Projection: Oscar - One Last Gasp
I wrote the first of this season’s Projection: Oscar columns 178 days ago. At the conclusion of that lengthy piece, I said the following: “…mark down The Artist as the one most likely to score nominations across the board. It is intelligent, and funny, and warm…and the kind of rare combination of old and new that the Academy likes to reward. Plus, when most people discuss the film, it is not a matter of ‘like’…it’s a matter of ‘love.’ And that’s what lands Best Picture nominations.”
As we wind down to the season’s inevitable end, before we reset and start anew for—egad!—next season, I will reinforce the point: when you are sitting at your Oscar parties and filling out your mock ballots, mark down The Artist as the one most likely to score wins across the board. It’s the surest, safest bet. If you want to win the pool and take home that $15 Blockbuster gift certificate, pick The Artist to win anywhere from 5 to 8 Oscars.
…when you are sitting at your Oscar parties and filling out your mock ballots, mark down The Artist as the one most likely to score wins across the board. It’s the surest, safest bet.
On the one hand, I could take pride in the fact that I doubled-down on my Artist prediction all the way back on September 1. On the other hand, as look back on this season, the fact that Best Picture was that predictable that early is a bit of black eye on the season, isn’t it? We all – myself included – bent over backwards to try and envision unexpected scenarios and possible contenders to overtake The Artist’s season-long dominance. In reality, we were just manufacturing these scenarios because we were bored. It’s been that kind of year.
Predictability has long been one of the Academy’s identifying marks. It’s easy to spot an “Oscar Movie.” For a group sporting nearly 6,000 members in multiple industry professions, they sure do develop an expected consensus year after year. I’ve correctly predicted the Best Picture winner every year since 2005 (an aberration year where old school voters picked Crash over Brokeback Mountain, thereby indicating that their preferred form of Hollywood liberalism was the kind that ignored homosexuality). With the exception of odd years like that, most pundits will nail down Best Picture well before Oscar night…though I doubt any of us ever expected to correctly peg the BP winner six months out.
It’s been the kind of year – really, it’s been this way for the last two years – where Hollywood wants to be a Dream Factory once again. People seem to want to “feel” more than they want to “think.” By nature, “feel” movies tend to bring people together, while “think” movies tend to polarize. There’s no big secret to predicting the Oscars because there is no big secret to human nature; Academy voters vote for the film that makes them feel the deepest…they vote for the film they love.
Looking at The Artist’s competition for Best Picture …do any of the other nominees scream out “love”? The Help fits that bill up to a point, which is why it has picked it share of awards throughout the season. War Horse is one case where Academy members probably so touched they felt violated. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a movie that sort of thinks a lot about feeling. And each of the film’s in the rest of the slate is sort of in its own head. But The Artist…it’s a simple idea with identifiable themes writ large, carried out with precision and great ingenuity. It’s deliberate homage to the old fashioned is precisely what feels so new fashioned about it. Looking at it compared to its competition, and then thinking about what makes an “Oscar winner,” there is no contest. Really, there never was.
So from a predictive standpoint, let’s all come to a consensus that The Artist will win Best Picture, and is likely to win the most Oscars when all is said and done.
So from a predictive standpoint, let’s all come to a consensus that The Artist will win Best Picture, and is likely to win the most Oscars when all is said and done. From there, let’s dig into the below-the-line categories and figure out which film – between The Artist and Hugo – will win all of those (ah, predictability). Hang on the moments of real uncertainty…like will Clooney or Dujardin take home Best Actor, or which freakin’ movie will actually win the Documentary Feature Oscar. And the short categories…those are always hard to predict, if for no other reason than no one has seen them – maybe not even Academy voters.
From an emotional standpoint, in this final pre-Oscar editon of Projection: Oscar, I want to give a last gasp of thanks to all of you who read my insular ramblings and chose to turn them into real conversations among passionate film lovers. I set out last September to apply my years of Oscar knowledge…Oscar obsession…to good use in a great forum. And all my highest expectations were surpassed. For all my know-it-all arrogance and seen-it-all cynicism, I embarked on Projection: Oscar because I have a deep-seeded, foolish, naïve, goofy love for this medium and this enterprise. I love the movies and I love the Oscars…that’s what winds my clock. So before the final unveiling, before Oscar goes into an ever-so-brief hibernation, I wanted to say thank you. I can’t wait for next year…after I take time to reboot over a long summer of trashy big-budget spectacles.
The final schedule: my final predictions in all categories will go live sometime Saturday. Also Saturday, you will be able to listen to the inaugural ProjectionCast, the Next Projection podcast, where our first topic of conversation will, of course, be Oscar hysteria. Then a final wrap-up will come early next week…and maybe we’ll even look WAY ahead to possibilities for next year’s Oscars. It’s never too early to start making a fool of oneself.
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