Predictions Friday: Can Manchester Become the First Sundance Offering to Win Best Picture?

I don’t know what it is about Anne Thompson, but she really has emerged as a tried and true Oscar whisperer. It isn’t that she wins every predictions contest – Joyce Eng over at Gold Derby is kind of putting us all to shame – but she knows things other people don’t. That’s really the best way to describe it. Remember when Anne Thompson kept predicting Ang Lee for Best Director for Life of Pi and how weird it all seemed when pundits were bitching about it after the New York Film Fest? And remember how she kept predicting The Grand Budapest Hotel when most of us thought it came out too early, Moonrise Kingdom didn’t make it. And yet, there it was – a strong and formidable Best Picture contender that got all of the top nominations. Then I remember standing with her at some party in Cannes the last year I attended and she was saying that Mad Max: Fury Road was going to be a major Oscar contender and no one else thought it would.

So she’s got some kind of intuition that is probably too often overlooked. We’ll skip the reasons for that for now, but something interesting about Anne’s predictions lately is that she is not quite sure on the Best Picture frontrunner at the moment. That’s not all that unusual this year since if you’re thundering in with guns blazing I can tell you’re probably going to be wrong. At this stage, it is simply too early to call it. But there are some things we know and we can probably get something from listening to Anne and Tom O’Neil talk Best Picture as they do here:

Manchester by the Sea will need to overcome only two obstacles to win. The first is that it’s a Sundance release. As of yet, no Sundance film has won Best Picture. Not a deal-breaker. The second is that Amazon thing. We can pretend it doesn’t matter and maybe it won’t matter. Maybe we really are in the midst of a massive adaptation where major studios no longer control the Oscars. Best Picture last year went to an independent:

Spotlight – Open Road
Birdman – Fox Searchlight
12 Years a Slave – Fox Searchlight
Argo – Warner Bros.
The Artist – The Weinstein Co.
The King’s Speech – The Weinstein Co.
The Hurt Locker – Summit
Slumdog Millionaire – Fox Searchlight
No Country for Old Men – Miramax
The Departed – Warner Bros.
Crash – Lionsgate
Million Dollar Baby – Warner Bros.
Return of the King – New Line/Warner Bros. <—date change
Chicago – Miramax
A Beautiful Mind – Universal
Gladiator – Dreamworks
American Beauty – Dreamworks
Shakespeare in Love – Miramax
Titanic – Paramount
The English Patient – Miramax
Braveheart – Paramount
Forrest Gump – Paramount
Schindler’s List – Universal
Unforgiven – Warner Bros.
Silence of the Lambs – Orion
Dances with Wolves – Orion
Driving Miss Daisy – Warner Bros.

And on it goes. The movie distribution business has always been in the movie business, even when independents took over the Oscar race. But Amazon Studios is now getting into the movie business in a very big way this year. Like Netflix last year and CBS Films the year before, this presents somewhat of a challenge for the film industry. Are they going to go there? The one thing that’s great about the tech industry is that they’re always trying to top each other. You watch, the next thing that’s going to happen is that Facebook will get into the movie business soon. Amazon is competing with Netflix now and both are really aiming that competition squarely on the Oscar race. But the funny thing is – they’re making and promoting and supporting great filmmaking. They are bringing money where money might not exist otherwise. Why would that be a bad thing necessarily? Maybe it won’t matter. But it sticks out to me as a thing that makes you go “hmm?” Just like La La Land not getting a SAG Ensemble nomination is a thing that makes you go “hmm?”

The more well-known studios are in the mix this year:
Paramount – Arrival, Fences, Silence
Fox – Hidden Figures
Fox Searchlight – Jackie
Focus – Loving
Warner Bros – Sully
The Weinstein Co – Lion

But the top three are indies:
Manchester by the Sea – Roadside and Amazon Studios
Moonlight – A24
La La Land – Lionsgate
Hacksaw Ridge – Lionsgate
Hell or High Water – CBS Films

What we’re seeing is a kind of shift both in how movies are made and how they’re distributed. It’s coming at a time when there is a shift in how we all watch movies, too. The movie theater might still be reserved for those films that are bigger spectacle, films that can make a lot of money – event movies. And we might start to see more of a shift towards same-day streaming to allow for more people to see a movie when it opens instead of waiting months to see it at the art house. They want to prevent piracy but they keep people who would ordinarily buy tickets from seeing movies because they don’t play in their towns. This is a very late adjustment to make since the internet has really made movie watching and discussion a global event. The market is there but the market hasn’t figured out how to profit off the changing times. Might these hybrid studios be the answer? They might. Is this the year everything changes? It might be.

If you take out the Amazon part of the story and the Sundance part of the story. I think that Anne Thompson is right: Manchester by the Sea has to be the frontrunner. Here are the reasons why:

1) It’s about a singular male protagonist struggling to do the right thing. It’s not really about anyone else except him – the other characters matter but he’s the center. Every film that has won since Million Dollar Baby (2004) can be defined that way. The Oscar world is, especially lately, a very very male world. Manchester, though, appeals across the board, not just to women but to men. Stories about women aren’t deemed “important” enough (lol, and we thought we could elect the first woman president). Other films that fit the bill this year would be Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Patriots Day, Lion, arguably Fences, MAYBE Moonlight. But Arrival, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Loving, do not really fit this bill.

2) Nobody hates it and lot of people love it. That’s why a Best Picture winner hits almost every important nomination. SAG matters because it shows you what the largest groups of voters thought so far about this race. Manchester leads there with four nominations.

3) Kenneth Lonergan has an Oscar story. A big one. His movie Margaret was famously shelved. He’s an actor’s director and is considered someone who stood up for art and that cost him greatly. That is an Oscar story.

La La Land seemed like the strongest movie heading into the race but it was sidetracked by the SAG snafu. It can be explained away in a variety of ways but the fact is, the actors picked five other movies including, gasp, Captain Fantastic. Also when you say it’s a “two hander” and that’s why it wasn’t nominated, well, look back at Best Picture winners. You’ll see how few two-handers there are. For whatever reason, actors like movies with lots of actors in them.

But it is somewhat disappointing, I’ll just say this out front, that yet again we might not have a Best Picture winner with a Best Actress nominee starring in it. Hillary Swank in 2004 was the last one who did. Unless somehow Arrival pulls ahead and surprises everyone with a win, or La La Land manages to surge — that ship has sailed for yet another year.

On the upside, we might be looking at a record breaking year in terms of African American nominees and Best Picture contenders led by black casts. It’s too early to make that determination, but SAG has already made history with Fences, Moonlight, and Hidden Figures all getting nominated for Ensemble. If the Oscars follow suit, they will make history in that regard.

Now, onward to our predictions!

Best Picture
Manchester by the Sea
La La Land
Moonlight
Fences
Arrival
Hell or High Water
Hidden Figures
Sully
Loving
Silence
Alt. Hacksaw Ridge

Best Actor
Denzel Washington, Fences
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge
Tom Hanks, Sully
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic
Alt. Ryan Gosling, La La Land

Best Actress
Natalie Portman, Jackie
Emma Stone, La La Land
Amy Adams, Arrival
Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins
Annette Bening, 20th Century Women

Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water
Dev Patel, Lion
Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea
Hugh Grant, Florence Foster Jenkins

Supporting Actress
Viola Davis, Fences
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Janelle Monae, Hidden Figures or Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures

Best Director
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Denis Villeneuve, Arrival
Martin Scorsese, Silence
Alt. Denzel Washington, Fences, Mel Gibson, Hacksaw Ridge

Original Screenplay
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Taylor Sheridan, Hell or High Water
Yorgos Lanthimos/Efthimis Filippou, The Lobster
Mike Mills, 20th Century Women

Adapted Screenplay
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Eric Heisserer, Arrival
Allison Schroeder, Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures
Jay Cocks, Silence
August Wilson, Fences

Editing
Hell or High Water
La La Land
Arrival
Moonlight
Manchester by the Sea

Cinematography
Hail Caesar
La La Land
Silence
Arrival
Moonlight

Production Design
Silence
La La Land
Arrival
Jackie
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Sound Mixing
La La Land
Hell or High Water
Hacksaw Ridge
Arrival
Patriots Day

Sound Editing
Arrival
La La Land
Patriots Day
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water

Costume Design
Hail Caesar
Jackie
Fantastic Beasts
La La Land
Love & Friendship

Original Score
La La Land
Patriots Day
Hell or High Water
Jackie
Moonlight

Foreign Language Feature
Toni Erdmann
The Salesman
Tanna
The King’s Choice
Paradise

Documentary Feature
O.J.: Made in America
13th
The Ivory Game
Gleason
Cameraperson
Tower

Animated feature
Zootopia
Kubo and the Two Strings
Moana
Sing
Finding Dory

Visual Effects
Arrival
Jungle Book
Arrival
A Monster Calls
Fantastic Beasts

Makeup and Hair
Hail Caesar
Florence Foster Jenkins
A Man Called ove