Making this category hard to predict isn’t always the lack of exposure most of the films have prior to being nominated.
Piper’s story of a sanderling trying to transcend its fear of water feels like an outtake from a Planet Earth episode.
A victory for Asghar Farhadi would be nothing short of a rebuke to our president’s politics of fear.
Let’s honor Viola Davis’s impending win for what it is: a moment of truth, clarity, and justice.
“I gotta watch this now?!” said my fellow awards pundit Eric Henderson on the morning the Oscar nominations were announced.
Here are our best bets to get past the first heat and maybe earn a few nasty tweets from our new POTUS.
This is a list of our predicted winners at the 2016 Academy Awards with links to individual articles.
Who would’ve thought that the triumph of 12 Years a Slave would give so many Oscar voters the chance to absolve themselves of any further obligation toward racial concerns?
An Oscar for Alejandro González Iñárritu is a reward for the return on the industry’s investment.
You have to ask which storyline does an evenly matched Oscar contest best serve? That of the underdog, obviously.
In this Oscar race, one nominee benefits from nostalgia while another will likely coast to victory because of category fraud.
When in doubt, fall back on a reliable formula: And the Oscar for sound mixing in a movie most likely to win best picture goes to…
When in doubt, fall back on the most reliable barometer of them all: And the Oscar for most sound editing goes to…
It’s impossible not to be dazzled by how much carnage Margaret Sixel packs into two hours without ever losing Mad Max: Fury Road’s sense of geographical scale.
Emmanuel Lubezki’s ornamental imagery for The Revenant signifies nothing so much as the look that $135 million can buy a director.
So, as voters make their little Leonardo DiCaprio dodge Lady Gaga on the 12-bit red carpet, so will the real Leo once again dodge Gaga as the latter walks to the podium with Diane Warren.
In a category designed to reward the toil of the writer, a film that celebrates the gumption of writers to expose the hidden truths of the world is already far ahead of the pack.
Four other best picture nominees and one unexpectedly snubbed also-ran would seem to make for a close race.
That Mad Max: Fury Road is only one of five films to ever be nominated in all seven technical categories can’t hurt it’s chances in the visual effects category.
For Ennio Morricone, being hitched up to Quentin Tarantino’s nostalgia-flattering métier, will be enough to ensure his first competitive Oscar.