The Critics Choice Awards will be announcing their film and television choices for 2015 tomorrow. Traditionally speaking, they are the most accurate in terms of matching up with Oscar. With roughly two hundred members or so, their tastes seem to line up, for the most part, with the industry. Since the Academy expanded their Best Picture slate to as many as 10 nominees, the BFCA has matched almost all of the Best Picture contenders, missing only one each year.
That doesn’t mean that such will be the case this year. In years past, the race has a much more solid consensus than this one does. We don’t know if there will be crossover or not because the race has so many different options for directions it might head in. Will the voters go for the independents, honoring films like Room, Brooklyn, Spotlight, Carol, Beasts of No Nation – or will they go big studio all the way and pick Straight Outta Compton, the Big Short, The Martian, etc.
Either way, at least one title from Oscar’s Best Picture list will be missing from the Critics Choice. Figuring out which film that will be is the trick.
2009
The Hurt Locker
Avatar
An Education
Inglourious Basterds
Invictus
Nine
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air
Missing: Distict 9, The Blind Side
2010:
The Social Network
127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The King’s Speech
The Town
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone
Missing: The Kids Are All Right
2011
The Artist
The Descendants
Drive
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse
Missing: None
2012
Argo
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
The Master
Moonrise Kingdom
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty
Missing: Amour
2013
12 Years a Slave
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Dallas Buyers Club
Gravity
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Nebraska
Saving Mr. Banks
The Wolf of Wall Street
Missing:Philomena
2014
Boyhood
Birdman
Gone Girl
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Nightcrawler
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Unbroken
Whiplash
Missing: American Sniper
At least one film on their Best Picture list tomorrow morning is likely not to make it over. In fact, maybe as many as three, like last year. Both Gone Girl and Nightcrawler made it to the Producers Guild but were killed when Oscar voters had to limit their scope to five slots for Best Picture nominations instead of ten, like the Producers Guild had. Films voters feel passionately about have the edge.
The other categories, especially Best Director, are more hit and miss. The Critics Choice might better reflect the Directors Guild than the 400 members in the Academy.
Your job, when the announcement comes out, will be to figure out which films will go, which won’t, and what movie might pop up on the Academy’s list that isn’t on the Critics Choice list.
We will have the nominees bright and early tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. PST.
