Oscars Nomination Prediction Results

This year’s Oscar nominations were pretty good, except for the ones that were terrible. Or maybe it’s the other way around. As is always the case, it’s hard for me to get too fired up about the Academy’s selections, even if I inevitably feel a twinge of disappointment when one of my favorite films gets ignored (fare thee well, Challengers) or a rush of euphoria when another gets recognized (Coralie Fargeat, allez!). That’s how this is supposed to work: The snubs omissions go hand in hand with the surprises, resulting in an overall slate that’s flawed, messy, and interesting.

So while acknowledging that the Oscars remain perfectly imperfect, let’s run through the nominees in each of the 14 feature categories that I previously predicted (quite poorly, in some cases), along with some quickie analysis of where things currently stand: Read More

The Oscars are a whipping boy. Despite their ostensible function of celebrating the year’s best movies, their real value lies in what they get wrong—the so-called “snubs,” the head-scratching inclusions, the rhetorical shrieks of “How did they choose him there but not her there??” We like following them because we like kvetching about them.

To that end, the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards did their job in both senses of the phrase. Sure, there were the usual infuriating exclusions (nothing for Asteroid City?!) and puzzling replacements (that sound you just heard was every boomer trying to figure out their Netflix login in order to watch Nyad), plus one genuine shocker (we’ll get to that). But otherwise—and as is usually the case—most of the nominations were, well, pretty good. Sure, no category perfectly aligned with my personal dream ballots (all of which shall be revealed at a later date!), but it’s unrealistic to demand perfection from the Oscars. Besides, if they got everything right, they would have no reason to exist. Read More

Hey, the Oscars just announced their nominations for the 95th Academy Awards! They were pretty good, except for the ones that were terrible. If you’re a member of the unfortunate class of cinephile who ritualistically follows such matters, you have by now performed the standard series of compulsory reactions: celebrating the precious few overlaps between your own ballot and the Academy’s, bemoaning the collective’s egregious failings of judgment (have I gotten over The LEGO Movie missing in Best Animated Feature in 2014? Reader, I have not), and frantically updating your mental list of favorites to win Best Picture.

In other words, this year was business as usual: a few welcome inclusions, several more head-scratching omissions, and the typical plethora of “Ah well that was inevitable” selections. But for those of you with social lives who are less enmeshed in Academy arcana, let’s quickly run the various categories and how they matched (or didn’t) with my own predictions: Read More

When it comes to this year’s Oscars, we can agree to disagree. Or maybe we can disagree about what we agree on. From my particular vantage on Film Twitter, it was hard to tell whether this year’s slate of nominations constituted a triumph or a travesty. Did the Academy make some brave and unexpected choices? Or were its curveballs simply, to quote a certain aesthete, a sly declaration of new classic status slipped into a list of old safe ones?

As is ever the case, it’s hard to get too excited about this year’s Oscar nominees, but it’s also silly to be too disappointed by them. By and large, the Academy highlighted some pretty good movies and artisans, even if their picks rarely aligned with my own. The day our respective selections do match perfectly will be cause for trepidation rather than celebration. After all, what am I without my own weird, idiosyncratic, inimitable taste? Read More

Yesterday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their nominations for the 93rd Oscars. The list was met with the usual cacophony of bitterness, gratitude, and exasperation. The selections were all terrible, except for the ones that weren’t; the omissions were egregious, except for those who were justly excluded.

Same as it ever was. It remains to be seen how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will affect the actual telecast of this year’s Oscars (scheduled for April 25). And of course, the disease’s devastating yearlong spread carried significant consequences for the movie industry; the trickle-down effects surely included how voters perceived the various contending films (or how many they even watched). But for one day, at least, normalcy was restored in our collective outcries and appreciations.

Is this a sign of a return to the Before Times, or an isolated blip amid a continuing shift in the industry? We’ll find out. In the meantime, here’s some quickie analysis of our predictions in 13 major categories, and where the respective races currently stand. Read More