Aug 30th - All Oscar Charts Updated!

by Nathaniel R

We've been needing to update all the Oscar charts and we've just about waited too long since Venice and Telluride have begun and soon things will be changing daily. But let it suffice to say that these are hunches just before the festival explosion. Team Experience is off to TIFF next week when we'll be seeing a lot of the contenders and consensus will begin to form around half of the titles, too. Some key November/December films will remain a mystery until just before their release, though.

The freshly revamped charts...

PREDICTION INDEX |  PICTURE | DIRECTOR | ACTOR  | ACTRESS | SUPPORTING ACTOR | SUPPORTING ACTRESS | SCREENPLAYS | FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM | VISUALS | SOUNDS | ANIMATED FEATURES

And about that 'Popular Achievement Oscar' Thingamabob... 

We haven't yet added a chart since Oscar has released no details about what they plan -- have they planned any details?  -- but I've added a list of 8 films I predict could compete for it at the bottom of the Best Picture chart. Naturally half of them are already on the Best Picture chart, since we hardly need such a category.

New Academy Rulings = Catastrophe

Oh dear.

Whatever goodwill Oscar has gained recently with their commendable efforts to diversify their membership appears to have not appeased their naked NEED to more popular with people who they'll never be popular with. Three new changes have been announced two of which are potentially catastrophic.

Let's take them in order of least to most upsetting.

The Oscars will be earlier after this year. 
The 2019 Oscars will be held on February 9th, 2020. The benefit of rushing the Oscars is that it also helps alleviate (in theory) the December glut as well as the ever-tacky "one week qualifier" release tactic that feel like cheating even though it's technically just fine with the rulebooks...

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Best Casablanca Quotes

Tomorrow is your last day to vote on the Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1943. Casablanca wasn't nominated in that category but it took the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. In addition to being economically constructed -- those 102 minutes fly by every time (in fact, it's the 8th shortest Best Picture winner ever) -- it's got generous helpings of contenders for 'best line ever'. So I asked this month's panel to share their favorite line or exchange from that immortal classic.

Here's what we all chose...

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Release date shuffle. The backloading begins with "Boy Erased" and "On the Basis of Sex"

by Nathaniel R

Ah.... statue lust. It invariably shoves everything into the last two months of the year. This just in: Focus has pushed back both of its key contenders this year: Boy Erased, the gay conversion drama, is moving the beginning of its platform release from September 28th until November 2nd and On the Basis of Sex, the biopic on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is moving its limited launch from November 9th until December 25th. Though pushing back a little seems kind of wise for On the Basis of Sex (put a little distance between yourself and RBG) Christmas seems like a step too far. Or is that just me? 

We expect a few more Oscar contenders to push back into December. Why? Well, despite statistics being in favor of releasing in October or November if you'd like to win e--  The Shape of Water (2017) was actually the first Best Picture winner to begin its release in December since Million Dollar Baby (2004) -- common beliefs are hard to shake and Hollywood has long viewed a December berth as the be-all and end-all of awards strategies. There is a good reason for that though we hate to admit it: despite December being tough for Best Picture wins in the modern era (momentum needed!) it is and basically always has been easier to get nominations if you release in December. Try to imagine, say, The Post, being nominated last year had it come out in September. It doesn't happen. But in December it had so much pre-release hype as an assumed frontrunner that it was able to weather lukewarm precursor attention and snag the nod.  

Wings (1927) the first best picture winner. It still holds up. For fun here's a list of when every Best Picture ever first opened in theaters excluding festival debuts obviously. (Some of the dates are a bit fuzzy, of course, that's especially true for ye olden times when listings are harder to come by and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between event premieres and the actual beginning of a platform release...

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Blueprints: "Moonlight"

To celebrate Pride Month, every week of June Jorge has been highlighting the script of a movie that focuses on a different letter of the LGBT acronym. For “G”, he looks at the poetry in Moonlight. 

When La La Land took the Best Picture statue at the 2016 Oscars for about five minutes, it wasn’t an Earth shattering surprise. It was the kind of movie that wins Oscars. The twist, from a mixed up envelope, was the fact that a small independent film about queer people of color had actually managed to go above all the other nominees for the big trophy was what had made the Earth shatter.

Moonlight is not a traditional Best Picture winner, in everything from themes to distribution model to narrative structure to protagonist. It won three Oscars in total, including Best Adapted Screenplay. It is also not a traditional screenplay. Let’s see how the script transmitted emotion through descriptive lines...

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