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.
It’s unavoidable to look at Octavia Spencer’s sunny Oscar odds though the filter of co-star Viola Davis’s ascendance in the Best Actress category.
In recent years, Academy members have repeatedly favored the most high-profile, buzzed-about doc in this category, from The Cove to Man on Wire to March of the Penguins.
At this point, being a Meryl Streep diehard who also cares about Oscar hoopla is a kind of brutal self-flagellation.
Even though Lubezki is backed, for the first time ever, by a Best Picture nominee, he’s also almost entirely surrounded by nominees that can boast the same.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who truly understands how the Oscars work that the still above isn’t from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation.
One could argue that voters might feel compelled to use this final opportunity to throw the highest-grossing film franchise ever a bone for its last chance at bat.
We’re not exactly batting a thousand in this category, but we’re pretty sure we got this year’s winner pegged.
Is it just us or can the Academy’s infatuation with The Artist be felt even in categories where the film isn’t nominated?
In years past, we’ve written off this category’s most obvious UNICEF candidates by virtue of their lack of any value outside of insistent efficacy.
The boy wizard’s last hurrah still, however, has a better shot in this category than Midnight in Paris.
Bridesmaids is just glad to be invited, no? A “memorable” quote from the film according to IMDb: “You’re like the maid of dishonor.”
Christopher Plummer has earned this year’s “It’s time” with absolutely no resistance.