This coming Tuesday (January 23), the nominations for the 90th
annual Academy Awards will be announced.
Let me first say that the Oscars have changed quite a bit in the last
decade and a half when it comes to nomination and victory patterns. Through most of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s,
there were four Oscar absolutes: (1) The film with the most nominations won the
Best Picture Oscar; (2) The winner of the Directors’ Guild of America’s (DGA)
top award won the Best Director Oscar; (3) The Best Picture winner won the most
Oscars on Oscar Night; and (4) Best Picture and Best Director went together.
Lately, however, only the second absolute, the DGA winner
winning the Best Director Oscar, has remained true most years. In the last decade and a half, and especially
in the last six years, we’ve seen a string of Oscar Night upsets in which not
only has the film with the most nominations failed to win the Best Picture
Oscar, but the film winning the most Oscars on the big night has not won the
Best Picture Oscar either. And we seem
to be heading in that direction again this year as there is no clear favorite
to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Here is my look at where we stand in each major category,
along with my Oscar nomination predictions.
Best Picture
There can be anywhere from five to ten Best Picture nominees.
Yet only three prospective Best Picture
nominees seem likely to win at this point:
Lady
Bird, The Shape of Water and
Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
What makes picking an eventual winner from those three so difficult is
the unusual fact that every single one of these films has a major Best Picture
victory destroying strike against it.
In
the case of
Lady Bird, the most
consistent winner of all the possible Best Picture nominees, it’s the lack of a
Best Director Golden Globe Award nomination for Greta Gerwig.
*No film whose director was not nominated for
the Best Director Golden Globe Award has won the Best Picture Oscar since
The Sting in 1973.
In the case of
The Shape of Water, which is likely to receive the most Oscar
nominations of any movie, its Best Picture kiss of death may be its absence
from the list of Best Motion Picture Cast nominees in the Screen Actors’ Guild
award contest.
You have to go back to
the very first year of this SAG award for the last time a non-nominee,
Braveheart, went on to win the Best
Picture Oscar.
And only one film in the
last forty years,
Titanic in 1997,
has won the Best Picture Oscar despite not receiving a screenplay nomination.
The Writers’ Guild of America ruled
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
ineligible for its awards, but the film is still eligible for a screenplay
Oscar nomination. If Academy voters follow the WGA’s lead and leave
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
off the list of screenplay nominees, that film could be in serious trouble on
Oscar Night. However, just three years ago,
Birdman
was ruled ineligible for Writers’ Guild award consideration but still won big
at the Oscars.
[i]
As for the other contenders, the biggest Cinderella story
has been I, Tonya, which has done a
lot better this awards season than anyone could have expected with a surprise
Producers’ Guild nomination for the film and an out-of-left-field BAFTA Best
Actress nomination for star Margot Robbie, while perhaps the biggest
disappointment has been Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk,
a one-time Best Picture favorite that has yet to win any prize of significance
this awards season.
Here are my picks for Best Picture:
Call Me By Your Name
Dunkirk
Get Out
I, Tonya
Lady Bird
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards
Outside Ebbing, Missouri
My Best Director Picks:
Guillermo del Toro, The
Shape of Water
Greta Gerwig, Lady
Bird
Craig Gillespie, I
Tonya
Patty Jenkins, Wonder
Woman
Martin McDonagh, Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Wild Card: Luca Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name
Additional Comments: I think the unexpected strength of I, Tonya will carry Craig Gillespie to a
Best Director nomination, possibly at the expense of Dunkirk’s
Christopher Nolan, and I believe a lot of Academy members see an opportunity to
produce two female Best Director nominees in the same year for the first time
ever.
Best Actor
In this race, Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out is the closest equivalent to the Cinderella Story that is
Margot Robbie of I, Tonya. Kaluuya’s unexpected strength this awards
season has probably cost either Daniel Day-Lewis or Tom Hanks, both perennial
Oscar favorites, a nomination.
My Best Actor Picks:
Timothee Chalamet, Call
Me By Your Name (At age 22, Chalamet would be the youngest nominee this
category has seen in many years.)
James Franco, The
Disaster Artist
Tom Hanks, The Post
Daniel Kaluuya, Get
Out
Gary Oldman, The
Darkest Hour
Wild Card: Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
Best Actress
Because I, Tonya
and its producer-star Margot Robbie have done better than expected, two
frequently nominated actresses, Dame Judi Dench and Meryl Streep, are probably
competing against each other for one spot.
I think the Academy will nominate either one or the other, but not both.
My Best Actress Picks:
Sally Hawkins, The
Shape of Water
Frances McDormand, Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Margot Robbie, I,
Tonya
Saoirse Ronan, Lady
Bird
Meryl Streep, The Post
(Her record-extending 21st Oscar nomination for acting in the last
40 years!)
Wild Card: Dame Judi Dench, Victoria and Abdul
Best Supporting Actor
It seems to be between Willem Dafoe and Sam Rockwell for the
Oscar Night win in this category.
My Best Supporting Actor Picks:
Willem Dafoe, The
Florida Project
Woody Harrelson, Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Richard Jenkins, The
Shape of Water
Sam Rockwell, Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Michael Stuhlbarg, Call
Me By Your Name
Wild Card: Armie Hammer, Call
Me By Your Name
Best Supporting
Actress
This has really become a two-woman race between Laurie
Metcalf and Allison Janney.
My Best Supporting Actress Picks:
Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
Allison Janney, I,
Tonya
Lesley Manville, Phantom
Thread
Laurie Metcalf, Lady
Bird
Octavia Spencer, The
Shape of Water
Wild Card: Whoever plays Nancy Kerrigan in I, Tonya.
Next week, I’ll comment on how I fared with my major
category Oscar nomination predictions.
Last Updated January 20, 2018
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*CORRECTION February 3, 2018: I’d like to correct a
statement I made in this article. While it is true that no non-Golden Globe
nominee has won the Best Director Oscar since The Sting’s George Roy Hill in 1973, I’ve become aware that two
movies since The Sting have won the
Best Picture Oscar despite no Best Director Golden Globe nomination: Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and Crash (2005), which became the first
film since The Sting to win Best
Picture at the Oscars despite no equivalent Golden Globe Award nomination.
