Oscars Nomination Predictions

The Oscars are good because they’re bad. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences exclusively bestowed trophies on the best movies, actors, and artisans, they would instantly become irrelevant—because nobody would have anything to complain about. It is the job of this institution to be wrong, to frustrate and antagonize, to create grist for the online mill of campaigning and caterwauling. What other ceremony could inspire such crazed rhetoric, like people clamoring that Emma Stone’s win last year for Poor Things was illegitimate because it came at the expense of Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon? The internet feeds on outrage, and the Oscars foment fury with annual, reliable precision.

They also, as it happens, tend to nominate pretty good movies. My own ballots rarely overlap with those of the Academy, but that’s less a function of incompetence than excess; there are simply too many good options for everyone to agree on the same subset of five (or, in the case of Best Picture, 10). The Oscars don’t matter in the same way that MVP awards in sports don’t matter—the token recognition doesn’t change the underlying performance—but they nevertheless shine a light on pictures which mainstream audiences might otherwise ignore. For that reason alone, they’re worth paying attention to, if not obsessing over. Read More

Movie critics love telling people how little we care about the Oscars, which is why we spend every year rigorously predicting, analyzing, and castigating them. It is true, of course, that the blessing of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confers no special level of excellence upon the chosen films; it certainly doesn’t change personal opinions of them. But if the Oscars are meaningless, they are at least meaningless in a meaningful way. Even as the Academy has diversified its membership such that it’s no longer exclusively run by old white guys, the Oscars still function as a form of fossilizing—preserving in amber the tastes and trends of a particular cinematic epoch. They allow future generations of movie-lovers to look back and ask in puzzlement, “What the fuck were they thinking?”

There are worse questions to ask, and to have answered. And so, per tradition, we here at MovieManifesto now embark on our annual scrutiny of the Oscars—a ritual characterized not by scientific precision or sober reasoning, but by random guesswork and snotty resentment. It’s fun! Read More

The nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are set to be announced on Tuesday morning, an annual tradition that’s invariably met with a combination of fanatical nitpicking and performative indifference. It is fashionable, almost mandatory, for critics to express their disdain toward Hollywood’s annual self-congratulatory gala, and for good reason: The Oscars don’t matter. Or at least, they can’t change your attitudes about the specific movies you loved, hated, and argued about. They’re a collective approximation of individual tastes, which inherently makes them a fool’s errand.

And yet, the only thing worse than caring about the Oscars is ignoring them. This isn’t because the Academy somehow confers prestige upon their chosen selections—quite the opposite, as winning an Oscar often carries with it a vaguely negative connotation of middlebrow safeness—or even because its picks can influence the types of movies that awards-hungry studios are more (or less) likely to green-light in the future. It’s because they preserve in amber the industry’s extant preferences and expectations. It is always illuminating to look back and remember the Academy’s choices, whether you do so with fondness (“Hey, remember when The Departed won Best Picture?!”) or exasperation (“Ugh, remember when Green Book won Best Picture?”). Read More

Hey, the Oscars are back to normal this year, right? Well, sort of. Following last year’s ill-advised, pandemic-influenced decision to extend the 2020 eligibility window by two months, this year’s period is correspondingly shorter, spanning from March through December of 2021. Of course, release date is really just a state of mind for the Academy; how else to explain the qualifying run, that ubiquitous, noxious trend in which buzzy contenders—including Cyrano, Petite Maman, and The Worst Person in the World—receive invisible one-week December releases in New York and L.A. in order to be deemed “2021” films, even though the vast majority of American audiences can’t see them for months later?

It’s annoying, but release-schedule and eligibility-fudging shenanigans aside, the good news is that the compressed ten-month window hasn’t yielded a shortage of strong candidates. I’ll wait until next month before unveiling my official top 10 list, but despite the routine prophecies of the death of cinema, there were still plenty of good movies to watch in 2021. Now, whether that sustained quality will actually translate to this year’s nominations is anyone’s guess, though widening the inevitable gap between personal darlings and populist favorites is arguably part of the Academy’s function. Put differently: What’s the point of the Oscars if not to complain about them? Read More

Oh look, it’s time for another Oscars. Business as usual, right?

As I’ve written in the past, the upheaval that the film and entertainment industry has suffered at the hands of COVID-19 is perhaps one of the pandemic’s less significant calamities. But the turmoil that it sowed for the Oscars strikes me as self-inflicted. Last June, after surveying an uncertain cinematic landscape where theaters were closed and new releases were being continually postponed, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the eligibility window for this year’s Oscars—which typically covers films that came out during the prior calendar year—would be extended to February 2021, and that it was correspondingly delaying the ceremony itself until late April. (Nominations will finally be proclaimed on Monday.) The theory, I suppose, was to broaden the pool of potential nominees, as though flipping the datebook from December to January would magically herald the sudden arrival of high-quality pictures that were heretofore unavailable.

This was, of course, nonsense; 2020 was already a terrific year for cinema, and in widening the window, the Academy implicitly derided the fertile crop of existing releases. Beyond that, the decision carried the unfortunate consequence of further prolonging the interminable period colloquially known as Awards Season: the annual ritual of critics’ groups and governing bodies bestowing honors on various films and artists, culminating with the Oscars’ ultimate crowning of the best of the best. Hell, by the time 2020’s Best Picture is announced, campaigns for 2021 Oscar candidacy will practically be underway.

So be it. It’s still the Oscars, meaning it’s still relevant in terms of the historical record; if the Academy’s actual choices for the best movies of 2020 scarcely matter, that’s no different from any other year. With that in mind, per tradition, here are MovieManifesto’s predictions for the nominations in 13 major categories of the 93rd Academy Awards: Read More