For Oscar fanatics and obsessives, it's better than Christmas morning. Perhaps maybe even more than the ceremony itself, which has tended to be anti-climatic over the last decade or two thanks to the endless glut of "precursor" ceremonies, the announcement of the annual Academy Awards nominations is one of the singular most anticipated moments of the year. While in any given category, many of the nominees at this point in the game have been pre-ordained, it's the unforeseen left-field surprise inclusion and omissions that keep the Oscar neurotic in a slight state of anticipatory frenzy as whichever unlucky Hollywood star, who clearly rather be sleeping than talking on television at 5:30 in the morning, garbles out the year's lucky chosen few that the Academy has deemed "nomination-worthy". And it's these unanticipated inclusions and omissions that create such a headache for the Oscar punditry crowd (and the gambling addicted). Who will be this year's Ben Zeitlin and Michael Haneke, shocking many with their inclusion in the Best Director field last year? Who will be this year's Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow, who managed to miss out on Best Director nominations despite their films' statuses as leading contenders for Best Picture (of which Affleck's film, Argo, went on to win)? Who will be this year's Jacki Weaver, who received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook despite having no discernable presence in any of the prior precursor awards up to the Academy Awards? These are the question that are nagging at the so-called "professionals", because the truth is, no matter what anyone may say, except for a few employees from PricewaterhouseCoopers, nobody knows. While we can be reasonably sure about a great many of the nominees thanks to a combination of the onslaught of precursor awards handed out prior to the nominations, statistical and historical analysis, and good old fashion intuition, Oscar predicting is no more a science than phrenology ever was. In fact, when you get down to it, Oscar punditry is more akin to water divining than to any recognized science, so even for those pundits that do manage to correctly predict some nomination that nobody else saw coming, it probably was more luck than anything else. Despite this futile and semi-nihilistic view of Oscar predicting, it's just too much fun not to play the game, which is why as an Oscar pundit myself, I have concocted a list of predictions, for every category (excluding the shorts categories which I didn't feel qualified to speak on), for this Thursday's Academy Award nominations announcement. It's difficult task no matter what the crop of a particular year's films may look like, but with so many well-reviewed films, with big name stars and directors attached as well as passionate fanbases lending their vocal support, this proved to be especially difficult. Nevertheless, after much careful thought and consideration (for whatever they're worth), here is my final thoughts and predictions on the 2014 Oscar race.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
