AFI jury is very small – about 20 in all, which hardly reflects a broad consensus. But what it does reflect is generally what people out there will go for. They picked some great ones and they picked some terrible ones. Critics only barely mattered this year. This is essentially what the Oscar picture kind of looks like from the Scott Feinberg/Dave Karger/Kris Tapley world of Oscar punditry. If you want to do well on your office pools, you should follow them. Me, my heart gets involved and I have a hard time with what should get in versus what will get in. But, on the upside of that? Being raised from a girl to a woman in America means I’ve got lots of training in laying there and pretending to enjoy it. This year, my tastes reside somewhere between the critics and the Oscar-y people.
This is the list of judges – probably the smallest list of compiled voters we’ll see all season.
AFI JURY FOR MOTION PICTURES
Tom Pollock
Chair, AFI Jury for Motion Pictures
Producer
AFI Board of Trustees
Jeanine Basinger
Wesleyan University
AFI Board of Trustees
Bob Gazzale
American Film Institute
Mark Harris
Historian
Marshall Herskovitz
Producer/Director/Screenwriter
AFI Board of Trustees
Patty Jenkins
Director/Screenwriter
Lisa Kennedy
Denver Post
Kasi Lemmons
Director/Actor
Matthew Libatique
Cinematographer
Akira Mizuta Lippit
University of Southern California
Leonard Maltin
Historian
Claudia Puig
USA Today
Peter Travers
Rolling Stone Magazine