Oscar Picks 2016

It's Oscar weekend, my favorite holiday of the year! And for once, my favorite movie of the year (Mad Max: Fury Road) is nominated in a bunch of categories, including Best Picture. Mad Max may, in fact, be my favorite movie of the past five years or so. Perhaps the past decade. It is amazing on all levels and if I had my way, it would win all the Oscars including Best Picture and a write-in Best Actress for Charlize Theron.

But there's a big gap between what I want to win and what I think will win. Here are my best guesses as to how the hardware will be distributed:

Best Picture: The Revenant
Best Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Best Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio
Best Actress: Brie Larson
Best Supporting Actor: Sylvester Stallone
Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander
Best Original Screenplay: Spotlight
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Big Short
Best Film Editing: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Cinematography: The Revenant
Best Score: The Hateful Eight
Best Song: "Til It Happens to You" from The Hunting Ground
Best Art Direction: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Costumes: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Makeup: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Visual Effects: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Best Sound: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Sound Effects Editing: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Animated Feature: Inside Out
Best Documentary Feature: Amy

You'll notice that while I'm picking The Revenant for Best Picture, I'm picking Mad Max to take home the most Oscars. Mad Max was, objectively, the best looking, best sounding movie of the year. I'll be thrilled if it wins more, but I predict it will take at least six Oscars.

There was a lot of buzz for Spotlight and The Big Short in the Best Picture race, but I think The Revenant will take it in the end and the others will take the screenplay awards. Also, it looks like Inarritu is poised to become the third person in Oscar history to win back to back directing Oscars. The lead acting categories are locks and Vikander is a strong favorite for Supporting Actress, but Stallone is in a tough race. His win (for a role he's played in seven movies) could be seen as a defacto lifetime achievement award, but many may feel that that's a lifetime of bad action movies and cast their votes elsewhere.

The category I'm most anticipating is Best Score, where the legendary Ennio Morricone is poised to win his first competitive Oscar in a lifetime of creating memorable music. This will be the best-deserved Oscar of the night and I'll be very bitter if he doesn't receive a standing ovation. In other music news, I predict that Lady Gaga will be halfway to an EGOT by the end of the ceremony.

As usual, I don't pick the short films and this year I'm not comfortable taking a guess in the Foreign Language category. I will take a shot at Animated Feature (Pixar is usually a safe bet) and Documentary Feature.

The Oscars are on Sunday night on ABC with Chris Rock hosting - it should be a good time. I'll post the winners and my correct picks.

 

Best Director

The nominees for Best Director are James Cameron (Avatar), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Lee Daniels (Precious), and Jason Reitman (Up In the Air).  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we have the fourth woman and the second African-American Best Director nominees and the first ever divorced couple (Cameron and Bigelow) up for Best Director.  That may be a first in any category, but I'm too lazy to research it.

Here's my take: Up In the Air and Inglourious Basterds were great, stylish films and are the unmistakably unique products of their directors, but their strength lies more in their screenplays.  Daniels is the least-experienced director, though he shows a creative narrative skill.  Really, though, it's going to come down to Cameron and Bigelow.  On one side is a big technical production involving an army of actors, computer animators, and computer power and on the other is a relatively smaller, though more intense, action film that cuts to the core of a handful of characters.  Let's face a fact here: Avatar is not Titanic.  It may be the new highest-grossing movie ever, but I don't think Avatar has the same deep cultural impact and fervent support as Cameron's previous Oscar juggernaut.  It's sure to take a handful of technical awards, but I believe that the Academy will make some history and recognize The Hurt Locker for its direction.  Bigelow has already won nearly every critics' award and the all-important Directors' Guild award, making her the favorite for the Best Director Oscar.

Best Director

Statistically, the Best Director award goes to the same film that gets Best Picture about 85% of the time and is usually a good indicator for choosing a winner. Looking at the last ten years, though, that statistic drops to about 50%, making this method a crap shoot. Complicating things slightly, the five Best Director nominees line up perfectly with the Best Picture contenders this year, meaning that no one can be easily eliminated.

The next step to choosing a Best Director is to look at the total number of nominations for each film. David Fincher's Benjamin Button leads with 13 (two of which are for acting, which bodes well), followed by Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire with 10. This makes these two movies the major contenders for Best Picture and, therefore, Best Director.

I'm going to give my pick to Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire. While Benjamin Button was more classically pristine and will do well in the artistic and technical categories, Slumdog showed off Boyle's uniquely kinetic style. Danny Boyle for the win.

Best Director

The Best Director race is a tricky one this year. Let's start by weeding out the least likely candidates. Juno's director, Jason Reitman, is the youngest of the five and is nominated for his second feature and, though he is a second-generation director, hasn't earned the standing that all the other nominees enjoy. Next is Michael Clayton's Tony Gilroy - a more established prescence, if not a household name. The real accomplishment of his movie is the writing and acting and I think his chances are slim for Best Director. Next is the spoiler - Julian Schnabel, for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. His is the only movie here not also nominated for Best Picture, but many critics agree that his direction stands out so much that he may win despite a relative lack of nominations backing him up. Conversely, the Cohen Brothers and P.T. Anderson have received nominations across the board for No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, respectively. Their high-nomination count makes their movies the front runners and therefore, puts them in the lead for Best Director. It's a tough call, but I'm going to pick the Cohens. They are seen as very prolific, artistic-minded directors and are the "elder statesmen" among their competition. Voters often reward not just the nominated movie, but the body of work that backs it up and I think that will be the case this year. By the way, if they win, this will be the second time that the Best Director award goes to two directors for the same film. The only other time was in 1961 when Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins shared the award for West Side Story.