Predictions Friday – Golden Globes Edition and How About Them BAFTAS?

A few people have asked me why I changed my Golden Globe predictions at Gold Derby from The Big Short, the film I’m predicting to possibly win Best Picture at the Oscars (give or take a Spotlight) to The Martian. I may change it again before the day is out. Here’s what I know from researching the Golden Globes in the musical/comedy category.

They like to spread the wealth. Last year’s Birdman won screenplay where Grand Budapest won picture. Both were nominated for Picture, Director and Screenplay.
It helps to have all three key nominations. Neither The Martian nor The Big Short do. The Martian is likely to win either Picture or Director, but not both. The Big Short is most likely winning Picture or Screenplay but it would be rare for it to win both, especially in a competitive year like this one. I think the last time a film won both was Sideways in 2004 and that film had already swept the critics awards. Sideways won Picture, Director and Screenplay, something neither The Big Short nor The Martian can do.
Getting a directing nomination from the comedy category already isn’t easy — getting a win there, almost impossible. The last time it happened was Robert Altman for Gosford Park (not a comedy but put in the category). Can Ridley pull off an Altman? He probably can, given that he’s Ridley Scott. I’m betting instead that George Miller or Tom McCarthy might take Director — and that is the reason I’m settling on The Martian for Best Picture. It is probably winning a major award, and in the end it might only take Best Actor. Nebraska had Picture, Director, Screenplay and Actor nominations and didn’t win any of them.
Most likely a director from the drama category will win — but if Sir Ridley won you know no one would be happier than I would — it could be Todd Haynes, Carol leads (but no screenplay nomination). It could be Spotlight’s Tom McCarthy, but Spotlight is probably winning picture, could win Director. George Miller’s dazzling work in Mad Max: Fury Road might earn him the win, even though Mad Max doesn’t have a screenplay nomination. The only piece of advice I would give is, if you’re predicting Sir Ridley, it’s probably better to predict The Big Short for Picture (and something else for screenplay, like Spotlight).
In the end, I’m figuring they will like The Martian better than The Big Short — the same way they did with Grand Budapest vs. Birdman last year. I could be wrong but The Big Short is a film that will motivate Americans more than any other group — perhaps not the Hollywood Foreign Press. The Martian is an international movie with actors from all over the world in it.

So there you go. My best case for my predictions. I think I’m going to go with the following:

Picture – Spotlight
Director – George Miller, Mad Max (alt. Ridley Scott or Todd Haynes)
Picture, Comedy – The Martian
Screenplay – The Big Short (alt. Spotlight)
Actor, Drama – Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Actor, Musical/Comedy – Matt Damon, The Martian (but I might change it to Christian Bale)
Actress, Drama – Brie Larson, Room (alt. Rooney Mara, Carol)
Actress, Musical/Comedy – Amy Schumer, Trainwreck
Supporting Actress – Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina
Supporting Actor – Sylvester Stallone, Creed (alt. Idris Elba, Beasts of No Nation)
Animated- Inside Out
Score – Carol
Song – One Kind of Love

A word of warning: while I can sometimes do well predicting nominations, I am not as good at predicting winners. I tend to rely on stats rather than buzz and, thus — in a year when so many stats are out the window — I have less certainty about how this will all shake out. These are my best guesses is all. If you’re betting money, go with someone else at Gold Derby.

Now, onward to the Oscars and what the BAFTAs mean for them.

The BAFTAs gave a very nice boost to Todd Haynes’ Carol and Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. They also confirmed that The Big Short continues to be placed highly in terms of its favorability to win, earning the requisite Picture, Director and Screenplay nominations. Spotlight missing out on director is probably not a good sign unless we’re looking at a Driving Miss Daisy type of winner where the director’s prominence won’t matter. This is the damnedest year in all ways where essentially, as Dave Karger told me on Twitter, everybody is “flying blind.”

One interesting thing to note about the BAFTAS is their supporting actor category, which looks like this:

BENICIO DEL TORO Sicario
CHRISTIAN BALE The Big Short
IDRIS ELBA Beasts of No Nation
MARK RUFFALO Spotlight
MARK RYLANCE Bridge of Spies

Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo continue to split the Spotlight votes but finally Ruffalo made it onto a list. These five look like they could form the consensus at the Oscars, too. The big bummer: there would be no seat at the table for Sylvester Stallone for Creed. I don’t think that’s a British thing, though it might be an Oscar thing. That’s a toss-up right now and I wish it weren’t. Nothing would make me happier and would warm my rotten and cold heart more than a Sly nom. Not to mention Paul Dano, who might squeak in at the last minute too.

Which contenders might the BAFTAs have pushed through, as they sometimes can? Well for one thing they’ve shown us, for the first time in an industry-wide group, that Bridge of Spies is really quite strong. Their love for Carol might be the tipping point that gets that film into the Oscar race, though if there was more time for these nominations to “bake” it would help a lot more. Still, that Carol did as well among the British voters bodes well for the film overall, since so many BAFTA voters get Oscar ballots too, no matter if Carol hit with the PGA or not.

Remember, the BAFTAs can add to clout, but they can’t really take away.

In terms of Best Picture, the correlation of their Best Director category matters slightly more than even their Best Picture category, as Martin Scorsese won for The Departed even when his film wasn’t BAFTA nominated for Picture.

The BAFTAS, it’s worth remembering, flipped their voting practices back in 2012. Before that, every voter participated in choosing all the nominees in a complex three-tier nomination process that included an intermediate “long-list” stage. Contenders who made it to Stage 2 got a special asterisk assigned to that honor if members from their branch had selected them. In stage 3, branch members in “below-the-line” categories chose the winners. Now though, they do it much more like the Academy does it, minus the Oscars’ preferential ballot — and the BAFTA have eliminated that intermediate long-list phase. The entire membership still vote for Best Picture and the acting categories.

Complicating matters further, the BAFTA didn’t push their date to come before the Oscars until around 2001. Before that, their nominations and awards happened after the Oscars did — as much as a month later. Thus, at the end of the day, nothing before 2001 can count in terms of history and since they changed their voting process in 2012, nothing before that really corresponds either. Take it all for what it’s worth.

So, going by 2012-2014 patterns, which isn’t much to go on at all, a film needs Picture, Director and Screenplay nominations from the BAFTA to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Going by this morning’s nominations, that leaves us with:

The Big Short
Carol
Bridge of Spies

Those are the only three that got BAFTA nominations in all three categories. And again, we’re only talking about 2012 onward, and that is no time at all to build a stat. Most of my “colleagues” do not believe in stats — they say they are meaningless. I track them because they help me pretend I have some working knowledge of something akin to a trend or precedent, in order to apply rough formulas to a shifting quantity that can’t be definitively measured nor predicted.

None of the films this year — because it is such a wide open year, with so many outstanding options — have checked off of the boxes.

Onward to current predictions. The big question for Best Picture is which film, if any, will take that last surprise slot — the #9th, in some cases, like Selma did last year (#8), or Philomena did, or Amour did. Those films didn’t show up on the Producers Guild list but did turn up on the Oscar voters’ ballots. Given Carol’s strong showing at the BAFTAs, I’m going to wager that it gets in, even without the PGA nod.

Predictions as of today.

Best Picture

The Big Short
Spotlight
The Martian
Bridge of Spies
The Revenant
Mad Max: Fury Road
Straight Outta Compton
Brooklyn
Carol
Sicario
Room
The Force Awakens
Beasts of No Nation
Creed
Trumbo

Best Actor

Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Bryan Cranston, Trumbo
Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl
Matt Damon, The Martian
Johnny Depp, Black Mass

Best Actress

Brie Larson, Room
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn
Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
Cate Blanchett, Carol
Jennifer Lawrence, Joy

Supporting Actor

Idris Elba, Beasts of No Nation
Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
Christian Bale, The Big Short
Benicio Del Toro, Sicario
Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight
or Sylvester Stallone, Creed, or Michael Keaton, Spotlight (too competitive for both to get in) or Michael Shannon, 99 Homes OR Jacob Tremblay, Room