I have been watching the Academy Awards since I was nine years old – my first memory of the show being Heath Ledger’s family, flown in from Australia, accepting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight on behalf of the late star. Two years later, at age eleven, The King’s Speech had impressed me enough with its storytelling that I swore on everything, except my own deceased relatives that it would suffice for the big prizes on Oscar night. It turned out that I was correct, and I have been hooked on the guessing game ever since.
Make no mistake, it is a horse race of golden statuettes. I make time in the fall and winter to keep up with all the movies, wake up at 7 am on a Tuesday in January for the nomination announcement, and immediately begin building bracket sheets, including all 23 categories, leading up to the show.
My scorecards have seen high marks over the last few years. In 2022, I correctly guessed 20 of 23 categories – my highest score to date. Last year, I got 18. This comes from now 15 years of watching Academy Award ceremonies, studying press coverage of the event and individual nominees, painful subjection to all the other snooze-fest awards preceding the ceremony, and – oh yeah – watching the films. While other people spent their adolescent years studying fine instruments, learning trades, volunteering for political causes, or earning scholarships through their advanced trigonometry scores, I studied this. It only works for me once a year, and this is my time to show what I’ve learned.
Acting categories are always the easiest to predict. For male actors, it’s all about transformation: think Gary Oldman donning a fat suit for Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, or Daniel Day-Lewis spending three years exhuming the mind of Abraham Lincoln. For female actors, humiliation and perseverance is generally the game. Which actress has the “big scene,” usually where she has a mental breakdown or a powerful speech about not taking her husband’s crap anymore? Nine times out of ten, that’s the winner (think Natalie Portman in Black Swan or Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook). The Supporting Actor and Actress categories are often won by a performer who has somehow never won before (anyone remember when Brad Pitt won simply for taking his shirt off in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood?) or the more subtle, subdued performance of a character integral to the plot of a film.
While predicting the Oscars is no art, there is a science to it that requires a little hypothesis. In layman’s terms, which nominee has “the most” of the facet of its recognized category? For technical categories like sound effects: the movie that makes the most noise generally wins (you can never go wrong with picking a war movie here). Editing: Which nominee cuts around the most? That’s the winner. In 2019, the Queen rock-biopic Bohemian Rhapsody had the most noise and the most movement, therefore I predicted it would win both categories – it did. The Best Cinematography column is all about what the camera captures. Which film uses a wide-angle lens (creating a ‘fuller’ picture)? Again, war movies usually take this (like Saving Private Ryan or 1917), as do fantasy epics (Dune, Life of Pi). Movies done in black-and-white in the age of digital also score pretty well here.
Fantasy films and period pieces almost always win the Production Design and Costume categories. For the former, which movie’s setting has the most unique environment? Think about the massive scope of the Death Star in Star Wars or the elegant interiors of Titanic. For the latter, think of the March family’s dresses in Little Women or the African-influenced futuristic Wakandan garb in Black Panther.
Best Director can generally be assumed by which of the four men and one woman (the usual gender breakdown) has either been on the most magazine covers or made the most talk show appearances. Remember, the Oscars are to be campaigned for!
The top Oscar, Best Picture, is becoming easier to predict. From 2015 to 2022, I got this category wrong every single year. Why? There was a trend during those years (stemming from reasons too long to list) that had the presumed “frontrunner” for best film losing in an upset. The frontrunner generally means a film that has won a ton of Best Picture prizes at other, smaller awards functions. A great example of this was in 2016, when the Leonardo DiCaprio-led western survival film Revenant lost to newsroom drama Spotlight. That seems to be changing, with more popular films endearing to the Oscar voters come voting time. 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once lived up to its title, and its widespread success critically and sales-wise translated to Oscar wins.
There is another cheat sheet: if you haven’t seen the films, you can also guess these winners by looking at who won the preceding award shows: The SAG Awards, Golden Globes, Critic’s Choice, and British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs). Sometimes, the winners of these shows match the Oscars nearly perfectly, but there is always a surprise.
That is another reason why the Oscars are so fun: the surprises. Whether it’s an actor winning their first award in an upset (salutations to Jamie Lee Curtis last year), or an underdog film defying the odds (Rocky beating Network and All the President’s Men back in 1976), one cannot possibly predict the category with full assurance. I love being right on Oscar night, but being wrong is just as fun. I put no money on these choices (nor do I ever intend to); this night is just the Super Bowl with better gowns and slightly less grunting.
Oscar should be enjoyed, not just by the winners and nominees, but by the public who tunes in year after year. There are a lot of clear frontrunners (Oppenheimer, Barbie, and Anatomy of a Fall) for the March 10th ceremony this year, but expect the unexpected.
I’m still working out my final picks for this year, and I am just as excited as I was as a tween watching Hollywood gather for four hours a year to give out silly little prizes. Is it important to art? No. Is it pointless? Not entirely. It’s showbusiness, and this is the night where $10 Million bonuses are determined. Is it fun? You bet your life it is.
Dylan James graduated from the Savannah College of Art & Design with a BFA in Dramatic Writing. He has studied both the ‘show’ and ‘business’ aspects of show business since childhood, and writes through sociological analysis, seeking relevance in the art and commerce for the moment.
1 comment
Nice piece!