But that won’t be an issue this time, leaving a clear pathway for The Jungle Book. But you never know. Watch out for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Personal: It’s gotta be The Jungle Book.

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BEST HAIRSTYLING AND MAKEUP
A Man Called Ove – Eva von Bahr and Love Larson
Star Trek Beyond – Joel Harlow and Richard Alonzo
Suicide Squad – Alessandro Bertolazzi, Giorgio Gregorini and Christopher Nelson

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None of the three nominees are movies that lit it up with the Academy, so voters are a bit off the grid here. Don’t discount Suicide Squad just because it seemed to be derided by critics and audiences. Even without having seen it, I know there was an impressive variety to the work. But I’ll put my money on Star Trek Beyond, because Trek is a known quantity to voters whether they saw the movie or not.

Personal: Judging just by pictures from Suicide Squad, the work looks impressive. But Star Trek Beyond is the only one of the three I’ve seen, so I suppose it gets my vote by default. The new alien designs — especially the one sported by Sofia Boutella — do look Oscar-worthy to me. There’s something about that design that makes me want to eat ice cream. What’s that about?

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BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Jackie – Mica Levi
La La Land – Justin Hurwitz
Lion – Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka
Moonlight – Nicholas Brittel
Passengers – Thomas Newman

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When Disney musicals had their resurgence in the late 80’s and early 90’s, Oscar voters proved keen to award not just their memorable songs, but also their orchestral scores. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and Pocahontas all took home the Oscar for Best Original Score even though you kind of got the feeling members were just voting for the scores as a way to vote for the overall music in the movie. I love those soundtracks (well, the first three anyway), but did the scores really deserve to win? Maybe. Maybe not. I bring it up because we’re in a similar situation this year, with La La Land poised to take this prize even though maybe, possibly, perhaps its actual instrumental score isn’t really as strong or memorable as some of its songs. It has a nice theme, for sure, but does the full score really merit an Oscar? Many will think so, and they will vote for it, and it will win.

Personal: I’m probably not being fair. La La Land‘s score is good, and functions successfully in the movie, which is ultimately what should matter with this award, even if — as I say every year — I’m always looking for something that stands tall on its own, apart from the movie. On that score (no pun intended) I think La La Land comes up a little short. It’s between Jackie and Moonlight for me, because both take a similarly unexpected approach to their subject matter. I admire the stylistic choices of both, but found Jackie‘s to be more memorable.

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BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Audition (The Fools Who Dream) – La La Land — Music by Justin Hurwitz; Lyric by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
Can’t Stop the Feeling – Trolls — Music and Lyric by Justin Timberlake, Max Martin and Karl Johan Schuster
City of Stars – La La Land — Music by Justin Hurwitz; Lyric by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
The Empty Chair – Jim: The James Foley Story — Music and Lyric by J. Ralph and Sting
How Far I’ll Go – Moana — Music and Lyric by Lin-Manuel Miranda

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You avid Hamilton fans eager for Lin-Manuel Miranda to complete his EGOT with an Oscar win had better put your hopes on hold. Despite contributing music to the latest animated film from Disney — as well-trod a path to success in this category as it is in Best Original Score — it’s not going to happen this year. But fear not; Miranda will have plenty of future chances. With a Mary Poppins sequel in the works and a secretive animated project with Sony a few years off, he’s not throwing away his shot.

The winning film will be La La Land, and this time it should be. The only question is which of the movie’s two nominated songs will emerge victorious: “City of Stars,” or “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)?” Nearly every pundit seems to be banking on the former, and that’s the smart bet. I’m going against the grain, however, and guessing that “Audition” pulls off an upset. First of all, there are really two versions of “City of Stars:” Ryan Gosling’s solo version, which has that memorable whistle going for it, but which is basically one verse; and Gosling’s duet with Emma Stone, which is longer, and has additional verses and alternate lyrics. I’d wager that when most people think of the song, they think of the solo, “whistling” version. But will they remember how brief it is? Will they care?

Then you have Stone’s solo, “Audition,” which is one of the most stirring moments in the movie, and a scene that I think people are more likely to remember than either of the scenes “City of Stars” figures into. It marks a major turning point in the story and furthers the journey of the characters; “City of Stars” doesn’t. It also has more evocative lyrics. Voters may not notice or care about these facts, especially with the powerful hook of that whistle echoing in their heads. So I don’t know. If voters are trying to recall the songs long after seeing the movie, “City of Stars” is probably the one that comes to mind. But if they really remember the moments in which the songs play and how they felt when they watched the movie, I’m convinced they’d vote for “Audition.” It’s not the wise move, but I’m sticking my neck out.

Personal: “City of Stars” is wonderful, so I don’t mean to knock it. I just think “Audition” is better. Gosling’s version of “Stars” is tinged with a touching melancholy, befitting the movie’s bittersweet resolution. The duet version, meanwhile, warmly speaks to the joys of finding love. But to me, “Audition” is the song that truly captures the full, blooming, in-love-with-art-and-artists spirit that infuses every frame of the movie, and it too is bittersweet, as it speaks to the struggle of reaching for an elusive dream. Plus, as I was saying, it has a more crucial function in the film. I certainly won’t be upset if “City of Stars” goes all the way, but “Audition” is the more deserving; an ultimately richer song that better encapsulates the themes of the movie.

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BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Allied – Joanna Johnston
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – Colleen Atwood
Florence Foster Jenkins – Consolata Boyle
Jackie – Madeline Fontaine
La La Land – Mary Zophres

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As I said in the previous post, Jackie has beautiful costumes, but many of them are re-creations of well-documented outfits worn by Jackie Kennedy, and to me that means the movie really doesn’t deserve the nomination. A win would be disappointing. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) went there anyway, while the Costume Designers Guild (CDG) instead awarded Hidden Figures in its Period category. Figures is not among the Oscar nominees, nor is Doctor Strange, which took the prize in the guild’s Fantasy category (besting Kubo and the Two Strings, unfortunately). The only CDG winner included among Oscar’s five nominees is La La Land, which won in the Contemporary category. I think it will come out on top at the Oscars as well. Emma Stone sports one striking dress after another, and I imagine at least a few of those will be top of mind for many voters. On the other hand, Academy voters usually favor period pieces and fantasies — or a melding of the two — in the design categories. You have to go back to 1994 and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for the last time this award went to a contemporary-set film. Before that? 1979(!) and All That Jazz. So history is against La La Land, but I think the bold colors will prove hard to resist, plus the styles are frequently old-fashioned, which helps lend a period feel to this modern musical.

Personal: La La Land. Those colors, those dresses…pretty much everything Emma Stone wears in this movie is splendid, forget about the rest of the cast. I liked the costumes in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, particularly Newt’s outfit, but I’ve got to give it up for La La Land.

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BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Arrival – Patrice Vermette, Paul Hotte
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – Stuart Craig, Anna Pinnock
Hail, Caesar! – Jess Gonchor, Nancy Haigh
La La Land – David Wasco, Sandy Reynolds-Wasco
Passengers – Guy Hendrix Dyas, Gene Serdena

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In another category where movies with non-stylized contemporary settings rarely come out on top, La La Land is again likely to defy tradition. The movie is a tribute, among many things, to Technicolor musicals of Hollywood’s heyday, and just as in the Costume Design category, color is key. It’s not so much that the sets and locations are all striking in and of themselves, but rather what the design team did to make ordinary locales pop off the screen. The only other nominee that feels like a potential threat is Arrival, for the compelling interior of the alien craft, so unlike other such settings we’ve seen before. Still, that’s a single and sparse location, and most of the movie takes place outside the ship in more drab or ordinary settings.

Personal: La La Land. Every wall, every windowpane, every prop, every single strip, dash and dot of color seems carefully considered and absolutely deliberate. The cumulative effect is an eye-popping visual palette that feels familiar and new all at once.

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BEST FILM EDITING
Arrival – Joe Walker
Hacksaw Ridge – John Gilbert
Hell or High Water – Jake Roberts
La La Land – Tom Cross
Moonlight – Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon

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Any outcome feels possible in this category, where the kind of movie that wins is more varied than in some of the other “crafts” categories. Hacksaw Ridge has brutally intense battle scenes but also plenty of quieter, well-paced character drama. Hell or High Water feels tight and efficiently assembled as it moves between the bank robbing brothers and the Texas rangers investigating them. Moonlight divides one character’s story into three distinct chapters, each one feeling complete yet complimentary to the others. Arrival plays with time in unexpected ways that take on greater significance after the movie has ended. And La La Land moves between the fast-paced energy of big musical numbers and intimate moments of a romantic relationship with ease, where it could have left us with whiplash. (Get it?! Whiplash?!!?) The voters could throw us a curveball, but I have a feeling enough of them will associate editing with the rhythms of a musical and cast their vote for La La Land.

Personal: I wouldn’t be disappointed to see any of these take the prize, but I’d vote for Arrival. Amy Adams’ character experiences flashes throughout the story, and as we start to understand what they mean and why she’s having them, the way they interact with her current circumstances becomes crucial to unlocking the movie’s mysteries.

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BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Arrival – Bradford Young
La La Land – Linus Sandgren
Lion – Greig Fraser
Moonlight – James Laxton
Silence – Rodrigo Prieto

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In making my nomination predictions last month, I pointed out that the Academy’s nominees usually don’t match up with those from the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), and that I thought Greig Fraser’s work on Lion would be the ASC nominee to miss with the Academy. Well, I blew that one. Not only did the Academy’s picks mirror the ASC’s exactly, but Fraser and Lion went on to win the ASC prize. Does that mean Fraser has the Oscar in his sights as well? Probably not. La La Land‘s Linus Sandgren is the frontrunner here. The Academy at large is more likely to remember the play of light (often spotlight) that transports us in and out the movie’s many musical numbers, as well as how the camerawork shows off the rainbow of colors captured within the costume and production design. Part of the reason the colors jump off the screen so vividly is due to the way the lighting illuminates them. All elements of a movie obviously rely on and play off each other, but La La Land‘s costumes, production design and camerawork function in particularly harmonious tandem. It’s hard to imagine the movie winning one and not the other two…though in fact, we don’t need to imagine it. BAFTA spread the love in these categories, giving Cinematography to La La Land, Costume Design to Jackie and Production Design to Fantastic Beasts. So it’s possible. But unlikely, I’m guessing.

Personal: La La Land, for the way the lighting makes the bright colors glow, dance and suck you whole into the world of the movie. Sandgren also gets credit for taking better advantage of Emma Stone than perhaps any cinematographer who’s ever filmed her. She has such an expressive face, so the camera loves her right off the bat. Sandgren really revels in that gift, often holding her in close-up and allowing her to be riveting simply in the act of looking. She brings that to the table, but he has to be there to capture it in all its effectiveness.

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BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Kubo and the Two Strings – Travis Knight and Arianne Sutner
Moana – John Musker, Ron Clements and Osnat Shurer
My Life as a Zucchini – Claude Barras and Max Karli
The Red Turtle – Michael Dudok de Wit and Toshio Suzuki
Zootopia – Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Clark Spencer

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This has been an exciting category to watch throughout the season, with Zootopia and Kubo and the Two Strings running in near lockstep with critics organizations. Zootopia took the Golden Globe and the Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA) prize, but Kubo got the BAFTA. Most of the guilds don’t have a category for animation, but those that do — the Producers Guild of America (PGA) and the American Cinema Editors (ACE) — went with Zootopia, and it was also the big winner at the Annie Awards, though I’ve never considered those to be much of a factor with the Oscars. You’d like to think that people only vote in a category if they’ve seen all of the nominees, but some probably vote regardless, and if that applies to anyone with this category, it’s probable that Zootopia — one of the highest-grossing movies of the year — was seen by a lot more people than Kubo…and I’d wager was playing in a lot more family rooms over  Christmas vacation. Kubo has made too strong a showing to be counted out, surprising consistently throughout the season with a Best Visual Effects nomination, a groundbreaking nomination from the Costume Designers Guild, and more critics awards than people may have expected. At the end of the day though, the math seems to favor Zootopia.

Personal: Kubo and the Two Strings. Hey, Zootopia is terrific and I’ll hardly be despondent if it wins. But smart, sly, funny and touching as it is, it’s still cut from the familiar cloth of wide-eyed animals occupying bright, cheerful, landscapes. Thematically too, we’ve seen similar efforts rewarded before. Kubo, on the other hand, is a real original, with arresting visuals and the daring to tell a darker story than the typical plucky animated fare. Plus, Laika Studios has been putting out excellent work from the start. Each of its previous three films has been nominated, but none have come this close to the prize before. Who knows when they will again. The movie deserves this win, and so does the studio. (Speaking, by the way, of voting without seeing all the nominees, I still haven’t been able to see The Red Turtle or My Life as a Zucchini. The latter is just now opening, and the former played only for a limited time and not anywhere very accessible for me. I hope to catch them both, but would be surprised if either lured me away from Kubo.)

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BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Arrival – Eric Heisserer
Fences – August Wilson
Hidden Figures – Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi
Lion – Luke Davies
Moonlight – Barry Jenkins; Story by Tarell Alvin McCraney

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The Writers Guild of America (WGA) honored Arrival in this category, but I’m sure you remember from my predictions post — because you studied it and committed it to memory — that the WGA placed Moonlight in the Original Screenplay category (where it won) while the Academy considers it an adaptation. Really though, we don’t need the guild to provide guidance in this case. Against La La Land and Manchester by the Sea in the Original category, it would have been a battle. But in the Adapted column, Moonlight should sail smoothly to victory. The movie is universally admired, and writer/director Barry Jenkins seems to have charmed and impressed everybody who’s encountered him during the months he’s been promoting the movie at Q&As, festivals, award ceremonies, etc. I think many voters want to not just recognize the movie; they want to recognize Jenkins specifically, and since he’s not one of the producers, that leaves this category or Best Director as the place to do it. He’ll get a lot of votes in both, but he’ll get more here. Arrival has spoiler potential, and without Moonlight to contend with I think its structure and surprises would carry it to a win. But it does have to contend with Moonlight, so that’s that.

Personal: I wouldn’t have said this if I hadn’t had the chance to see it a second time, but since I did, my pick has to be Arrival. Not just for the whoa-factor, but for making an engaging movie about a rather abstract concept. With a story about humans and aliens trying to establish a baseline of communication with two entirely different systems, the movie becomes about the fragility and delicacy of language. How do we ask them complicated questions about their purpose on Earth? Do they even understand what a question is? How do we correctly interpret their attempt to use a word that even among our own kind can be misunderstood and construed in different ways? There’s nothing inherently cinematic about this, but Eric Heisserer’s script presents it as gripping, high-stakes drama, and even though it rather conveniently bypasses the nuts-and-bolts of how the humans come to understand and “decode” the alien language — and vice versa — the script has the courage to be about something scholarly and intellectual while still having great humanity and feeling. No easy task.

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BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Hell or High Water – Taylor Sheridan
La La Land – Damien Chazelle
The Lobster – Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou
Manchester by the Sea – Kenneth Lonergan
20th Century Women – Mike Mills

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One of the hardest-to-call races this year finds La La Land squaring off against Manchester by the Sea. They tied with the BFCA. La La Land won the Golden Globe. Manchester won the BAFTA. The WGA by-passed them both in favor of Moonlight. So where does that leave us? I don’t know that enough voters — even those who liked La La Land — will think that its screenplay is as much a winning achievement as certain other components or the film as a whole. The heartache and humanity of Manchester seems more the stuff of great screenplays, and since Kenneth Lonergan is unlikely to factor into many Best Director votes, this is the place to reward him. If there are enough voters who love La La Land and just rubber-stamp it up and down their ballot, then surely they’ll choose it here too. But I think this will be one of the few places it misses.

Personal: I love the originality of The Lobster, but I don’t quite love the movie. Really, these are all great (though La La Land is the weakest as a screenplay nominee). But my pick is Manchester by the Sea. Lonergan took somebody else’s skeletal premise — it was actually John Krasinski who birthed the seed of the idea — and made it completely his own, sublimely marrying humor born of character conflict with harrowing circumstances and heartbreaking sadness, to create something deeply moving and unexpectedly funny. Few movies I’ve seen strike the balance so honestly and effectively, and it’s just a great story that seems miraculously imaginative yet completely, believably mundane.

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Mahershala Ali – Moonlight
Jeff Bridges – Hell or High Water
Lucas Hedges – Manchester by the Sea
Dev Patel – Lion
Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals

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This year’s acting nominations may have put the #OscarsSoWhite issue on the back burner, but nominations aren’t enough. Some of these folks have to win! And they will, starting here with Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali, who has nearly swept the circuit so far. He did endure two surprise, high-profile losses on his path to the Kodak Theatre — the Golden Globe went to Aaron Taylor-Johnson of Nocturnal Animals and the BAFTA went to Dev Patel for Lion. But Taylor-Johnson isn’t nominated for the Oscar, and Patel may have benefitted somewhat from a home field advantage in England, and perhaps even some lingering residual love for Slumdog Millionaire. I don’t see him repeating at the Oscars, and can’t really imagine any of these guys coming from behind to overtake Ali. If Jeff Bridges were still seeking his first win, things might be different. But he’s got an Oscar now, so I don’t expect him to collect a second this year, beloved as he is. He’ll get a fair share of votes, I’m sure, but Ali will be crowned the champ.

Personal: Mahershala Ali. My only hesitation is that the part is so small, and I’m always saying that roles should be larger than this to be worthy of an Oscar win. But Ali does so much so beautifully with his limited screentime, and his impact is felt even when he’s not there. His character defies the expected archetype, and Ali makes him wholly believable, speaking volumes while talking softly…and sometimes without talking at all.

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Viola Davis – Fences
Naomi Harris – Moonlight
Nicole Kidman – Lion
Octavia Spencer – Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea

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This is your safest bet of the night. Viola Davis probably already has the Oscar at home, engraved, on her shelf, in need of a polish. The ceremony is just a sham for the public. Some may argue that she belongs in the lead actress category, but given the history with the role on Broadway, lead and supporting were both deemed legitimate pathways. In Best Actress, it might not have been so cut and dry. In Supporting Actress, her fellow nominees can’t compete. They’re all good, but Viola has more screentime, her character is easily the most fully drawn of the five, and she just plain totally crushes it. She’s deeply admired and respected by her peers, and this role seemed to be waiting for her to come along. I was disappointed when she didn’t win Best Actress for The Help, partly because she had such good odds and who knew if she’d come that close again. I’m glad I was wrong.

And she still should have won for The Help.

Personal: Viola’s time has come, and I’m right there with her.

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BEST ACTOR
Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea
Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge
Ryan Gosling – La La Land
Viggo Mortensen – Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington – Fences

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For the longest time, this was shaping up to be as sure a thing as Viola Davis: Casey Affleck won nearly every single award there was to win, cutting what looked like a clear path to the Oscar stage. Then last month, he was toppled at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards by Denzel Washington, and now this is being called one of the toughest races of the year to call. Since the first SAG Awards in 1994, only four times has the Best Actor winner not gone on to win the Oscar, and the last time was 2003. I throw that out there just for trivia; I put far less trust in those kinds of stats than other pundits. But it’s a fact that had many people shifting their prediction from Affleck to Washington.

The bigger threat is the renewed coverage of sexual harassment charges leveled at Affleck in 2010 by two female colleagues from I’m Not There, his mockumentary collaboration with Joaquin Phoenix. The situation was brought up here and there during Phase One of awards season, but didn’t gain much traction (which, as noted by many of the people who did cover it, stood in stark contrast to the controversy that erupted around Nate Parker and The Birth of a Nation). The chatter got a little louder right after the nominations were announced, most notably from Constance Wu, the lead actress on the hit ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. Wu shamed the Academy for nominating Affleck, yet still the story didn’t blow up. But it could well be steadily simmering below the surface, and it’s impossible to know whether or not it will impact voters’ decisions significantly. Was it part of the reason Affleck lost the SAG award? Possibly. The reason could also have had less to do with denying Affleck than it did awarding Washington, who had never won a SAG award. The organization has occasionally leaned toward a greatly admired actor who has not previously won. In a tight Best Actress race, Julie Christie won the SAG award in 2007 for Away From Her; the Oscar went to Marion Cotillard. The same year, SAG’s Supporting Actress winner was Ruby Dee, but the Oscars chose Tilda Swinton. In 2002, Christopher Walken got the Supporting Actor SAG for Catch Me If You Can; Chris Cooper won the Oscar. SAG’s voters may simply have felt that Washington was due.

Affleck rebounded a few weeks later and won the BAFTA, which like SAG, has some crossover membership with the Academy. But Washington was not nominated for a BAFTA, so there’s that. Plus, he’s a two-time Oscar winner already, so voters who think about that sort of thing won’t feel any pressure to finally award one of the great actors of all time. And hey, maybe Washington won the SAG award because big, showy performances like the one he gives in Fences tend to capture more awards than quiet, inward ones like Affleck’s in Manchester by the Sea. Academy voters could go with Washington for the same reason. His performance is like a big, jagged bolt of lightning; Affleck’s is like the electric current running invisibly inside the wall.

Bottom line, this went from slam dunk to nailbiter. No doubt, Affleck will lose votes from people who can’t ignore his alleged behavior, regardless of their feelings about the performance. Yet controversies like this one haven’t stopped the Academy from handing Oscars to Roman Polanski or Woody Allen. Have things changed in the era of the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief? One writer asked if Affleck could win in a post-women’s march world. I think he can. My gut tells me that despite the recent twist in the road, this will go down exactly the way it seemed destined to in the first place. In the end, Affleck will pull it off…but from other predictions I’ve seen so far, I appear to be in the minority.

Personal: I don’t have strong feelings about the outcome, surprisingly. I enjoyed all these performances tremendously, and consider Ryan Gosling’s the only one that doesn’t feel substantial enough to win. Judge me if you will, but part of me wants to see Affleck get it just because when someone wins pretty much everything along the way, it’s a bummer to see them lose in the end, no matter how predictable winning is at that point. But if Washington captured his first Oscar in 16 years, or Mortensen somehow shocked us all, I couldn’t argue.

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BEST ACTRESS
Isabelle Huppert – Elle
Ruth Negga – Loving
Natalie Portman – Jackie
Emma Stone – La La Land
Meryl Streep – Florence Foster Jenkins

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When the critics were having their say, this was a race between Natalie Portman and Isabelle Huppert, with Portman looking like the Oscar frontrunner since Huppert faced the challenge of starring in a foreign language film with a difficult subject matter. Even with a surprise Golden Globe win over Portman in the Drama category, Huppert’s odds remain low. Portman’s have receded as well, however, with Jackie being embraced less enthusiastically by the Academy than by critics. Instead, it’s Emma Stone who’s emerged as the late-season frontrunner. Some thought as far back as November that she was right in the thick of it, but her fortunes seemed to fade as one critics group after another went with Portman and Huppert. Now Stone has come back from behind, fueled by winning the Golden Globe Musical/Comedy award, the SAG and the BAFTA. And everyone loves Emma Stone. They won’t vote for her just because of that, but if they were put off by divisive films like Jackie and Elle, they may feel okay about voting for Stone. Portman could still pull an upset, but at this point it looks like Emma’s got this. For those unsure how it will turn out, keep an eye on Best Original Song. Stone could triumph regardless of that outcome of course, but if it goes to “Audition,” she’s your winner.

Personal: As I said in my nominations post, I haven’t seen Elle. I hate going into Oscar night having not seen all the nominees in the main categories, but from what I know of that movie, I couldn’t stomach seeing in a theater. Of the remaining four, I’d pick Portman. Emma Stone is wonderful in La La Land, but I don’t see hers as an Oscar-winning performance. Portman, on the other hand, did transformative work. That odd Jackie Bouvier accent did some of the heavy-lifting, but there’s a lot more than that going on in her work. She presents us with a woman who has played the passive role of doting wife, hostess, and First Lady, then swiftly finds her strength and resilience when confronted with the shock and horror of her husband’s assassination. Portman shows us Jackie’s grief and uncertainly mingling with the need to step up and control how JFK’s death and the immediate aftermath are seen by the world and immortalized by history. Her performance is fiery and understated all at once.

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BEST DIRECTOR
Denis Villeneuve – Arrival
Mel Gibson – Hacksaw Ridge
Damien Chazelle – La La Land
Kenneth Lonergan – Manchester by the Sea
Barry Jenkins – Moonlight

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Damien Chazelle won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and most importantly, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) award, which has failed to augur the Oscar winner only seven times in its 69 years…and in three of those cases, the DGA winner wasn’t nominated for the Oscar. In fact, in the entire grand game that is Oscar predicting, the DGA is the most meaningful precursor. So considering his victory there, and the general acclaim for La La Land, Chazelle is the man to beat. The only one who can is Barry Jenkins. As I said in the Adapted Screenplay section, I think there are a lot of Academy members who want Jenkins to go home with an Oscar. I said he’ll get a lot of votes for the Screenplay — more than he will here, I think — but he will get a lot of votes here. Probably not enough to overtake Chazelle, but this is a politically tumultuous year where voters looking to not just honor great filmmaking but also make a statement (we’ll get into that a bit more in a minute) could do both by voting for Jenkins.

Personal: I admit to favoring directors who take the helm of epic productions with physical and visual challenges and a daring that extends beyond the narrative and into the production itself. So while I recognize the skill involved in directing character-driven dramas like Manchester by the Sea or Moonlight, I’m inevitably drawn to something like La La Land, which makes Chazelle my choice. But I would have no problem seeing Barry Jenkins take this. He created a small miracle with Moonlight, and it’s a beautiful and assured piece of work. (Of course, so is La La Land. Ack! Making choices is hard.)

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BEST PICTURE
Arrival – Dan Levine, Shawn Levy, Aaron Ryder, David Linde
Fences – Scott Rudin, Denzel Washington, Todd Black
Hacksaw Ridge – Bill Mechanic, David Permut
Hell or High Water – Carla Hacken, Julie Yorn
Hidden Figures – Donna Gigliotti, Peter Chernin & Jenno Topping, Pharrell Williams, Theodore Melfi
La La Land – Fred Berger, Jordan Horowitz, Marc Platt
Lion – Emile Sherman & Iain Canning, Angie Fielder
Manchester By the Sea – Matt Damon, Kimberly Steward, Chris Moore, Lauren Beck, Kevin Walsh
Moonlight – Adele Romanski, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner

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Since Best Picture and Best Director usually go to the same movie, our starting point is that La La Land is the presumptive winner. Not that Chazelle’s Best Director odds alone are boosting La La Land to frontrunner status. The movie’s been thrilling audiences in and out of the industry since it first debuted at the Venice Film Festival in August, landing at the Telluride and Toronto festivals a few weeks later. Although it didn’t actually come out until early December, it has been considered the probable film to beat ever since those early festivals, and that status has been solidified with victories at the Golden Globes (Musical/Comedy), BAFTA and PGA Awards. Many pundits look to the PGA award in the same way they look at the DGA, particularly because in 2009, the PGA adopted the same voting procedure — the preferential ballot — that is used to determine the Best Picture Oscar. Since then, only last year did the PGA winner not go on to take the Oscar. (The PGA had a tie in 2013; one of the two winners — 12 Years a Slave — got the Oscar.

Is there any reason to think La La Land could lose? Well, sure…we can almost find reasons to doubt and wonder. This year, there’s that politics factor. Things are pretty ugly in the world right now. The movies people choose to support — be they “regular” people deciding what to see on a Saturday night or journalists and filmmakers voting for awards — reflect the times, and so the question this year is whether voters want escapism or want to make a statement. La La Land represents escapism. It would be unfair to dismiss the movie as fluff or ignore the honest things it has to say about art and love and the difficult choices some people make between the two. It may arrive at a bittersweet conclusion, but by and large La La Land makes people feel good. Members who want their vote to speak for their conscience could choose movies that celebrate the sort of characters who are undervalued or victimized in our current political climate. Moonlight‘s protagonist is a gay black boy trying to navigate a confusing world. Hidden Figures shines a light on brilliant African-American women who played a major role in launching Americans into space. Lion follows an Indian boy separated from his family and eventually raised by adoptive parents in Tasmania, who years later falls into an obsessive search to find his home. Hell or High Water involves the corruption of banks and the power they hold over ordinary, struggling people. Fences celebrates those people too, those left behind by institutions that saw them as less than. Arrival focuses on the importance of working across cultures — both earthly and extraterrestrial — to achieve a common, positive goal…and how refusal to cooperate could doom us all. So…there are a lot of ways Academy members could use their vote this year to say something that matters.

Still, of all these movies, Moonlight is the only one that could take down La La Land. I could stretch that and call Hidden Figures an incredible long shot, but for all of its pleasures and for highlighting a tragically unknown piece of history, it’s a pretty standard piece of entertainment by Oscar’s yardstick. Consider too, that a victory for Moonlight (or Hidden Figures or Fences) would be the ultimate rebuke to the last two years of #OscarsSoWhite. La La Land, after all, is pretty damn white…not that I think cries of racism will be too prevalent this year if La La Land takes the top two prizes. Oh, and on that point, could we see a Director/Picture split this year? It’s happened 24 times in Oscar’s 88 years, last year being the most recent. If it were to happen this year, which way would it go? Barry Jenkins wins Best Director but La La Land takes Best Picture? Or Moonlight for Picture and Damien Chazelle for Director? In 2013, Alfonso Cuarón won Best Director for Gravity, which boasted incredible technical and visual achievements, while Best Picture went to the powerful, human-scale drama of 12 Years a Slave. Could we see a similar situation this year?

Maybe. Surprises can always happen, but after spinning all of this supposition, the smart money is on things going exactly as the momentum indicates they will…and the momentum is with La La Land.

Personal: When I add up all of the beautiful individual elements of La La Land, I have arrive at that as the movie to which I’m most partial. But Moonlight is exquisite and it would be really wonderful to see something so delicate and humanist win Best Picture. So I’m split between the two. And I loved Manchester by the Sea as well.

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THE REST
As usual, I can be of little help with Best Documentary Feature, Best Foreign Language Film, or the animated, live-action and documentary shorts. O.J.: Made in America appears to be the favorite for Documentary Feature, assuming voters made time for all eight hours of it. If not, look for I Am Not Your Negro or 13th to step up. As for Foreign Language Film, I haven’t detected a consensus, but I do know that there’s been a movement encouraging people to vote for Iran’s entry, The Salesman, as a middle finger to our Infant-in-Chief’s Muslim travel ban. Before the ban was struck down, the film’s director, Asghar Farhadi — whose excellent film A Separation won this award in 2011 — stated that even if accommodations were made that enabled him to attend, he would not, in protest of the policy. Although he could come now, he has chosen not to, saying he will be represented by two prominent Iranian-Americans. I know The Salesman was well-received, and maybe it would have won if none of this nonsense had happened. If it does win, there will be no way to know if the bulk of votes it collected were because it was members’ favorite movie among the five or because they wanted to make a statement. In my eyes, people should vote for the movie they think is the best, and not for something different because they think it will send a message. In this case especially, the people who need to hear the message won’t be listening, and even if they were, they don’t care. There are better, more effective ways to protest.

Regardless of whether or not this category becomes a political moment during the ceremony, we can definitely expect it to be a politically-charged evening, where many artists will mix their gratitude with expressions of dismay about the state of the world and our nation, and call for peace, tolerance and love. This is anathema to many, who think celebrities should keep their mouths shut when it comes to politics and that award show acceptance speeches (and presentations) should focus on the honors at hand and nothing more. But I’m all for some impassioned commentary on Oscar night. It will certainly make for a more interesting and more emotional show than listening to winner after winner recite a list of names. If the Academy or the ABC Network are worried about this, they shouldn’t be. Awards season so far has been marked by such speeches, most prominently Meryl Streep’s instant-classic takedown of the Asshole-in-Chief at the Golden Globe Awards, and the amazing, rousing call to arms from David Harbour on behalf of the Stranger Things cast when they won Best Ensemble in a Drama Series at the SAG Awards.

These memorable moments have only helped their respective shows by bringing them more attention and generating momentous web traffic. Many other speeches at both events found winners speaking to our fractured times. At the Academy’s annual Nominee’s Luncheon earlier this month, Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs addressed travel ban-related absences and set a tone for a political Oscar night. Film journalists like Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and past Oscar winners like novelist John Irving have written opinion pieces to encourage winners to speak their minds. A few days ago, Michael Moore reflected on his controversial speech from 2003 when he won Best Documentary for Bowling for Columbine days after President Bush launched the war in Iraq, and was essentially booed off the stage. This came a day after Yahoo! published a detailed account of how Moore’s infamous moment came to pass. Just on Friday, the directors of the five Best Foreign Language Film nominees released a joint statement calling for “freedom of expression and human dignity.” Politics have a long history of finding their way into the Oscars, and this year promises to be rife with examples.

JIMMY
Despite the potential for fireworks, it’s still an awards show at the end of the day, and it needs to be fun. With Jimmy Kimmel as host, that shouldn’t be a problem. He pulled hosting duties at the Emmy Awards last fall and hit a home run. Terrific cold open…

…terrific monologue…

…and many terrific moments throughout the evening (skip to 1:38).

(If you don’t get it, you didn’t watch the monologue video).

We can also expect Kimmel to have some fun with his nemesis Matt Damon, who will be in attendance as one of the nominated producers of Manchester by the Sea. Damon crashed the Emmys in brilliant fashion, and no doubt Kimmel will be looking for revenge.

He should more than up to the task of keeping the show entertaining, though it must be said that late night’s other Jimmy threw down the gauntlet with his cold open at the Golden Globes, so Kimmel has his work cut out for him on that front.

Alright, I’ve left you precious little time to mentally prepare for the big night, so I will finally leave you at peace and wish your choices good luck, unless they conflict with my choices, in which case screw you. Here’s a ballot if you still need one, and one last video that you’ve probably seen already, but I’ll include anyway because it’s great and has some fun with a certain bound-for-glory musical.