As the precursor awards continue unabated until Oscar night, I’m going to be providing a weekly update highlighting the films that have won and lost momentum through the precursor awards (and in some cases other outside influences).

The 87th Oscar season has come to a close, as will our coverage very soon. Before that happens, we have a couple of articles to present to you. Today, we’ll go over the last of the precursor winners & losers that occurred just prior to the Oscars. There weren’t many (two to be exact), but their winners might have helped us predict depending on how big a night they had had. As for the next precursors? After Thanksgiving this year, the precursors will start for the 88th Oscars and we’ll be here to follow them.

Big Winners

Birdman walked away with several prizes, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Inarritu may not have won Best Director, but Linklater is much more familiar to this voting body than Inarritu who hasn’t done a lot of small indie work. That said, the victory should have acted as a forecast of things to come, but it arrived too late to do anything with.
The Grand Budapest Hotel won the Costume Designers Guild award, which clearly confirmed that it was the front-runner in that category.
Michael Keaton got to give his last speech of the season and although the Spirit Awards didn’t go 4-for-4 with the acting categories, it did incredibly well and there was no way Keaton wasn’t winning there.
Whiplash picked up two awards, the expected J.K. Simmons prize and an ultimate forecaster: Best Editing. Of course, it wasn’t the same competition, but winning over Boyhood would have been a sign had it not been too late already.
Nightcrawler may not have gotten Oscar love, but it did pick up two prizes from the Spirit Awards, which are a nice consolation either way.

Big Losers

Boyhood may have won the award for Best Director from the Spirit Awards, but he lost Best Picture, which was a troubling sign for the director. Still, Linklater is much more a part of the Film Independent family than Inarritu is.