Jeremy Beck

During my senior year of high school, my friends and I played Madden together after school. It was more fun than it sounds, if just as dorky. We adopted the Cleveland Browns as our franchise, only we created versions of ourselves and placed those avatars into the game, resulting in a freakishly talented roster that routinely rolled over teams by 50-plus points. (My particular avatar was a wide receiver in the Ed McCaffrey mold who won the MVP after racking up roughly 200 catches for 5,000 yards and 40 touchdowns.) The Browns hadn’t been this relevant since the halcyon days of Jim Brown and Milt Plum. It reached the point where we even used Madden‘s ingenious feature that allowed you to compete against teams from the past, slaughtering juggernauts like Bill Walsh’s West-Coast 49ers and Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain. We were the Dream Team of Madden folklore.

What does all of this have to do with this year’s Best Actor race? Well, the competition this year is so loaded that the category is basically the Oscars’ version of my old unstoppable, self-created team from Madden. Four of the five nominees deliver downright superlative performances (the fifth isn’t half-bad), while at least a half-dozen contenders who failed to crack the ballot are just as deserving. If you plugged 2013’s Best Actor field into the Academy equivalent of Madden and let it face off against Oscar categories of yesteryear, this year’s quintet would jump out to a 35-0 first quarter lead before the computer “accidentally” reset the game due to unexplained system failure. If there’s ever a category that could hope to justify the indefensible switch from “And the winner is” to “And the Oscar goes to”, it’s this one. Read More

NOMINEES
Amy Adams—American Hustle
Cate Blanchett—Blue Jasmine
Sandra Bullock—Gravity
Judi Dench—Philomena
Meryl Streep—August: Osage County

WILL WIN
Blanchett was supposed to take this in a walkover of “Anne Hathaway in Les Misérables” proportions. But then, Dylan Farrow, whom Woody Allen adopted as his daughter when he was married to Mia Farrow in the 1980s, penned an open letter accusing Allen of sexually assaulting her in 1992, when she was seven years old. Allen responded, flatly denying the allegations. Read More

The 86th Academy Awards are a week away, and the Manifesto still needs to analyze the big four categories of Best Actor, Actress, Director, and Picture. Before that, however, we need to weed through the remaining races that we’ve yet to cover. These may not be the sexiest categories, but the winners get a statuette all the same, and the Manifesto prides itself on completeness.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

NOMINEES
The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Ernest & Celestine
Frozen
The Wind Rises Read More

I typically analyze this category early in my Oscar predictions, but the race is so uncertain this year that I wanted to wait until after the BAFTAs so I had much information as possible. Now, we’re nine days away from the telecast, and I’m still clueless. Typical.

NOMINEES
Sally Hawkins—Blue Jasmine
Jennifer Lawrence—American Hustle
Lupita Nyong’o—12 Years a Slave
Julia Roberts—August: Osage County
June Squibb—Nebraska Read More

For such a critically and commercially successful film, Gravity has become weirdly polarizing. One camp of viewers seems to have found it technically stunning but narratively lacking, while the other camp was completely seduced by its marriage of jaw-dropping craftsmanship and intimate storytelling. Yet as much discussion as Gravity has generated, few people seem to actively dislike it; those denigrating it tend to frame their feedback as less absolute (“It was a bad movie”) than relative (“It was a good movie, but …”). That’s because, ignoring the physicists carping about the film’s alleged lack of aeronautical realism, audiences seem to have reached consensus that the technical aspects of Alfonso Cuarón’s space thriller are objectively astonishing. People may have quibbled with Gravity‘s story, but there’s no disputing its skill. Or, to cast the debate in the somewhat archaic language of cinematic snobbery: Not everyone necessarily thinks Gravity is a good film, but virtually everyone agrees that it’s a good movie.

And this makes its Oscar candidacy absolutely fascinating. The Academy Awards have never been shy about honoring technically superlative features that achieved box-office stardom; Star Wars won six Oscars, while Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, The Matrix, and Inception all won four. Hell, even Avatar and The Bourne Ultimatum—which is about as unpretentious as mainstream movies get—took home three Oscars apiece. But rarely do such smash hits double as high art, and while those seven movies combined for 28 Oscars, exactly zero came in major categories (i.e., Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, or any of the acting fields). So, although the Academy is more than happy to invite fantastical blockbusters to its party, it generally keeps them at the kids’ table. Read More