Oscars Nomination Predictions

Are you excited for this year’s Oscars? Neither am I. But I’m not depressed about them either. For all of the annual hand-wringing among critics about the disproportionate influence of the Academy Awards—the complaint that the industry focuses so much money and attention on a gala of glorified self-congratulation—it’s worth remembering that the Oscars tend to honor movies which are, for the most part, pretty good. You will not agree with everything that’s nominated, because you are an individual with your own specific tastes rather than a voting body susceptible to marketing, bias, and groupthink. But the lack of recognition for a performance that you loved—or, conversely, the highlighting of one that you simply can’t stand—hardly invalidates your opinion, nor does it signify the Academy’s collective stupidity.

If anything, personal divergence from the bloc’s choices is a good thing, given how the Oscars function as a flattener—a smoothing of esoteric preferences into agreed-upon safe picks. It will never happen, but if my own favorites of a given cinematic year ever precisely aligned with those of the Academy, I’d be worried that I’d lost my own taste—that my private thoughts had somehow become indistinguishable from the public will. That would be far more disturbing than being disappointed about some dubious selections for supporting actress or cinematography.

So by all means, complain about the Oscars; rage about snubs, fret about race, and long for greater surprise and imagination. Some of those grievances are surely valid. Just remember that the displeasure is part of the point.

Here are the Manifesto’s predictions for this year’s Oscar nominations in 13 major categories: Read More

Who’s going to host this year’s Oscars? Who cares? True, for some viewers, the Academy Awards are more about the pageantry—the glamour, the outfits, the sheer mass of hundreds of celebrities piling into a single auditorium—than the movies. But for me, to the extent the Oscars matter at all—and they do matter, probably more than we’d like to admit—it’s the way they function as a snapshot of film history. Sure, they’re a ceremony of self-congratulation, but they’re also a statement about the particular cinematic values that the Academy holds at this moment in time.

Does that mean that the Oscars function as some sort of objective arbiter of filmmaking quality? Of course not. But even if it’s silly to get too worked up about which movies win Oscars and which don’t—the upsets! the snubs!—the awards themselves are still worth analyzing and remembering. That’s why, each year, the Manifesto devotes some brief time to covering the Oscars. We’re beginning today with our predictions for the nominations, which will be announced tomorrow. We’ll follow that up with some quick reactions to those nominations on Tuesday, followed by some category-specific analysis in the coming weeks.

Let’s get to it:

BEST PICTURE
Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
If Beale Street Could Talk
Roma
A Star Is Born
Vice Read More

Here we go. Couple things to remember before we dive in to this year’s Oscar predictions. First: The Academy’s membership has expanded considerably over the past year, skewing younger and more diverse, so the stereotype of the typical Oscar voter—essentially, “Old white dude who loves fusty period pieces and doesn’t like to be challenged”—may no longer hold true, if it ever even did. Second, and far more importantly: Although the ceremony will take place in 2018, the show covers movies released in 2017, so whatever film wins Best Picture must be referred to as “Best Picture winner in 2017”. Do not test my patience on this. Read More

With the nominations for the 2016* Academy Awards being released tomorrow morning, it’s time for the Manifesto to unveil its official predictions. I’ve hit on a mediocre 80% of my predictions each of the last two years, so we’ll see if I can improve on that mark this year (I don’t have high hopes). Per usual, we’re only predicting nominations for 13 categories; we’ll have predictions for the winners in all 21 feature fields prior to the big show on February 26.

(* Although most websites refer to these as the 2017 Academy Awards, all of the movies were released in 2016, so I prefer that nomenclature.) Read More

With the 2015 Oscar nominations being announced in a matter of hours, the Manifesto is racing against the clock to finalize its predictions. Last year, we hit on a pedestrian 80% (55 of 69), so we’re hoping to top that figure this go-round. The good news is that I’ve actually seen most of the movies in contention this year, which will better inform my speculation. The bad news? I’ve seen most of the movies in contention, meaning I can’t trot out the usual “It’s not my fault, I haven’t seen it” excuse as a crutch. So it goes.

On to the predictions. Per usual, we’re predicting the eight major categories, plus five additional below-the-line fields that I consider to be of significant importance. We’ll be back on Friday with analysis of the nominations, with category-specific coverage leading up to the big show on February 28. Read More