Oscar Predictions Friday: Lost in Space

The Oscar pundits are kind of like preachers in the old world standing on our pulpits and promising you we can hear the word of god and if you’ll just follow us we’ll lead you to the promised land. ‘Don’t listen to that person over there because they’re crazy. Listen to me because I have the power to hear God speak. He sends me messages from on high. Follow me! I will lead you to the promised land.’

Okay, so maybe it isn’t quite that dramatic but you get the idea. The truth is that nobody knows anything. We all know that we don’t know anything. We have voices whispering in our ears from strategists and publicists who need to sink those nominations because their bread and butter relies on it. We have fans who mobilize and become active members of the flock in hopes of seeing their own mini god rewarded with Oscar’s attention. We have various markers we count on – box office, reviews, that elusive “buzz” that may or may not exist. But mostly, we have experience. Or not.

Some of us have more experience than others. Some of us have been doing this as long as their own daughter has been alive (17 years, cough cough, kill me now). Even given that, some of us were born with vaginas and therefore aren’t to be trusted with something as serious as Oscar prognostication and thus get lectured on Twitter about the Oscar race that we already know better than we know ourselves. Having experience and knowing the Oscar race usually means one thing and one thing only: the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. Taking a year like last when none of us – not even those who were “soft” on Boyhood were predicting Birdman. Why not? Because we underestimated how Hollywood loves itself. We also didn’t figure they would award a film that weird, that dark, that divisive.

What does divisive really mean, though? It means you go to Rotten Tomatoes and look at the negative review number. Who cares about the positive number. You want to know how much people HATE your movie because the only way you get a rotten tomato is if you hated the movie. If you were following along last year, you’d know that we knew the race was down to two movies – Birdman and Boyhood, or Boyman. We just never thought it would tip Birdman’s way. The reason being, many of us couldn’t have imagined, in a million years, that the film industry would not reward a film that took 12 years to complete. In the meantime, though, a weird kind of backlash emerged. Even the BAFTA gave Boyhood their top prize but by the time the film reached the last lap, Oscar voters were annoyed. They knew they were SUPPOSED to vote for Boyhood but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, not when this other movie was about their collective plight to beat back futility and superhero movies.

They were saying things like “the only good thing about Boyhood was watching the kid age.” Before long, Boyhood – which barely got made with a jar of pennies and nickels was the MEAN OLD FRONTRUNNER preventing them from voting for the movie THEY liked. And sure, Birdman was a standout. It was hard to choose Boyhood over a film that dynamic, especially by the end. So yeah, that happened.

Last year’s Best Picture win proved that the impossible can be possible under the right circumstances. Which brings us to this year. There is already a lot of chatter around the movies people will think will be the favorites of the industry. What does the industry mean? It means a lot of fucking people voting. We’re talking thousands.

SAG voters are 120,000
DGA voters are 16,000
PGA voters are 6,000
Oscar voters are 6,000

Pundits predictions are divided into three groups
— films they genuinely believe will get in
— films they hope get in and can’t give up on (no matter how much they claim to be unbiased)
— films they feel some obligation to keep alive for whatever reason.

The end result is that they get put on a list somewhere, a list people read to see what the race is shaping up to look like.

At this stage of the game, though, there is no THERE there. We can rely only on what we think might happen. Pundits in my field will now have to take the information given to them about Steve Jobs – which was a smash hit out of Telluride, a surefire Oscar contender with everything going for it – is now potentially not in the race anymore all because of its box office crash. It’s struggling along to make back its budget and profit, which I think it will do, but the perception is what will damage it with industry voters, or so the thinking goes. The problem isn’t that it didn’t make money – it’s that they opened it big too soon, thinking it would be a hit.

All the same, I personally am not going to throw in the towel quite yet on Steve Jobs because I think the actors are still going to go bananas for it – it is actor-writer driven, monologue driven, even if it will be a love it/hate it movie. Its prominence in the race has dropped down a few notches perhaps but it is premature to write it off this early — I think.

The Martian just keeps getting stronger as word of mouth drives its box office sky high. It’s the Oscar contender no one saw coming and doesn’t really fit in the paradigm of recent winners because it showed in Toronto, not Telluride. The Martian doesn’t need pundits to drive its success. It doesn’t need publicity even. It has everything already – but top of the list is word of mouth.

The Martian is that good movie out of the studios people are always waiting for – one that appeals to everyone, not just to insular critics and industry insiders. It crosses over to the people “out there” and helps to rebuild the long forgotten bridge between Hollywood, the Oscars and the people they supposedly make movies for. The best thing it has going for it though? Pure love. People love it. The only other movies people seem to LOVE like that are Brooklyn and Room.

The rise of The Martian is shaking up the race in unpredictable ways, starting with Fox’s other two movies — Joy and The Revenant. Fox Searchlight does very well (two back to back Best Picture wins) but Big Fox, or 20th Century Fox has one or two every so often, like Life of Pi and Avatar.

20th Century Fox hasn’t had three Best Picture nominees since 1979, and certainly not since the creation of Fox Searchlight. In 1979, the films that they had in the race were All That Jazz, Breaking Away and Norma Rae – small movies that would probably be Fox Searchlight movies today. So to have three movies from Fox is unheard of in the modern era. When you add to that Universal’s inclusion with either Steve Jobs or Straight Outta Compton, and Warner Bros. in with maybe Black Mass or Creed – it’s looking a lot like the old studio days before the indie takeover, ain’t it?

Either way, The Martian is the best thing to ever happen to Spotlight, which is following the trajectory of other under the radar Best Picture winners no one sees coming. After Telluride, people like me are always looking for what’s coming next instead of what’s already here. Thus, Spotlight is in the same place Argo and Birdman were. It’s just quietly sitting in the background waiting for people to discover it and vote for it. The problem with Spotlight is that it’s distributed by an outsider studio (Open Road Films) and we know how our Oscar voters are when it comes to outsiders winning Best Picture. Also, it’s a tad subdued as a winner. It’s a perfect film, brilliant in every way, but it’s subdued. It isn’t the kind of film thousands will necessarily rally behind.

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s hard to make that call at the moment. Still, it’s interesting to see the wide variety of prediction narratives floating around various websites. For instance, Gold Derby just sent out a blast that said Michael Keaton was on track not to be nominated for supporting for Spotlight but to win. This is driven by last year’s Best Actor loss he suffered. They are thinking voters will want to reward Keaton now because they didn’t last year. And that’s certainly one way to look at it. The problem – Mark Ruffalo is the standout in Spotlight, among many other actors. Still, that kind of thinking often proves true – so perhaps Keaton will win.

Either way, it’s a narrative that’s driving the backroom conversation that may or may not trickle down with voters. The one thing none of us seems willing to accept is that it is still a full month before we will really know where the race is headed, maybe even longer than that.

Full predictions

Best Picture

Best Director

Best Actress

Supporting Actress

Adapted screenplay

Original screenplay

Random predictions

Best animated feature film of the year
1. Inside Out
2. Anomalisa
3. The Peanuts Movie
4. The Good Dinosaur
5. Minions

Achievement in cinematography
1. The Revenant
2. Carol
3. In the Heart of the Sea
4. Bridge of Spies
5. The Martian

Achievement in costume design
1. Carol
2. Suffragette
3. Brooklyn
4. The Danish Girl
5. Bridge of Spies

Best documentary feature
1. He Named Me Malala (Davis Guggenheim)
2. Going Clear (Alex Gibney)
3. What Happened, Miss Simone? (Liz Garbus)
4. The Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson)
5. Amy (Asif Kapadia)

Fringe dwellers: Winter on Fire, The Armor of Light, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Meru, Prophet’s Prey, The Wolfpack

Achievement in film editing
1. The Revenant
2. Spotlight
3. Joy
4. The Martian
5. Bridge of Spies

Best foreign language film of the year
Son of Saul (Hungary)
The Assassin (Taiwan)
The Second Mother (Brazil)
Mustang (France)
Labyrinth of Lies (Germany

Achievement in production design
Carol
The Revenant
Bridge of Spies
The Martian
Star Wars

Achievement in sound editing
The Revenant
Jurassic World
Mad Max: Fury Road
Inside Out
Star Wars

Achievement in sound mixing
Star Wars
Jurassic World
Mad Max: Fury Road
Son of Saul
The Hateful Eight

Achievement in visual effects
Mad Max: Fury Road
Star Wars
Everest
Jurassic World*
In the Heart of the Sea