April Foolish Predictions: Best Supporting Actor

by Nathaniel R

Samuel L Jackson was Tony-nominated for The Piano Lesson on Broadway. Will the transfer result in another Oscar nomination?

It's the last four days of April Foolish Predcitions and, thus, time for the acting categories. A year out nobody knows anything, particularly in regards to the supporting categories since they're less dependent on juicy obvious-from-a-distance leading roles and far more dependent on things you can't really know in advance like who will "steal" the movie, how large their supporting roles will be, and whether they'll film will have enough heat to ignite their campaigns. This is when it's most fun, especially in the supporting categories where you can imagine almost anything happen. By the time the televised awards roll around each year there is zero drama in Best Supporting Actor (though we infrequenely see some in Best Supporting Actress).

Last year's lopsided contest was the Robert vs Ryan showdown with two full blown movie stars competing for the supporting gold, one leaning into a career achievement narrative while the other was content to ride his film's pink zeitgeist wave rather than worry about the gold...

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April Foolish Predictions: Eye Candy and Music

by Nathaniel R

The Dietzes are back in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" and so is costume design goddess Collen Atwood. Photo © Parisa Taghizadeh for Warner Bros

Our April Foolish tradition continues with the visual and sound categories. For this installment we're just picking highlights from our crystal ball. Read on...

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April Foolish Predictions: What will happen in 'Toon Town'?

by Nathaniel R

Will the new emotions in "Inside Out 2" impress voters?

Last season, we finally saw another hand drawn film take the Best Animated Feature Oscar with The Boy and the Heron emerging triumphant. Will we have another rarity this year or will Oscar voters return to their Pixar and/or American CG habits? Each year we root for the underdogs in this category since great studios like Laika and Cartoon Saloon have yet to take home an Oscar. Sadly, neither of those companies will have a film ready this year. Still, we'll dream that it will prove a truly competitive year no matter what emerges. That always makes it more exciting.

Herewith our April Foolish predictions...

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Final Oscar Predictions!

by Nathaniel R

It's that time again. The Oscars are Sunday night so it's time to make those final calls. Oppenheimer is poised to win big but HOW big exactly? Clean sweeps have gone out of fashion in the past 25 years. The only "clean sweep" this century -- aka a movie nominated for a lot of Oscars that won ALL of them on Hollywood's High Holy night -- was 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Even more interesting than Hollywood's turn away from sweeps is that it's become common the Best Picture winner to NOT win the most Oscars. We like it when they spread the wealth but the overperformance last year of Everything Everywhere All At Once suggests that Hollywood may be entering sweep-mindset again.

We expect that Chris Nolan's atomic biopic Oppenheimer will have the biggest Oscar haul since Return of the King on Sunday though it won't break any records...

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11 Quick Observations about the Oscar Nominations

Did you toon into the Oscar nominations this morning. Jack Quaid and Zazie Beetz (in particular) did a fine enthusiastic job of announcing the nominations in Oscar's 23 categories. There were surprises and shut-outs and overperformers as per usual. You can see the complete list of nominations at the Oscar Charts Index Page (though the individual charts per category are not yet updated).

Herewith 11 quick obversations about the nominations before we dive in to individual categories.

1. BARBIE FATIGUE (SORT OF)
While America Ferrera nabbed the Oscar nod we predicted for her in Best Supporting Actress (we went 5/5 on that volatile category in our predictions) Barbie received just 8 nominations overall. That's a lot, of course, but it isn't a lot in terms of expectations and how well the film had been performing at precursors...

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