The ultimate takeaway here is that predicting this category is a total crapshoot—that, or we don’t know shit.
No Oscar category has become as big a flash point among cinephiles as the cinematography prize.
The brash, rise-and-fall stock-market satire seems to boast more comedy than the filmmaker’s typical hard-hitting drama.
It bears mentioning that one of the two times we’ve gotten this category wrong was when we disregarded the almost always reliable frilliest-always-wins rule.
Just as we’d expect from the Academy, there’s no shortage of lushness on display in this year’s nominees for best cinematography.
Though it boasts the strongest pedigree of all 2012 awards contenders, Lincoln doesn’t play like obvious Oscar bait while you’re watching it.
The film emerged from Toronto as virtually every pundit’s Best Picture frontrunner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the risk of milking a joke whose teets have been sore for weeks, The Artist’s musical score will do just fine without Kim Novak’s vote.
The boy wizard’s last hurrah still, however, has a better shot in this category than Midnight in Paris.
As long as there’s a Transformers film franchise, there’s a good chance Oscar nominations for special effects are going to be thrown at it like alien shrapnel.
If there’s anything that can excite an impassioned debate among film fans, it’s the topic of 3D.