The first guild to announce every year is the Screen Actors Guild, which now reveals their nominees in early December (this year it was on Dec. 9, 2015). Their reasoning is that with the nominees in place, work can begin on preparing their annual telecast. This is a perfectly understandable decision, but it does create some confusion when they don’t get to see a number of films that release later in the year or if their small nominating committee happens to lean towards a particular style of film that another group might not. As such, we count the beginning of the guild segment of Precursor Season as the first post-SAG nomination set announced.

On Jan. 4, 2016, the American Cinema Editors will become that first guild and over the next three weeks, a string of dominoes will fall each representing one of the eleven guilds. The reason the guilds are so important is that they tend to help clear the air of what has become common perception thanks to effusive praise from critics and give us a much more grounded look at what’s coming from the Academy Awards. Since members of the Academy are also members of their respective craft guilds, it can give you an idea of where the Academy’s thinking might be.

With the critics largely finished for the year (all that remains are the Georgia Film Critics Association, National Society of Film Critics, Oklahoma Film Critics and the London Film Critics Circle awards). Barring any strange inclusions from these groups, we have a fairly firm grasp of where the critics are coming from and what their ultimate influence might be on the Oscars.

Exploring the potential nominees category-by-category, I’m going to explain my current thoughts on the Oscar Hopefuls that I updated on Dec. 29, 2015 as well as look at how the guild races in those categories might shake out what we’ve currently come to see as the conventional wisdom of the season.

I’ll start with categories that have narrowed to a slim number of submissions and then work my way through the creative and tech categories before finishing off with the top tier categories with Best Picture as the natural finale. Since none of the three short film categories will be impacted by the various guild nominations, I’ll skip those and save them for my final Oscar Morning post coming in mid-January.

Best Documentary Feature

The Producers Guild of America (PGA), which has already announced its nominees in this category, is not the only guild that recognizes documentaries. The Writers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America and American Cinema Editors also have categories. While none of these voting bodies are likely to overlap with the Academy’s documentary branch, a particularly popular feature could presage inclusion.

There are fifteen titles on the final shortlist for this category. Only two documentaries seem like safe bets for nomination, Amy and The Look of Silence. Both have been dominating the critics awards and both were nominated by the PGA for Best Documentary. Of the remaining three PGA nominees, only two of them made the final list with the Academy, Meru and The Hunting Ground. Neither should be counted out, but the PGA isn’t a great precursor, so having 4-of-5 sync up seems a bit wrong.

Cartel Land, Best of Enemies and Going Clear are the other major documentaries that have been doing well with the precursors so far. None of these, not even The Look of Silence can stand up to the dominance of Amy, but any one of them could also get nominated. The Hunting Ground has also done well with critics as has Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next. He Named Me Malala might have seemed a dominant player earlier this year, but the reported lack of craft has led to its fall from hefty consideration. Heart of Dog could be a crowd-pleaser, but the Academy’s documentary voters aren’t always interested in that kind of thing.

What Happened Miss Simone? and Listen to Me Marlon could be dark horse candidates, but I suspect their support is soft enough that they’ll ultimately be forgotten. The documentary I think that has the most potential for getting a nomination is Winter on Fire, which is an incendiary look at the conflict in Ukraine and its topicality could easily be a boon to its chances.

Best Foreign Language Film

I wouldn’t expect too much to change between now and Oscar Morning, but if any major foreign language film plays a part in the guild nominations, especially since only the Motion Picture Sound Editors have any kind of categories specifically for that type of effort, it could give us an idea of what is playing well with discerning palates and might bring added attention to any one of the nominees.

The Academy narrowed its selections to nine films. Only one of these seems a foregone conclusion, the likely eventual winner Son of Saul. Set in a Auschwitz, the Holocaust story is right up the Academy’s alley. The rest of the field has roughly even chances of capturing the remaining four slots.However, there are a few elements to some of these films that could give them a boost.

Labyrinth of Lies deals with the Holocaust like Son of Saul does, but it follows the events well afterwards as a lawyer tries to decide whether seeking justice is more important than letting the community heal. Of the remaining eight films, this one seems to best play into the Academy’s penchant for World War II narratives. Mustang and The Brand New Testament have both performed quite well in the precursors, which give them a leg up on their competition. That France hasn’t been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film since 2009 even when it seemed sure to claim a nomination could give one pause before selecting Mustang.

Theeb, Embrace the Serpent, Viva and A War seem to have their supporters and any one of them could fill out the remaining one or two slots. The only film that doesn’t seem to have much of a chance, The Fencer, might be the perfect candidate for one of those oddball nominations the Academy occasionally throws out there.

Best Visual Effects

And then there were ten. There aren’t a lot of precursors out there that recognize visual effects, but the Visual Effects Society, in spite of its incredibly lengthy list of categories, is the best bet for assessing trends that might help predict the category. Suffice it to say, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Mad Max: Fury Road are most likely the top two potential nominees. The latter because of its strong showing with critics who vote in the category and the former because it’s the colossal return of a visual effects heavy franchise.

Jurassic World‘s outsized grosses suggest the film should still play well with Oscar voters even if there isn’t a lot of new technology at play. Likewise, The Martian may not seem as dominant as the others. Ant-Man and Tomorrowland are lucky to be on the final list. Avengers: Age of Ultron is jampacked with visual effects, but that might be too much for some voters who are looking for more subtle uses of technique.

Likewise, The Revenant may have too few uses of visual effects to earn a nomination. The focus has been placed on the bear mauling scene, but one scene does not a Best Visual Effects nominee make. It surely impressed the voters initially, but will it be enough to eke out a nomination? I’m not so sure. The Walk‘s sheer audacity and stomach-churning 3D effects might be enough to get it nominated along with the recreation of the World Trade Center twin towers; however, I think it’s running a race for a close 6th-place finish.

What leads me to Ex Machina as the fifth nominee is that it’s held its own through precursor season against the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road and its more subdued, but obvious usage may just be enough to put it over the top. Add to that the fact that the film has found new legs thanks to the support of critics in several categories, including Best Supporting Actress contender Alicia Vikander (upon whom the visual effects are significantly important) and you have a fairly good reason to suspect it will get a nomination.

The Visual Effects Society nominates a lot of films in those multitudes of categories, so it won’t be who’s nominated, but how frequently among the categories that determines just how potent a contender each of these films ultimately is.

Best Makeup & Hairstyling

While the Make-up & Hair Stylists Guild (MHG) would seem the perfect predictor of the Oscar category for Best Makeup & Hairstyling, their short-lived history makes it difficult to assess just how accurate they will be. Add to the mix the fact that incredibly few critics groups recognize makeup and it becomes almost a guessing game as to what will contend and what won’t.

Start your selections with the most obvious of the seven finalists. Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant seem like clear contenders with copious amounts of prosthetic and traditional makeup effects in evidence. If either or both of these are excluded, it would be a shock. That leaves one slot for five potential films.

I’ll immediately toss Mr. Holmes, which does a lot with aging Ian McKellen, but will it be noticeable enough to capture the branch’s imaginations; Concussion, which can only claim to slightly modify Will Smith’s visage with some other effects that might be more prominent on a sizzle reel; and Legend which mostly just differentiates itself by making Tom Hardy look like two different people. These three films all use fairly subtle effects, which don’t tend to appeal to this branch.

This leaves two: Black Mass and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. Few people have seen the latter and while the Academy loves aging effects, will the obscurity of and lengthy title be a determinet? Possibly. However, Black Mass has in its favor the radical transformation of Johnny Depp, a showy affair that so dominates the film that it conjures memories of the flap over Nicole Kidman’s nose in The Hours. Hopefully the MHG will clarify things.

Best Sound Mixing & Best Sound Editing

It’s too bad there are no bake-offs in either of these categories. It might make it easier to choose from the copious amounts of films where sound and sound effects are such dominant factors. The Cinema Audio Society (Sound Mixing) and Motion Picture Sound Editors (Sound Editing) may help clarify the competition some, but as with all guilds, they aren’t definitive.

I combine the two categories because they are so similar that trying to explain to the uninitiated or film neophyte is like explaining the difference between sine and cosine to non-math students. They’ve also had an unquestionable connection to one another over the years with few films winning one award and not the other. While this has been less frequent in recent years, the tendency is still towards awarding the same film for both (largely because of the general confusion among Academy members).

Likewise, the correlation of nominees between the two categories is almost as inextricable as separating the nominees for Best Production Design and Best Costume Design. Those two categories are easily distinguishable from one another, but frequently fall in line as well. Theese two categories also don’t have a lot of attention from critics making it harder to make predictions here without the guilds.

I have four films shared between the two categories, Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Hateful Eight and The Revenant. History has shown that each of these films has a strong chance of being nominated, either by being the visual effects extravaganza of the year (Star Wars) or being the technical marvel everyone seems to be talking about (Mad Max: Fury Road) or belong to directors who’ve had success here in the past (Alejandro G. Inarritu’s The Revenant and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight).

Of these, I feel one of them has soft enough support that it could easily be ignored (The Hateful Eight) and another is perhaps too subtle for the Academy (The Revenant). However, given the Academy’s sound department’s openness to recognizing unusual selections here (think Birdman or The Social Network or No Country for Old Men.

The films I have split between the two categories are The Martian in Best Sound Mixing and Sicario in Best Sound Editing. I don’t have a simple explanation for this, I’ll just say that war films seem to do better in Sound Editing than they do in Sound Mixing, but either film could really get nominated in both. Outside of these, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Jurassic World are like strong competitors for nominations. Also, don’t count out the inventive soundscape of Inside Out. Pixar is no stranger to these categories and could reap the benefit of a divided slate.

Best Production Design & Best Costume Design

Once the purview almost solely of the costume drama, Best Production Design and Best Costume Design are so frequently tied together that usually only one film each year fails to make both lists. This tendency has changed over the last decade, but it’s still common enough to be a safe bet.

The Art Directors Guild (ADG) and Costume Designers Guild (CDG) will each have something to say about potential contenders. However, since they split their nominations between Period, Fantasy and Contemporary, it’s sometimes difficult to pick out which of those fifteen nominees will make the final list, though the least likely ones to copy over are in the contemporary categories.

My current predictions align only three nominees: Carol, Brooklyn and The Danish Girl. The Danish Girl is probably my weakest choice in both categories, but with few other period dramas getting much attention in other races, it’s possible it can still pull things off.

In Best Production Design, my two non-carry-over nominees are Bridge of Spies and Mad Max: Fury Road. Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies had the difficulty of re-creating a historical representation of Berlin Wall-separated Germany. That concept should give his film a boost when all things are considered. Mad Max: Fury Road creates such a visually resplendent dystopian future that it’s been the most dominant player among the few critics groups to give out an award in this category.

For Best Costume Design, Cinderella and Crimson Peak are my two outliers. I’m not confident on Crimson Peak, but it reminds me of the costumes for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which won the Oscar in their year. It’s possible that an oddball, poorly received film can get the nomination, but I’d say it’s one of the weaker entries on the list. Cinderella seems like a safe choice, especially when you consider it’s beloved costume designer Sandy Powell behind them, but she’s up for Carol already and while a double nomination isn’t out of the question, there are a few other potential contenders waiting in the wings.

The Hateful Eight, The Martian, The Revenant and Star Wars: The Force Awakens are all serious contenders for Best Production Design. Far from the Madding Crowd, The Hateful Eight, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant and Suffragette are also solid bets for Best Costume Design. We’ll know more after the ADG and CDG announce.

Best Cinematography

Above all other guilds, this is the guild you should most pay attention to. While many of them have an excessive number of categories that all tie together for a broader picture of the single category at the Oscars, the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) only has one and it matches up with the Oscars 4-for-5 in most years.

Based on the critics, one film has dominated the awards, Mad Max: Fury Road with The Revenant a distant second. Both films have been well represented among critics’ nominations, though so both getting nominated seems like. Other prominent players so far are Carol and Sicario. The lion’s share of nominations and all of the awards so far have gone to these four films. That is one of the reasons these four films and their cinematographers John Seale (four Oscar nominations, including one win for The English Patient), Emmanuel Lubezki (seven Oscar nods, including wins in each of the last two years),Edward Lachman (Oscar nominee for Far from Heaven) and Roger Deakins (twelve Oscar nominations and no wins) are very likely nominees.

What of the fifth slot? That’s a good question. There has been light chatter for acclaimed cinematographers Robert Richardson (The Hateful Eight), Janusz Kaminski (Bridge of Spies), and Darius Wolski (The Martian) along with lesser known directors of photography Yves Belanger (Brooklyn), and Masanobu Takayanagi (Spotlight). This represents a tough choice, but I ultimately believe that Richardson will pull out the fifth slot, but ASC could definitely change my impressions on that.

Best Film Editing

There are few categories with more impact on Best Picture than Best Film Editing. These two categories have been inextricably tied for several decades. Even though Birdman won Best Picture without a Best Film Editing nomination, it was the first time this had occurred in 34 years (Ordinary People claimed Best Picture of 1980 without the nomination). As a matter of fact, a snub in this category has been a sign that the year’s Best Picture frontrunner isn’t so solid with both The Color Purple and Brokeback Mountain stumbling after the exclusions.

Birdman‘s apparent lack of cuts kept it from getting a nomination, but make no mistake a failure to secure a nomination here means trouble in the top category, so everyone will be glued to the outcomes here.

The American Cinema Editors (ACE) have multiple categories, but the one for Best Drama Editing may be the best precursor there is when looking at the Oscars. So, keep an eye out early next week for this one to get an idea of what to expect on Oscar Morning.

As for my predictions, the current Best Picture frontrunner, Spotlight has to get mentioned here or it will be a tough hill to climb if not. The top three most nominated films so far this season are Mad Max, The Martian, and The Revenant. Sicario, Spotlight and The Big Short aren’t far behind. As to what’s been winning the most awards, the landslide victor has been Mad Max: Fury Road with ten victories to date, The only other two films to achieve a victory are The Big Short and Steve Jobs, neither of which seem like major Oscar contenders.

I’ll hedge my bets and go with the five with the most frequent nominations. However, ACE could give us something new to chew on and that will be interesting.

That’s it for this first article. I’ll be covering the remaining eleven categories tomorrow (hopefully).