2015 is providing us with an odd awards season because there seem to be so many different narratives with no clear leaders in any aspect of the Oscar race. We are one week away from any serious voting or awards announcement and each new honor bestowed will change the direction of the race. Who could have predicted, for instance, that last year the critics would have turned the Best Actress fifth slot nomination into a backroom war between Jennifer Aniston (punished for having produced a film that would give her a role to really showcase her acting ability) and Marion Cotillard, deemed the queen of actresses by the critics, a martyr for the cause of The Immigrant’s lack of marketing. Cotillard was suddenly the only actress who mattered and Aniston was thrown under the bus. No one could have seen that coming because it was an organic mutation of a season.
We don’t yet know what the mutations of this season might be, like which actor or film will get thrown under the bus either for spending too much money on the campaign or for chasing Oscar.
Here is a quick example of marketing psychology. Liberal consumers, especially younger ones, are some of the most easily manipulated, especially since they are driven by ideas driven by social media. The recent “controversy” over holiday Starbucks cups of undecorated neutral red generated some talk that it was a war on Christmas, hence war on Christians. Suddenly, the backlash was so strong that it briefly became a bigger story to online warriors than anything else happening in the world. Starbucks cups were flaunted everywhere. Think pieces sprouted up. Our Facebook and Twitter timelines were littered with images of our friends holding Starbucks cups like a badge of honor. A marketing ploy or a real story? It’s hard to know. Either way, it worked to sell Starbucks because suddenly people felt valiant buying Starbucks. No more worrying about the environment dealing with all of those pesky cups and lids and stirrers. No more worrying about where all of that dairy product comes from. Buying it makes you feel good and that’s all that matters.
The Oscars work the same way. Voters have to feel good about voting. That means a perceived frontrunner – even if it’s a tiny indie like Boyhood – will almost always have a harder time than the perceived scrappy underdog for Best Picture. Aniston’s situation, for some strange reason, became everything that’s wrong with the Oscar race in one season. I’ve never seen one actress take it as hard as she did it because she was guilty of the crime of being successful. Plenty of actresses have been nominated and won for films voters didn’t like overall but whose performances were appreciated.
With the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics announcing early, like a week and a few days from now, and the SAG nominations and Golden Globe nominations right on their heels, we are just at the beginning of the race coming into focus for real. That means we have to predict what might happen, what could happen, and how those things might impact what eventually does happen. The race becomes one thing until the night of the Producers Guild Awards and then it becomes another. Once a film wins the PGA it’s mostly over. That doesn’t mean the acting races are set in stone.
Right now, we don’t have a frontrunner in any category because no big awards have yet been given out. Sometimes it’s decided early, like it was for Julianne Moore last year with Still Alice. She was poised for a win anyway but her publicity machine ensured she took that baby home. Aniston never had the chance to be an indie cred actress because she rose to fame with Friends and has never been able to get outside of it, even while working with smaller directors and trying to do good work beyond that. Not so with Julianne Moore. No one was ever going to get sick of her or resentful of her success.
Similarly, the Best Actor race is being pinned on a performance no one has yet seen – Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant. Take that performance out of it for a minute, though, and you have a completely wide open race where anything could happen. Given how much people love Creed, Sylvester Stallone has emerged the early Supporting Actor favorite all of a sudden, or Jacob Tremblay could upset. Best Supporting Actress might be a race between Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl and Rooney Mara for Carol, or the Academy (or SAG) could decide to consider them in the lead category – in which case they may not be nominated at all or else get nominated but have very little chance of winning. Take them out of the Supporting Actress race and things start to look really different. Jane Fonda has a shot then. As does Elizabeth Banks.
Neither Best Picture nor Director has been decided yet either and won’t be for a good long time yet. Might as well sit back and enjoy the wide openness of this race before it becomes a closed loop.
The contenders have been doing what’s required of them and more, putting themselves on the line to help their movies get recognition. They have been rubbing elbows with the HFPA, appearing at parties, posing for magazine covers, breezing in and breezing out without breaking a sweat. If they hate what they have to do, it doesn’t show.
The first crack at defining the year’s best will come from the critics mostly. Sure, the SAG and the Golden Globes will have their moment in the sun but in a way both have separated themselves from the Oscar race and have become singular events onto themselves. For instance, SAG could have a night in 2011 when Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and their film The Help won big. And then on Oscar Night, Spencer alone took home an Oscar. The Globes could give their top prize to Avatar and Jim Cameron while on Oscar Night, Avatar would go home with Cinematography, Visual Effects and Art Direction. Hey, that’s more than 2001: A Space Odyssey took home.
The biggest consensus building, however, will come from the critics – because they still are the ones to lend respectability. Their influence is becoming kind of odd, though, because more and more contenders are hiding their films from the reach and risk of early reviews to ensure they can get nominations before the majority of critics have even seen the films.
Film criticism has changed so dramatically it has actually become a box office liability for fledgling films that would ordinarily count on the critics to help them get by. The trend will probably result in fewer films being shown to so many people early on, unless they want to hazard a potential attack before the film has a chance to open. Rotten Tomatoes features hundreds of Joe Everyones weighing in with blog reviews – an odd shift away from authoritative voices that was recently given a major send up by Jesse Eisenberg in the New Yorker. Eisenberg speaks the truth about self-appointed film critics have become, the kind of unearned power they have to influence perceptions.
Either way, where awards are concerned, films that withhold their films from the critics usually do it because they have something to hide. And even though publicists can sometimes fly under the radar and get their movies in before they get killed by the critics (The Blind Side, American Sniper) it’s a gamble because, sooner or later, those movies will be seen and discussed.
Still, with The Revenant screenings scheduled to come just under the wire, it begs the question whether the SAG nominating committee will even get to see it. Many of the voters live in major cities and will thus be able to see many of the films. But for those who don’t, it’s important to have screeners at the ready. There are some schools of thought that are committed to the idea that screeners are everything when it comes to the Oscars. Kris Tapley dives into the SAG deadline in this piece.
Thing is, one of the ways distributors and Oscar campaigners send screeners now are via online invitations – completely private and secure links that voters are not allowed to share. I’m gonna wager that more and more movies will be seen this way, in the event of DVD screeners being unavailable due to time and cost constraints.
Here are the things that matter in a wide open race like this one.
- Buzz will count for a lot. Buzz can mean people are saying how great the film is (Spotlight) or it can mean someone is working the circuit so that they themselves have become the story. There can be fake buzz for a film that hasn’t even been seen yet, and real buzz that seems to come from nowhere that could never have been predicted (The Martian).
- Timing – Even if someone gets a SAG or Globe nomination, that doesn’t guarantee Oscar will follow. Late breakers could bump some of the sure things seen in the earlier part of the race.
- Chaos Theory – The pundits and the critics can dirupt a movie’s chances just by putting it in the frontrunner’s spot. Predicting a nominee too forcefully can sometimes turn voters against it. Figuring out which one that will be is the tricky part.
Best Picture
The most recent Gurus of Gold chart has these films on top:
Gold Derby has these:
There hasn’t been a major shift in the Best Picture race since last week, particularly. It still feels like it’s down to The Martin vs. Spotlight. That means big studio versus indie. Spotlight will likely be the critics choice, but if it isn’t then all the better for its prospects. The critics seem poised to award one of the following films as their top pick:
Spotlight
Carol
Brooklyn
Anomalisa
Son of Saul
Diary of a Teenage Girl
And whatever other movie crops up of the ones we haven’t yet seen, as the New York Film Critics did with Zero Dark Thirty and American Hustle.
The films that will probably do better with the broader industry at large might include:
The Martian
Bridge of Spies
Steve Jobs
Spotlight
Room
Brooklyn
Carol
The question marks are still:
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Danish Girl
Black Mass
The Big Short
Straight Outta Compton
Beasts of No Nation
Inside Out
Creed
The ones to come are:
The Revenant (screening Monday)
Joy
The Hateful Eight
In the Heart of the Sea
My own predictions as of today would be in terms of “sure bet” status:
Spotlight
The Martian
Bridge of Spies
Room
The Revenant
Brooklyn
Carol
Steve Jobs
Joy
The tenth slot, if there is one, is a doozy. It would open a place for The Hateful Eight, Inside Out, Concussion, The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road, Beasts of No Nation.
Best Actor is equally difficult to figure out. Right now I have:
- Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
- Johnny Depp, Black Mass
- Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
- Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl
- Ian McKellen, Mr. Holmes or Michael Caine, Youth
It’s an impossible category to call, with Will Smith for Concussion, Michael B. Jordan for Creed and Steve Carell for The Big Short pushing from the outside.
Best Actress
- Brie Larson, Room
- Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
- Saoirse Ronan,Brooklyn
- Cate Blanchett, Carol
- Charlotte Rampling 45 Years or Carey Mulligan, Suffragette
Best Supporting Actress
- Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
- Rooney Mara, Carol
- Elizabeth Banks, Love & Mercy
- Jane Fonda, Youth
- Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs or Jessica Chastain, The Martian or Jennifer Jason-Leigh, The Hateful Eight
Supporting Actor
- Sylvester Stallone, Creed
- Jacob Tremblay, Room
- Paul Dano, Love & Mercy
- Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
- Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight
Best Director
- Ridley Scott, The Martian
- Alejandro G. Inarritu, The Revenant
- Tom McCarthy, Spotlight
- Steven Spielberg, Bridge of Spies
- David O. Russell, Joy; or Todd Haynes, Carol; or John Crowley, Brooklyn; or Lenny Abrahamson, Room; or Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight; or Lazlo Nemes for Son of Saul
Adapted screenplay
1. Drew Godard, The Martian
2. Alejandro G. Inarritu, The Revenant
3. Aaron Sorkin, Steve Jobs
4. Charlie Kaufman, Anomalisa
5. Phyllis Nagy, Carol or Emma Donoghue, Room
6. Nick Hornby, Brooklyn
7. Cary Fukunaga, Beasts of No Nation
8. Adam McKay, Charles Randolph, The Big Short
9. Jez Butterworth, Mark Malouk, Black Mass
Original screenplay
1. Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, Spotlight
2. Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley, Inside Out
3. Matt Charman, the Coens, Bridge of Spies
4. Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight
5. David O. Russell, Joy
Best Animated Feature
1. Inside Out
2. Anomalisa
3. The Peanuts Movie
4. The Good Dinosaur
5. Minions
Achievement in Cinematography
1. The Revenant
2. Carol
3. Sicario
4. Bridge of Spies
5. Son of Saul
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) or Where To Invade Next (Michael Moore)
Fringe dwellers: Winter on Fire, The Armor of Light, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Meru, Prophet’s Prey, The Wolfpack
Achievement in Film Editing
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
2. The Revenant
3. Joy
4. The Martian
5. Bridge of Spies
6. Spotlight
Best Foreign Language Film
Son of Saul (Hungary)
Mustang (France)
The Assassin (Taiwan)
The Second Mother (Brazil)
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