Selma is truly this year's wildcard of the awards season. A late-breaking film that almost no Oscar pundit had on their radar, when the film had its surprise premiere in November at the AFI Fest, it became an automatic contender in the 2015 Best Picture race. For weeks it seemed the only thing the Oscar-centric world wanted to talk about was the unexpected arrival of Selma as a major contender in the awards season. Once the actual awards started to be handed out though, enthusiasm for the film's Oscar prospects died down. Outside of some critics' notifications and a decent amount of Golden Globe nominations, Selma was nowhere to be found in the all-important guilds awards. However, the members of these guilds were not sent screeners (i.e. free dvds) of Selma due to its late completion, so many of them likely simply did not see the movie. The good news for Selma though is that screeners were sent to Academy members. The film's lofty subject matter, the civil rights march led by Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, would also seem to be up the Academy's alley, although even on this front the film has received flack from historians for its historically inaccurate portrayal of the relationship between LBJ and Dr. King. The film is truly a mixed bag then that is hard to predict its future, but scroll through any Oscar history book and you'll see that all the right pieces are there for Selma to become a Best Picture nominee.
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.