Predictions Friday: How to Think Like an Academy Voter, A Field Guide

Hope springs eternal in the phase of the Oscar race when a movie is screened and no group has yet rung in on whether or not it makes the grade. Then come the top ten lists. Then come the critics awards. Then come the industry awards. By the time the Oscar nominations come down, hopes have long since been dashed. Whatever might have been is folded carefully and stored away, to be reopened in the future by people who have no wish to measure films by such standards. They are the lucky ones. If you’re not careful, this job can kill your love of films once you start measuring them in terms of what the consensus deems worthy.

It’s one thing to say “love the movies you love.” That’s valid, that’s right. And we can’t help but wish that the movies we love would be loved by others, because that sort of accord means acceptance — not only for the films what we love, but of ourselves somehow. We also like to see those who made the films we admire get awarded for their efforts, as if to say “Yes, you did a great job. Here is an award nomination to prove it.”

The problem is this: in order to accurately predict the Oscars – to participate in the race from that perspective, we must always try to see the work through the lens of an Oscar voter’s eye. You can love a movie like Carol; you can believe it to be one of the best films of the year, a work of art to be valued, cherished; you can hope that a director like Todd Haynes will be encouraged to continue to do such fine work. But then the end of the year comes around and no, not enough of the 6,000 Oscar voters thought it was one of the five best films of the year to make the cut. The reason these disappointments burn so badly is that most of us can already guess which films will rejected and why, which will be accepted and why. We have trained our eyes to look at movies as a typical Academy member would.

So who are those Academy members and how do we train our eyes to look at films through theirs? They are mostly white, mostly straight, mostly male voters, with an average age around 50 or 60 years old. I once heard them described once as Eagles fans. It’s the politically liberal boomer guys who probably drive a Prius, who are economically upper middle class to wealthy. They are kind-hearted and prefer to see the best in people and hence prefer films about good people doing good things. As with any demographic, they seem drawn to films with male protagonists because they find it easier to relate to stories in which they see themselves. If a film stars women, these voters generally have to like those women — either admire them or want to sleep with them.

As we speak, there isn’t a single film being predicted for Best Picture this year that is solely about a female character. Nearly all the women in the year’s most important movies are adjunct dimensions of the male characters they star alongside. There are a few films this year where women exist as individuals onto themselves, which means they are the heroes of their own stories. Those central female figures would include Amy Adams in Arrival, Jessica Chastain in Miss Sloane, Rebecca Hall in Christine, and perhaps Taraji P. Henson in Hidden Figures. However, at this point, none of these films are slam dunks for a Best Picture nomination.

This situation will either bother you greatly (as it has bothered me for years) or it won’t, and you’ll learn to stop worrying and love Oscar predicting. The upside is that sometimes the Academy will surprise you. Sometimes they won’t be as averse to a dark film as you think they’re going to be (The Wolf of Wall Street), sometimes they’ll pick the film with the bummer ending you think they won’t (No Country for Old Men), sometimes they’ll go for the black-and-white silent film you might figure they never will (The Artist). So it can be just as limiting and pointless to try to second-guess them this early as it is in attempting to decode their cryptic reasoning when the nominations come down.

It’s important to remember who they are, what they’re about, what they like, and what they don’t like. But it’s equally important to remember that if a movie is good enough then it should be placed on the list of films that will be named as the year’s best, regardless of the personality factors involved. Thus, every good list of predictions should have picks that we think are obvious (La La Land), but we should feel free to go off-script for a few titles too. Scott Feinberg, Kris Tapley, Anne Thompson, David Poland, Pete Hammond, Tom O’Neil, Jeff Wells all do it. I do too. If we didn’t allow our personalities to color our choices, all our lists would look exactly like one another, and they don’t. Each of these predictors throws in a wild card here or there because we know from years of practice that wild cards do sometimes pop up. It is on those wild cards that we all hang our hopes and dreams.

Let’s do this, keeping in mind that the Billy Lynn screenings won’t begin until next week.

Best Picture
Frontrunners:
La La Land
Moonlight
Fences
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Silence
Manchester by the Sea
Arrival <—Only film with a central female character who’s not a dimension of a male character
Lion
Loving
Sully

Possible:
Jackie
Miss Sloane <—central female character unattached to a male figure
Live by Night
Hell or High Water
20th Century Women
Hidden Figures<—central female characters unattached to a male figure
Denial <—central female character unattached to a male figure
Gold

Best Director
Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Martin Scorsese, Silence
Ang Lee, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight

Next tier
Denis Villeneuve, Arrival
Pablo Larrain, Jackie
Jeff Nichols, Loving
Denzel Washington, Fences
Clint Eastwood, Sully

Best Actor
Denzel Washington, Fences
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Dev Patel, Lion
Joel Edgerton, Loving
Tom Hanks, Sully

Next tier:
Michael Keaton, The Founder
Joe Alwyn, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge or Silence
Ryan Gosling, La La Land
Miles Teller, Bleed for This

Best Actress
Emma Stone, La La Land
Viola Davis, Fences (unless she goes supporting)
Natalie Portman, Jackie
Jessica Chastain, Miss Sloane
Amy Adams, Arrival

Next tier:
Annette Bening, 20th Century Women
Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins
Ruth Negga, Loving
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Rebecca Hall, Christine
Rooney Mara, Una

Supporting Actor
Liam Neeson, Silence
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea
Hugh Grant, Florence Foster Jenkins
Aaron Eckhart, Bleed for This

Supporting Actress:
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Miss Sloane
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea
Alt. Greta Gerwig, 20th Century Women

Original Screenplay
La La Land
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight (if not Adapted)
Loving
20th Century Women

Adapted Screenplay
Fences
Silence
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Sully
Arrival

Cinematography
La La Land
Jackie
Hail Caesar
Arrival
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Production Design
La La Land
Jackie
Hail Caesar
Silence
Passengers

Documentary Feature
The 13th
OJ Simpson: Made in America
Weiner
Life Animated
The Ivory Game

Costumes
Jackie
La La Land
Hail Caesar
Florence Foster Jenkins
Hidden Figures