Predictions Friday – Can Spotlight Surge Ahead?

Now that the PGA has announced The Big Short as its winner, the Best Picture race has spun in a wildly unpredictable direction. Although alternatively, we could say it spun perceptions of the race in a wildly different direction. Whatever was happening in the minds of industry voters was happening whether we detected it or not. What we discovered is that the critics groups and the Golden Globes had not been on the same track as the Producers Guild members. Now we have the Screen Actors Guild Awards coming up on Sunday, which can help assure us that Leonardo DiCaprio and Brie Larson are definitely winning, and can tell us who might be ahead in the Supporting Actress race. No matter what happens this weekend, Supporting Actor will be a wide open race up to the Oscars and remains anyone’s guess.

The real heat seems to be on Best Picture and Director. Pundits at Gold Derby are still holding out for this to be an outlier year and are predicting Spotlight to win both the SAG Award Ensemble and the Oscar for Best Picture. They are betting on it being a year where the PGA is off, just as SAG was a poor predictor of this year’s Best Picture nominees when they announced their Best Ensemble nominations. Since this has been a year of surprises, if I was into risky bets I might do the same thing some colleagues are doing.

The problem with The Big Short when compared to Spotlight is that the first is more divisive. Spotlight is a movie everyone loves — Big Short is a movie many people feel passionately about, but it does have its haters. The part that is hard for me to get past is that we’ve never had a year when the PGA result turned out to be the outlier since the implementation of more than 5 nominees and the preferential ballot were simultaneously implemented for PGA and Oscar voting. Never. Since 2009, whichever film wins a majority consensus at the PGA has correctly foreshadowed the majority consensus with Academy voters choice for Best Picture 100%. Predicting something that has never happened before is a tricky thing, even though it’s often those long shot bets that can pay off big.

Many pundits are banking on a kind of split vote: Spotlight for Picture, George Miller for Director, which is what happened at the Critics Choice awards. What we don’t yet know is whether the pundits’ hunches are right, or whether they are still underestimating The Big Short and its director, Adam McKay.

Predicting The Big Short to win the PGA was not predicting a long shot if you looked at the stats. But the SAG Awards are different. If Spotlight can win a simple plurality vote at SAG for Best Ensemble, it might be able to regain its Best Picture momentum and this could carry it all the way to Oscar Night. I’ve never seen that happen since the date change and the preferential ballot took over, but it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility (in other words, I do consider it slightly outside the realm of probability).

Tom O’Neil and his editors at Gold Derby have had a good discussion about this very topic, actually. They seem equally on the fence about it. The way I figure it is this: there is a significant segment of voters who might swing away from both of the frontrunners in reaction to #OscarsSoWhite and pick either Beasts of No Nation or Straight Outta Compton — to differentiate the SAG as having cred the rest of industry seems to lack. But since there are two excellent alternatives with mostly-black casts, both Beasts and Compton may end up splitting the voters who share this sentiment, even though they are completely different kinds of films. Furthermore, the SAG does not represent the same matchup with the Academy as the PGA does: first, there are 7,000 voters in PGA compared with 150,000 in SAG; second, the SAG vote will likely come down to a choice between Spotlight and The Big Short whereas the PGA race was probably looking to four points of the compass: Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, Spotlight, and The Big Short. Spotlight did not prevail in that four-way split. With SAG, we have just five films, no preferential ballot, and only two Ensemble award nominees that have corresponding Best Picture nominations. It’s a whole different thing.

So how is this possibly shaking out, guild-wise?
ACE – Mad Max: Fury Road/Big Short
WGA – Spotlight/Big Short

Open questions: DGA – There are a few names here that can tip the balance in one direction or another. For instance, if Tom McCarthy wins the DGA, all bets are off and Spotlight will likely reclaim the lead. Or maybe there will be some kind of split. If George Miller or Alejandro G. Inarritu edge one another out — well, that definitely sets up another kind of split.

We’re pretty certain, at the moment, that The Big Short is likely to win at least three guild awards. It will win the ACE Eddie. It should probably win the WGA, although it does have some competition there with The Martian. But let’s just say it wins PGA/ACE only, and not WGA.

Where does that put it in terms of recent history, with just those two??

2009
PGA – The Hurt Locker
SAG – Inglourious Basterds
DGA – The Hurt Locker
ACE – The Hangover/The Hurt Locker
WGA – Up in the Air/The Hurt Locker

2010
PGA – The King’s Speech
SAG – The King’s Speech
DGA – The King’s Speech
WGA – Inception/The Social Network (King’s Speech not eligible)
ACE – Alice in Wonderland/The Social Network

2011
PGA – The Artist
SAG – The Help
DGA – The Artist
WGA – Midnight in Paris/The Descendants
ACE – The Descendants/The Artist

2012
PGA – Argo
SAG – Argo
DGA – Argo
ACE – Silver Linings/Argo
WGA – Zero Dark Thirty/Argo

2013
PGA – Gravity/12 Years a Slave
SAG – American Hustle
DGA – Gravity
ACE – Captain Phillips/American Hustle
WGA – Captain Phillips/Her

2014
PGA – Birdman
SAG – Birdman
DGA – Birdman
ACE – Grand Budapest/Boyhood
WGA – The Grand Budapest Hotel/The Imitation Game

When we pair the PGA and the ACE Eddie together, we always get two things, at least going by this history. We get the Best Picture Oscar and we get the DGA, which is what occurred in 2009, 2011 and 2012. If we add the WGA, we have scenarios like 2009 and 2012.

Essentially, at least since 2009, SAG and WGA count less than PGA. The producers seem to have become the preeminent indicators nowadays in determining Best Picture.

The strangest year we’ve had since the beginning of the expanded nominations for Best Picture was 2013, when 12 Years a Slave and Gravity split the vote. As you can see, there was not a lot of broad guild support for 12 Years a Slave. It was a “just barely” kind of winner. Even still, the only stat that prevailed is the PGA stat which remains, so far, unassailable.

Interesting, isn’t it?

The majority of the pundits at Gold Derby, in fact, have Spotlight out in front to win both the SAG Awards Ensemble and Best Picture. The reason for this, I assume, is that Open Road’s Tom Ortenberg was behind the big Crash win in 2006. They’re betting that he’ll pull a rabbit out of his hat again and that Spotlight will ultimately prevail. The problem is, this isn’t a Brokeback Mountain vs. Crash kind of year. It’s a weirder year than that. To many eyes, The Big Short was a surprise winner at the PGA, having won no major awards before that apparent upset. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, as The King’s Speech surged forward and took the race in much the same way.

Basically, we can look at Best Picture this way: It’s either a year where something that has never happened before happens, or it’s a year where the expected happens as usual. For the former, you might see Spotlight, The Revenant or Mad Max winning. For the latter, you have only The Big Short taking the race.

It’s kind of exciting in a way, but it’s also a tad irritating in another way. My heart honestly can’t take many more surprises this season.

One other thing to note: if another film besides Spotlight or The Big Short wins the SAG Ensemble award, the race will become kind of interesting. Like, let’s say Straight Outta Compton wins. That could potentially put Spotlight in a somewhat precarious situation in terms of its one bona fide lock — Original Screenplay.  This is going to sound racist, but I don’t know any other way to say it — if the writers of Straight Outta Compton were black, the #OscarsSoWhite energy might be enough to give Compton the only Oscar win that could possibly redeem the Academy from the place it’s in. But the writers are white, like Sly Stallone is white, so either of those wins is a tricky proposition. This is the one way Stallone could be slightly vulnerable as a winner — opening the door to another Supporting Actor to take his place, like Mark Ruffalo for Spotlight, or Christian Bale for The Big Short.  I leave that thought for you to mull over without comment.

Best Motion Picture of the Year

1. “The Big Short” Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, Producers
2. “Spotlight” Michael Sugar, Steve Golin, Nicole Rocklin and Blye Pagon Faust, Producers
3. “The Revenant” Arnon Milchan, Steve Golin, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Mary Parent and Keith Redmon, Producers
4. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Doug Mitchell and George Miller, Producers
5. “Room” Ed Guiney, Producer
6. “The Martian” Simon Kinberg, Ridley Scott, Michael Schaefer and Mark Huffam, Producers
7. “Bridge of Spies” Steven Spielberg, Marc Platt and Kristie Macosko Krieger, Producers
8. “Brooklyn” Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey, Producers

Achievement in Directing

The reason I am not predicting a split here is that in every year with the preferential ballot and a split vote, we had a strong sense of the result ahead of time. With Alfonso Cuaron, he was winning every Best Directing award leading up to the Oscars. Should anyone but Adam McKay win the DGA, I will re-evaluate. But remember, only Alejandro G. Inarritu has a corresponding BAFTA nomination for director and thus, it would be another highly unusual feat if, a) Inarritu can pull it off two years in a row (more likely with BAFTA than DGA or Oscar, as he didn’t win the BAFTA for Birdman), and b) if the DGA goes to someone who doesn’t win the BAFTA. Hey, it could totally happen. I just don’t know how many irregularities I can fit in in one race. I’m open to the possibilities. I think Spotlight is in the number 2 spot for Picture, so McCarthy gets second for directing. Inarritu has won already, which greatly diminishes his chances to win again consecutively, despite what an impressive piece of work The Revenant is. Oscar voters just don’t tend to go back to the same well two times in a row: even Frances Ford Copppola only won Best Director once for the Godfather movies, ditto Peter Jackson for the Lord of the Rings movies. John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz are the only two directors with back-to-back directing Oscars. More likely, if there is an 11th hour surge for Spotlight, McCarthy will take director at both DGA and Oscar.

1. “The Big Short” Adam McKay
2. “Spotlight” Tom McCarthy
3. “Mad Max: Fury Road” George Miller
4. “The Revenant” Alejandro G. Iñárritu
5. “Room” Lenny Abrahamson

Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

1. Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant”
2. Matt Damon in “The Martian”
3. Michael Fassbender in “Steve Jobs”
4. Bryan Cranston in “Trumbo”
5. Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl”

Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

Boy, this is a tough category. I’m going to give the edge to Sly because 1) I think he deserves it, and 2) he’s beloved. There won’t be a dry eye in the house. But — BUT — I could also see Mark Ruffalo taking it as a win for Spotlight. Ditto Christian Bale. The SAG won’t be any help here.

1. Sylvester Stallone in “Creed”
2. Mark Ruffalo in “Spotlight”
3. Christian Bale in “The Big Short”
4. Mark Rylance in “Bridge of Spies”
5. Tom Hardy in “The Revenant”

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

1. Brie Larson in “Room” – Gold Derby
2. Saoirse Ronan in “Brooklyn”
3. Charlotte Rampling in “45 Years”
4. Cate Blanchett in “Carol”
5. Jennifer Lawrence in “Joy”

Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

1. Alicia Vikander in “The Danish Girl”
2. Rooney Mara in “Carol”
3. Kate Winslet in “Steve Jobs
4. Jennifer Jason Leigh in “The Hateful Eight”
5. Rachel McAdams in “Spotlight”

Adapted Screenplay

1. “The Big Short” Screenplay by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay
2. “Carol” Screenplay by Phyllis Nagy
3. “Room” Screenplay by Emma Donoghue
4. “Brooklyn” Screenplay by Nick Hornby
5. “The Martian” Screenplay by Drew Goddard

Original Screenplay

1. “Spotlight” Written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy – Gold Derby
2. “Straight Outta Compton” Screenplay by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff; Story by S. Leigh Savidge & Alan Wenkus and Andrea Berloff
3. “Inside Out” Screenplay by Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley; Original story by Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen
4. “Bridge of Spies” Written by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
5. “Ex Machina” Written by Alex Garland

Best Animated Feature Film of the Year

1. “Inside Out” Pete Docter and Jonas Rivera – Gold Derby
2. “Anomalisa” Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson and Rosa Tran
3. “When Marnie Was There” Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Yoshiaki Nishimura
4. “Shaun the Sheep Movie” Mark Burton and Richard Starzak
5. “Boy and the World” Alê Abreu

Achievement in Cinematography

1. “The Revenant” Emmanuel Lubezki
2. “Mad Max: Fury Road” John Seale
3. “Carol” Ed Lachman
4. “Sicario” Roger Deakins
5. “The Hateful Eight” Robert Richardson

Achievement in Costume Design

1. “Carol” Sandy Powell
2. “Cinderella” Sandy Powell
3. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Jenny Beavan
4. “The Danish Girl” Paco Delgado
5. “The Revenant” Jacqueline West

Best Documentary Feature

This is the one longshot bet I’m banking on. Liz Garbus for What Happened, Miss Simone who, along with Sandy Powell, could be the only woman winning a major award — for directing, no less. What Happened, Miss Simone, which is also about a woman of color, Nina Simone. It is powerful, memorable, and could be the surprise winner here.  I also think Cartel Land could surprise. In the end, it will likely be Amy, but it’s always worth nothing when a woman director is in the race.

• “What Happened, Miss Simone?” Liz Garbus, Amy Hobby and Justin Wilkes
• “Amy” Asif Kapadia and James Gay-Rees
• “Cartel Land” Matthew Heineman and Tom Yellin
• “The Look of Silence” Joshua Oppenheimer and Signe Byrge Sørensen
• “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” Evgeny Afineevsky and Den Tolmor

Best Documentary Short Film

I love all of these movies. So much. Any of them winning would be a great choice. But Chau – that dude transformed my way of thinking about my own life and inspires me daily.

1. “Chau, beyond the Lines” Courtney Marsh and Jerry Franck
2. “Last Day of Freedom” Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman
3. “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah” Adam Benzine
4. “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness” Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
5. “Body Team 12” David Darg and Bryn Mooser

Achievement in Film Editing

This is another tough one. Probably Mad Max will take it but editing is such a HUGE part of The Big Short’s success. It’s like the cinematography in The Revenant. That’s how important it is.

1. “The Big Short” Hank Corwin
2. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Margaret Sixel
3. “Spotlight” Tom McArdle
4. “The Revenant” Stephen Mirrione
5. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey

Best Foreign Language Film of the Year

1. “Son of Saul” Hungary
2. “Mustang” France
3. “Theeb” Jordan
4. “Embrace of the Serpent” Colombia
5. “A War” Denmark

Achievement in makeup and hairstyling

1. “The Revenant” Siân Grigg, Duncan Jarman and Robert Pandini
2. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega and Damian Martin – Gold Derby
3. “The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared” Love Larson and Eva von Bahr

Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)

Carol deserves to win this. But Morricone is a superstar, a legend, and will likely win his first (and long overdue) competitive Oscar.

1. “The Hateful Eight” Ennio Morricone
2. “Carol” Carter Burwell
3. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” John Williams
4. “Bridge of Spies” Thomas Newman
5. “Sicario” Jóhann Jóhannsson

Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)

1. “Til It Happens To You” from “The Hunting Ground”
   Music and Lyric by Diane Warren and Lady Gaga – Gold Derby
2. “Writing’s On The Wall” from “Spectre”
   Music and Lyric by Jimmy Napes and Sam Smith
3. “Manta Ray” from “Racing Extinction”
   Music by J. Ralph and Lyric by Antony Hegarty
4. “Simple Song #3” from “Youth”
   Music and Lyric by David Lang
5. “Earned It” from “Fifty Shades of Grey”
   Music and Lyric by Abel Tesfaye, Ahmad Balshe, Jason Daheala Quenneville and Stephan Moccio

Achievement in Production Design

1. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Production Design: Colin Gibson; Set Decoration: Lisa Thompson
2. “The Revenant” Production Design: Jack Fisk; Set Decoration: Hamish Purdy
3. “The Martian” Production Design: Arthur Max; Set Decoration: Celia Bobak
4. “Bridge of Spies” Production Design: Adam Stockhausen; Set Decoration: Rena DeAngelo and Bernhard Henrich
5. “The Danish Girl” Production Design: Eve Stewart; Set Decoration: Michael Standish

Best Animated Short Film

1. “World of Tomorrow” Don Hertzfeldt
2. “Prologue” Richard Williams and Imogen Sutton
3. “Sanjay’s Super Team” Sanjay Patel and Nicole Grindle – Gold Derby
4. “We Can’t Live without Cosmos” Konstantin Bronzit
5. “Bear Story” Gabriel Osorio and Pato Escala

Best Live Action Short Film

1. “Shok” Jamie Donoughue
2. “Day One” Henry Hughes
3. “Stutterer” Benjamin Cleary and Serena Armitage
4. “Everything Will Be Okay (Alles Wird Gut)” Patrick Vollrath
5. “Ave Maria” Basil Khalil and Eric Dupont – Gold Derby

Achievement in Sound Editing

1. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Mark Mangini and David White
2. “The Revenant” Martin Hernandez and Lon Bender
3. “The Martian” Oliver Tarney
4. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” Matthew Wood and David Acord
5. “Sicario” Alan Robert Murray

Achievement in Sound Mixing

1. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Chris Jenkins, Gregg Rudloff and Ben Osmo – Gold Derby
2. “The Revenant” Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montaño, Randy Thom and Chris Duesterdiek
3. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” Andy Nelson, Christopher Scarabosio and Stuart Wilson
4. “The Martian” Paul Massey, Mark Taylor and Mac Ruth
5. “Bridge of Spies” Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Drew Kunin

Achievement in Visual Effects

1. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Andrew Jackson, Tom Wood, Dan Oliver and Andy Williams
2. “The Revenant” Rich McBride, Matthew Shumway, Jason Smith and Cameron Waldbauer
3. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, Neal Scanlan and Chris Corbould
4. “The Martian” Richard Stammers, Anders Langlands, Chris Lawrence and Steven Warner
5. “Ex Machina” Andrew Whitehurst, Paul Norris, Mark Ardington and Sara Bennett