I Did Surprisingly Well on My Predictions. And You?

Though I feared a complete and utter breakdown of my predictive skills this year, as it turns out I did about the same as usual which is quite wonderful given how difficult those fifth spots were this year and how much you had to chuck statistical expectations to get it right (Riva and Haneke and Amour had so little precursor support but I had a feeling from way back that they'd find their way in, that they'd be "sticky" enough as it were in the memory)

The Big Eight in the high profile categories Picture, Director, Acting and Screenplays I had an 81% degree of accuracy with 36/44 nominees guessed correctly. 
All Categories Absent the Shorts 77% (83/107)
All Categories Including The Shorts 74%  (91/122)

Last Minute Mistakes - I had a perfect predicted set in Production Design until I swapped out Life of Pi at the last second, thinking that Django Unchained might win a farewell honor for J Michael Riva who died during production. And last last night I stated on Twitter my regret that I didn't predict Waltz over Redmayne in Supporting Actor (a no guts no glory call that gave me no glory...). I would've been 100% there too though I remain confused that Waltz won more attention than DiCaprio or Jackson whose work in tandem is the best the highly uneven Django has to offer.

Categories I'm Most Proud Of - It was a cinch to predict Adapted Screenplay this year -- interview coming up with one of the nominees -- so my 100% guesswork there is no biggie and nothing to shout about. But I'm pleasantly surprised that I went 9 for 9 in Best Picture for two reasons. The first is that since I had placed them in if 7... if 8... if 9... order and all 9 lined up that I was spot on and the second and even better reason is that apart from about ½ of Silver Linings Playbook and about ¼ of Django Unchained I think they're all really good movies and six of them are on my own top ten list (which has been delayed due to all this Oscar madness)

I knew Colleen Atwood's death-fetish royalty porn wouldn't fail in the Costume category

I'm also pleased that I went 4 for 5 in so many categories (13 in all!) but particularly the difficult cases of Actress and Costume Design (missing only Mirror Mirror - I had predicted A Royal Affair instead since they often like royalty porn and one foreign film in that shortlist), and Foreign Film (I missed only "No" but I'm THRILLED about the nomination since it's such a great movie) arguably my 3 top interests as categories go. I am not nearly as well versed in Documentaries and Sound Editing so I was stunned to call 4 of those 5 correctly too.

Silver LInings Playbook is the first film since 1981 to receive nominations in ALL acting categoriesMy Worst Categories This Year - Like everyone else the shocking Best Director lineup threw me (3/5) but at least I got the Hooper snub / Haneke in mix right but where I made the biggest judgement call errors was Supporting Actress where I let my Nicole Kidman mania persuade me that they'd preserve her wild genius abandon (the Globe & SAG nods are wondrous though) and I confess that I didn't consider Jacki Weaver to be in the running at all. I am a huge Jacki Weaver fan -- she offered to adopt me during the Animal Kingdom campaign, maybe my fondest memory of that awards year -- but I didn't think that Silver Linings Playbook gave her enough to do to win #1 placements. 

But my absolute worst prediction field this year was Animated Short. Many people don't predict this category but I predict all categories and the shorts can be really tough. I only corrected guessed 2 of the 5 and am saddened that the eye-popping fascinating Eagleman Stag and the hilariously rauncy Tram didn't make the cut. 

Where were you most mistaken and which categories do you feel proudly totes psychic about?

Oscar Nominations Announcement

[DRUM ROLL PLEASE] 

8:03 The nomination announcement begins in half an hour. My synapses are firing wildly, the coffee is brewed, and in a failed attempt to feel like a sane normal person going about one's daily routine a load of laundry was started. This was perhaps a bad idea since I'm likely to forget said laundry exists in 1/2 an hour. Once again, to borrow Tiffany's sound advice from Silver Linings Playbook I warn myself "Calm down, crazy." 

8:05 If you're as touched as I am in the head by those 13 ½ inch gold men you're up watching this

COMPLETE LIST OF NOMINEES AND MORE EARLY MORNING FREAKOUT AFTER THE JUMP (BUT HERE'S A VISUAL CHART INDEX IF YOU'D PREFER... AND HOW I PERFORMED PREDICTIVE-WISE and the TEN BIGGEST SURPRISES )

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Finally Final Predictions

Click on over to the Oscar Prediction Charts if you'd like to laugh at my broken crystal ball in time for the morning announcement. If you'd like more agonized reasoning there's this post from yesterday. A few of the pages are down for prep for tomorrow and more will be down as we approach the announcement (for the same reason). I'll type as fast as I can tomorrow.

This year seems extraordinarily hard to predict with beautifully wild "anything goes" 5th slot dreams abounding. Anne Hathaway would like to warn us that dreaming dreams can be dangerous but we can't help ourselves this time of year. The tigers come at night...

Nomination Morning is my Christmas Eve and the only thing I've asked Santa (aka The Academy) for is nominations for Kidman, McConaughey and Riva and something, anything, for Beasts of the Southern Wild which some people feel confident about but those 'some people' do not include me. Is it because it's so close to my heart and I need it in the Oscar history books? (And can I just express, right here and now, that the fact that all of these things are longshots is damn depressing)

• What did you ask Oscar Santa for? 
• And what are you expecting as your lump of coal in the morning?
• Do you take the day off work on Oscar nomination morning or warn them you'll be late? 

Final Nomination Predix: Big Day Ahead for Lincoln, Life, Les Miz

And here we are again.

I was amused to find myself named one of the 'Nate Silvers of the Oscar Race' today on Salon but Thursday morning will undoubtedly make the comparison less apt even if though we'll still share a first name (Nathaniel... why do people go by "Nate"?). In my soon-to-be needed defense it's a lot harder to successfully predict 120ish nominees in 24 categories that dozens of different groups are voting on (nominees, though not winners, are determined only by peers: actors voting for actors, directors for directors and so on) than it is to read an electoral map with only two candidates. Nor is their endless polling to guide us. Oscar voters aren't supposed to tell people who they're voting for. And even when they're willing to, filling out a weighted multi-named ballot is a lot different than checking a box for Candidate A or Candidate B when it comes time to let slip your favorites.

But I digress. Whatever the chaotic, agenda-driven, polarizing and exhausting race to Oscar nominations has in common with politics (quite a lot) we'll ditch the analogy now in order to dig in. I've never been one to care too deeply about statistics apart from the generalities they underline. So in the end I play my hunches.

PICTURE
Locks: Lincoln, Argo, Les Misérables, Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook

But What Else Will Be Nominated? infinite hand-wringing after the jump....

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Nom Nom Nom: The DGA's.

Hey, lovelies. Beau here, with the announcement of the DGA Nominees for 2013 whilst Nathaniel lunches with one of them.

• Ben Affleck, Argo 
• Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
• Tom Hooper, Les Miserables
• Ang Lee, Life of Pi
• Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

And so, the open spot goes to Tom Hooper, a recent recipient a couple years back for his work on The King’s Speech. If anything must be said about Les Miserables, it is that it is indeed a director’s vision; the intimacy of the camera superseding the largeness of the story in an effort to maximize the full emotional impact of the musical.

While I have many issues with the film, Hooper’s vision does lend itself well to Hathaway’s ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, the strongest scene in the film. Observing despair and bottling it in a shot that would have made Bergman proud, his attention to detail in Hathaway makes for something profoundly intimate and personal. That the rest of the film never lives up to this moment is not really surprising; its pacing and its reticence to self-edit do it a disservice, as the film never really gives its audience a moment to breathe and take in the considerable emotional toll. 

That being said, this is the lineup many have been predicting for quite some time now, give or take Hooper in place of Russell or Tarantino.  We’ll just have to see if Oscar feels the same way come Thursday morning.

Until then, dears. xo, Beau