The common refrain this season has been one of despair, of theatrical death by dearth.
Though it boasts the strongest pedigree of all 2012 awards contenders, Lincoln doesn’t play like obvious Oscar bait while you’re watching it.
Biopics may have the strongest track record in currying Academy favor, but tales of overcoming physical obstacles aren’t far behind.
At this stage, the alternately thrilling and unwieldy three-hour epic is the season’s closest thing to a wild card.
There seems no reason why the film’s Art Direction, Set Decoration, and Production Design can’t compete right along with this year’s showy heavy-hitters.
Most filmgoers who see Lee’s magical-realist marine life, from bioluminescent jellyfish to migrating trout that fly, will be quick to dub the film the Visual Effects frontrunner.
The film emerged from Toronto as virtually every pundit’s Best Picture frontrunner.
Does Looper have a prayer in the Visual Effects race, where tigers and hobbits and Avengers will be sprinting, neck-in-neck?
Conventional wisdom says this film would surely have the sound categories in the bag.
Time will tell if the Academy’s newest rule adjustment will throw off the mojo of latecomers like Les Misérables.
Will the Academy really go for a star-free, Sendak-esque allegory, whose rugged charms are tied to its loose lack of answers?
This is a complete list of our predicted winners at the 2012 Academy Awards.
That the Best Picture category’s “Will it be six or will it be seven?” question was settled as close to 10 as possible without actually being 10 isn’t merely a mark of how much of a mess this year’s Oscars are.
When it comes to film editing, marveling at how rhythmically one shot feeds another is hardly sufficient in predicting an Oscar winner.
So it is that the one year we didn’t stick to our frilliest-always-wins guns here, we came up short.
Conventional wisdom suggested that adaptations of the biggest bestsellers would make up much of this year’s shortlist.
I’ve seen them all. Most of them I wish I hadn’t, but such are the perils of this job.
A lot of pundits think Hugo’s love train through the tech categories will stall out before reaching the sound duo toward the bottom of the ballot, and that War Horse will gallop past it to win by a nose.
If some of those prophets who called the nomination for Demián Bichir still see something we don’t, then the whispering buzz that the actor is poised to pull the ultimate upset could indeed be true.
For the record, sound mixing is the sort of umbrella sound category, whereas sound editing represents the “special effects” angle of movie sonics.
Less a race than a ping-pong match, this year’s battle for Best Director has shifted favor from an obvious lock to a popular spoiler and back again.