Soon cineplexes near you will be bombarded with weighty films about important people who did important things and overcame great odds to do so. These films will serve as vehicles for their actors and directors to receive an obscene amount of praise and awards as the never ending onslaught of award shows march on. After about the umpteenth awards ceremony which rewards the exact same person for the exact same award though, even the prognosticators who make their living covering the Oscar race can find the repetitiveness of the whole game dull to the point of madness. However, a more difficult and entertaining challenge for would-be awards season soothsayers is to predict which few films released before the beginning of the prestige movie season can manage to maintain enough momentum to actually be remembered by the members of the Academy when it comes time to fill out their ballots. While the Academy tends to heavily favor films released later in the year, there are always some films released in the first three-quarters of the year which manage to garner a mention here and there. Here then is an educated stab in the dark at some films already released in 2014 that will hear their names called when the Academy finally announces the lucky few nominees in January 2015. Some of these potential nominees are more long shots than others, but regardless of their odds, they are all legitimate enough contenders that you can bet your bottom dollar they will be receiving Oscar campaigns.
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.
