84th Predictions: January

From now until the Oscar nominations, we’ll be bringing you periodic updates to our personal predictions for this year’s Oscar nominations (and after that our predictions for the winners). Today, after a series of guild nomination announcements and before we head into the first major awards-giving ceremonies of the year (Broadcast Critics tonight, Thursday, and Golden Globes on Sunday), we’re giving you an update of our predictions to this point. We’ve added Cinematography, Art Direction, Visual Effects and Documentary Feature since the associated guilds have presented their nominations. We’ll do the same thing next week after the remaining guilds go up and then if the next update isn’t our final, we’ll do one final list right before the nominations are announced on the morning of the 24th.

Here’s what we’re thinking at this point. While we have quite a bit of discrepancy in several categories, Best Picture, the most unusual of all of them, is the only one where we agree what ten films are competing for five to ten nomination slots. We don’t agree on which order, but our prevailing thoughts seem to lean towards 7 nominations, though they could get ten with the solidity of all of these contenders.

The Academy changed their nominations procedures for both Best Animated Feature and Best Picture. This created a bit of a quandary for us as the only way we could adequately share our predictions while giving the possibility of fewer than 10 (Picture) or 5 (Animated Feature) nominees. Now, the rules are different for each category. Animated Feature could have anywhere from 0 to 5 nominations depending on the quantity of animated features in release. With the number of entries, Animated Feature is likely set to feature 5 full nominations.

The rules for Best Picture are a bit more complex, To get a nomination for Best Picture, you must have at least 5% of the total vote. This isn’t necessarily just first place votes as the preferential balloting method the Academy uses, which is unnecessarily complex, can put votes into a film’s column even if they are second- or third-place votes. How this will all play out is a mystery to us. All we do know is that Best Picture could have anywhere from 5 to 10 nominations. There could be 5 or 7 or 8 or 10…we won’t know until the nominations are announced. Each of our contributors selected ten films for Best Picture and ranked them in the order they think the film is most likely to get an Oscar nomination. We then totaled the results and ranked the final list by our totals. 10 points for a first place vote, 9 for a second and so forth. In addition, we still color-code each predictions so you know how many of us put that contender on our lists. Below are the results of our labor.

As for deciphering what we have below in Best Picture? The numbers in parentheses next to our individual initials indicates how we ranked the film. The higher the points, the higher it’s ranked. The number to the left of the title indicates the total points between our three sets of prediction ranks.

KEY:

Appears on Three Lists
Appears on Two Lists

Wesley Lovell Peter Patrick Tripp Burton

(New) = New Prediction
(M) = May Prediction
(A) = August Prediction
(S) = September Prediction
(N) = November Prediction
(SAG) = Post-SAG Prediction
(J) = January Prediction