The last time the winner of Best Picture wasn't at least nominated for Best Film Editing was 1980 when Ordinary People won the top prize. That's a long time. To make the trend even stronger, in 2005 Best Picture frontrunner Brokeback Mountain lost out to Crash. Guess what film wasn't nominated for Best Film Editing. Boyhood had a fight on it's hand…
The Oscar for Best Original Song is one of the few categories that doesn't have a lot of patterns or indicators as to who will win. The only major precursor is the Golden Globe, however since the year 2000, the two kudos have matched up a whopping 4 times. Even last year when "Let It…
What's better than the same 5 guys being nominated for SAG, Golden Globes, and Oscars? Maybe the same guy winning. J.K. Simmons has swept his way through the awards season on the coattails of his now infamous character of Fletcher, the abusive jazz director that demands excellence and a commitment to honoring the greats. There's…
We have an interesting situation in the category for Best Cinematography. The last five winners were Life of Pi, Hugo, Gravity, Avatar, and Inception. So, the easy prediction is for the visual effects driven film. However, we don't have one this year. Instead there's the single-take Birdman, black and white Ida, symmetrical The Grand Budapest Hotel, period drama Mr. Turner, and Roger Deakins' Unbroken. The easy…
A few things happened this year to make Best Original Score, my usual favorite category, the thorn in my side. First, the academy disqualified the scores of Birdman and Whiplash because the former wasn't prewritten for the film and the latter because there wasn't "enough" score. That already angered me enough, but when they egregiously snubbed Gone Girl, I was furious.…
With the expansion of the Best Picture category to ten nominees/whatever they're doing with this sliding scale, Best Visual Effects has become one of the easier categories to predict at the Oscars. The winner tends to be whichever nominee is also nominated in Best Picture. Take Gravity, Hugo, Life of Pi, and Inception as examples from recent years. However,…
I don't like changing my predictions too close to Oscar night. It tends to lead to unnecessary second guessing and almost always leads to no good. However, this year it looks like I'm going to be changing back and forth all the way up to Oscar night. This year is like no other for the…
Best Actress is an open and shut category. Julianne Moore (Still Alice) was the early frontrunner, even when it was for a different film. Either way, whether she was in the running for Still Alice or A Map to the Stars, it looked like she would finally win her Oscar. She has everything: a pure Oscar bait role, a performance…
The Oscar for Best Animated Feature is usually won in a walk. Frozen, Up, Toy Story 3 were all the frontrunners from close to the beginning of Oscar season and pulled it out all the way to the end. The only year in recent memory that the race was unclear was in 2012 when Brave…
Every year since 2009 when Monique won for Precious, the winner of the race for Best Supporting Actress has pretty much swept every single award along the way and struck a hatred for her into our hearts. Don't believe me? Look at Anne (with an E) Hathaway and Melissa "Take out my own FYC ad"…
