PREDICTIONS FOR THE 86th ACADEMY AWARDS

Shall we do this thing? Let's do this thing. It's the thing that American cinephiles get to do instead of caring about sports statistics, and I've had several weak years of predictions in a row, so I'm starting to get hungry to redeem myself.

Best Picture
12 Years a Slave
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Dallas Buyers Club
Gravity
Her
Nebraska
Philomena
The Wolf of Wall Street

WON: 12 YEARS A SLAVE
Will Win: 12 Years a Slave
Spoiler: Gravity
My Pick: Gravity

Cutting to the chase: for anything but 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, or American Hustle to win would require an unprecedented break with all sorts of patterns, and American Hustle looks pretty damn weak. That leaves with a seemingly irresolvable choice between the film which is unquestionably going to win the most awards, but is also widely perceived to be a simple if well-crafted thriller, and the film of all nine nominees to trumpet its Grand Importance most obviously. There's only feeling your way through this one, not logicking it through. That said, I'm predicting that Importance is too much to pass up, and we're looking at at a Godfather/Cabaret-style split between the crowd-pleasing spectacle (though Cabaret is more overtly serious than Gravity) that can't quite pip the sprawling tour of American history for the wind. Heck, I think 12 Years even takes the Godfather hand of Picture, Adapted Screenplay and an acting award as its total haul.

That the Best Picture win is neck-and-neck between two movies I genuinely and significantly admire is a weird state of affairs that has not happened in my lifetime, and I pray does not happen again soon.


Best Director
Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity
Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave
Alexander Payne, Nebraska
David O. Russell, American Hustle
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

WON: ALFONSO CUARÓN
Will Win: Alfonso Cuarón
Spoiler: Steve McQueen
My Pick: Alfonso Cuarón

There is, at this point, no defensible reason to genuinely expect anyone other than DGA winner Cuarón, whose project is after all a hell of an achievement in visual storytelling and crafting an onscreen reality. That even 12 Years partisans seem content to say that it's not McQueen's best work - in fact, from a directorial standpoint, I even think it's his least - means there's no apparent urge to honor the man who is, let's be honest, a lot less likely than Cuarón to ever show up in this race ever again, unless he has a massive personality transplant before his next project enters production.


Best Actor
Christian Bale, American Hustle
Bruce Dern, Nebraska
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

WON: MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY
Will Win: Matthew McConaughey
Spoiler: Leonardo DiCaprio
My Pick: Chiwetel Ejiofor

If there's going to be an acting category surprise - and there very often is, though not always - it'll be in this hugely overstuffed category, maybe the best of the whole lot (but then, it was an absurdly strong years for lead actors - you could make a top 5 entirely out of Oscar-friendly performances in mainstream American movies without including any of these nominees, and it would look just as great). McConaughey has been running the boards and has that whole "wow, you can act!" narrative, now in its second year, and that makes him hard to bet against. But anybody besides Bale has a fairly clear route to victory, if we're going to be rational about it.


Best Actress
Amy Adams, American Hustle
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Judi Dench, Philomena
Meryl Streep, August: Osage County

WON: CATE BLANCHETT
Will Win: CATE BLANCHETT
Spoiler: Amy Adams
My Pick: Cate Blanchett

Adams is the only nominee to have never won an Oscar, and this is one of the few places that American Hustle boosters can focus their energies on a win. but Blanchett has taken everything this awards season that wasn't nailed down, and she's considered due a "real" Oscar and not just a Supporting win, which makes no sense to me, but it's my favorite performance here too, so what do I know. There were a few hours back in January where it looked like the Woody Allen scandal might hurt her, but that was a long time ago and it self-evidently didn't take hold.


Best Supporting Actor
Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips
Bradley Cooper, American Hustle
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street
Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club

WON: JARED LETO
Will Win: JARED LETO
Spoiler: Barkhad Abdi
My Pick: Michael Fassbender

I still don't see what's more than commonly special about Leto's performance, and I think Abdi's "from taxi driver to Tom Hanks kidnapper" personal narrative is, on paper, too wonderful to even think about passing up. And yet here we are, and while Leto's not as locked up as Blanchett, it would qualify as a massive upset for him to lose.


Best Supporting Actress
Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave
Julia Roberts, August: Osage County
June Squibb, Nebraska

WON: LUPITA NYONG'O
Will Win: Lupita Nyong'o
Spoiler: Jennifer Lawrence
My Pick: Sally Hawkins

By no means 12 Years a Slave's safest category, but I think the consensus that even JLaw the Great and Powerful doesn't deserve back-to-back Oscars at age 23 - she's no Louise Rainer, for God's sake - has fully congealed, and Nyong'o's splashy breakthrough is safe enough that we don't need to debate it. Unless there's some massive groundswell of support for Squibb that nobody's even thinking about predicting; this is, after all, the only place that Nebraska could even conceivably win.

Incidentally, this is the only acting category for which I would, given my druthers, throw out everybody and start over from scratch. Sarah Paulson's absence genuinely pisses me off.


Best Adapted Screenplay
12 Years a Slave, by John Ridley
Before Midnight, by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, & Ethan Hawke
Captain Phillips, by Billy Ray
Philomena, by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope
The Wolf of Wall Street, by Terence Winter

WON: 12 YEARS A SLAVE
Will Win: 12 Years a Slave
Spoiler: Philomena
My Pick: Before Midnight, but not in this category

12 Years is too big an event film to win nothing, and this is certainly its safest berth. There are unconvincing arguments for Philomena (a BAFTA win, but that it had home court advantage there), but we'd have to assume that the Academy genuinely hates 12 Years for it to miss here.


Best Original Screenplay
American Hustle, Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
Blue Jasmine, by Woody Allen
Dallas Buyers Club, by Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack
Her, by Spike Jonze
Nebraska, by Bob Nelson

WON: HER
Will Win: Her
Spoiler: American Hustle
My Pick: American Hustle

Best Picture is impossible to predict because it is capricious; this is, in my eyes, the actual hardest category to predict all night. WGA says we go with Her, and that's pretty damn telling; but this is also American Hustle's strongest play in any of its categories, and do we really want to predict that the nomination leader goes home empty-handed? There's precedent for it to go either way, but nothing to make you sleep soundly at night.


Best Cinematography
The Grandmaster (Philippe Le Sourd)
Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Bruno Delbonnel)
Nebraska (Phedon Papamichael)
Prisoners (Roger Deakins)

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Inside Llewyn Davis
My Pick: Gravity

The farther I get from the early hand-wringing about "oh, but it's digital!", the more I think that Gravity's cinematography can be compared to Avatar and Life of Pi only if we are using it as a stick to beat up on them. Emmanuel Lubezki still made all the decisions about lighting and movement, it looks in virtually every frame like something he shot, and the much-publicised "lighting Sandra's face" anecdote makes it clear that it was a shitload of work for it too look so casually flawless. Anyway, the argument that it's not "real" because he's not using a camera somewhat misses the fact that in any case, Lubezki isn't actually responsible for the mechanical actions that cause movie to be captured; he has a team of assistants to do the finagling for him (and with the long shots he favors, there's a lot of finagling to be done). In this case, they're using keyboards and computers to do their work instead of rotating dials on a lens; the creative work is the same either way.

All of which is my way of saying: Lubezki basically can't lose. I don't mean to tempt fate like that. But he basically can't.


Best Editing
12 Years a Slave (Joe Walker)
American Hustle (Jay Cassidy, Crispin Struthers, Alan Baumgarten)
Captain Phillips (Christopher Rouse)
Dallas Buyers Club (John Mac McMurphy, Martin Pensa)
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Sanger)

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Captain Phillips
My Pick: Gravity

Almost as hard as Original Screenplay, and for not dissimilar reasons: Captain Phillips isn't winning anywhere else, and it's a Best Picture nominee and all. And it won the ACE award, which is telling, but not definitively so. For its part, Gravity is too close to taking the top prize for me to confidently discard its chances of winning a prize that so often goes hand-in-hand with Best Picture. I do not like this one, not one tiny bit. Incidentally, if any of the other three wins, it will be taking Best Picture along with it.


Best Production Design
12 Years a Slave (Adam Stockhausen; Alice Baker)
American Hustle (Judy Becker; Heather Loeffler)
Gravity (Andy Nicholson; Rosie Goodwin, Joanne Woollard)
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin; Beverley Dunn)
Her (K.K. Barrett; Gene Serdena)

WON: THE GREAT GATSBY
Will Win: THE GREAT GATSBY
Spoiler: American Hustle
My Pick: Her

I've squinted and pretended there's some way to justify arguing that Her might win (it won't), and toyed with wondering if the Cinematography and VFX locks for Gravity might help it here (nope). Outside of some potential that the much more realitistic and grueling locations in 12 Years, along with its Best Picture pole position, might nudge its towards a win, Gatsby is far too cleanly in line with everything the Academy has ever loved in this category: glitz, style, and scale.


Best Costume Design
12 Years a Slave (Patricia Norris)
American Hustle (Michael Wilkinson)
The Grandmaster (William Chang Suk Ping)
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
The Invisible Woman (Michael O'Connor)

WON: THE GREAT GATSBY
Will Win: THE GREAT GATSBY
Spoiler: American Hustle
My Pick: I have not seen all of the nominees

Costuming is already a significant aspect of the novel; Catherine Martin makes it damn near the overriding aspect of the movie. Gaudy or gorgeous, take your pick, but there's too much volume to ignore. 12 Years is too drably realistic; American Hustle is probably too recent (though I wouldn't be, like, SHOCKED shocked if it won), and the other two films are much too small.


Best Makeup & Hairstyling
Dallas Buyers Club
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
The Lone Ranger

WON: DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
Will Win: Dallas Buyers Club
Spoiler: Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
My Pick: Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa

A category that pretty much misfired in getting to the final three. None is objectively and by a vast margin better than the other two; in the absence of other pressures, Dallas is by far the least embarrassing outcome.


Best Score
The Book Thief (John Williams)
Gravity (Steven Price)
Her (William Butler and Owen Pallett)
Philomena (Alexandre Desplat)
Saving Mr. Banks (Thomas Newman)

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Saving Mr. Banks
My Pick: Her

Gravity is set to join the list of worthy winners for the wrong reasons: it has some fascinatingly unconventional orchestrations and electronic manipulations, but the bit that voters will be thinking about is the syrupy "YOU WILL FEEL WHAT I TELL YOU TO FEEL" gestures in the final act. Desplat has to win eventually, but not as long as the music branch keeps passing up his great scores for his mediocre and middlebrow ones at the nomination stage.


Best Song
From Despicable Me 2: "Happy"
From Frozen: "Let It Go"
From Her: "The Moon Song"
From Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom: "Ordinary Love"

WON: "LET IT GO"
Will Win: "Let It Go"
Spoiler: "Ordinary Love"
My Pick: "Let It Go"

If it was just U2, or just Pharrell Williams, we might even have a race on our hands. But if there is an anti-"Let It Go" contingent, it has no flag to rally around. And even a brief tour of YouTube will demonstrate that if there is an anti-"Let It Go" contingent, it is badly outnumbered.


Best Sound Mixing
Captain Phillips
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Gravity
Inside Llewyn Davis
Lone Survivor

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Inside Llewyn Davis
My Pick: Gravity

Musicals typically have a leg up here, and I am reminded when the under-nominated Letters from Iwo Jima won a sound award, apparently to send it home with some hardware. But honestly, you'd have to be pretty dim to suggest that Inside Llewyn Davis is in striking position here. The work done in Gravity is great, but a touch subtle; I would be likely to suggest it would be passed over if it didn't seem clear that the film is heading for a pretty major sweep.


Best Sound Editing
All Is Lost
Captain Phillips
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Lone Survivor

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Captain Phillips
My Pick: All Is Lost

My single point of pause: loud action movies do great here, loud war movies not least. But I do not imagine that Lone Survivor was near the top of anybody's screener pile. The logic that leads to X-ing off Gravity in Sound Mixing applies to almost exactly the same degree here, though if it somehow manages to split the two with Captain Phillips, I should think that this is the ever so slightly more vulnerable category.


Best Visual Effects
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Iron Man 3
The Lone Ranger
Star Trek Into Darkness

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: I have no clue, and it doesn't matter
My Pick: Gravity

For the second consecutive year, VFX is the absolute, stranglehold lock of the night. I don't doubt that Gravity ended up with more votes than the other four combined.


Best Animated Feature
The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Ernest & Célestine
Frozen
The Wind Rises

WON: FROZEN
Will Win: Frozen
Spoiler: The Wind Rises
My Pick: Ernest & Célestine

Lingering affection for the retiring Miyazaki aside, there are hits and then there are culture-devouring Zeitgeist monsters, and this strikes me as an absurdly easy waltz for Walt Disney Animation to finally snag its first-ever win in this category.


Best Foreign Language Film
The Broken Circle Breakdown (Belgium)
The Great Beauty (Italy)
The Hunt (Denmark)
The Missing Picture (Cambodia)
Omar (Palestine)

WON: THE GREAT BEAUTY
Will Win: The Great Beauty
Spoiler: The Hunt
My Pick: I have not seen all of the nominees

It's plainly a three-way race between the European films. And while The Hunt has Incredible Gravity and Seriousness on its side, the luxuriant spectacle of The Great Beauty feels more in-character for this category's tastes. The Broken Circle Breakdown is a little bit gritty and low-stakes for me to see it trumping either of the other two. But this is a "throw a dart and see where it lands" category this year if any of them are.


Best Documentary
20 Feet from Stardom
The Act of Killing
Cutie and the Boxer
Dirty Wars
The Square

WON: 20 FEET FROM STARDOM
Will Win: The Square
Spoiler: 20 Feet from Stardom
My Pick: The Act of Killing

The new rules that let anyone vote, regardless of whether they've attended sanctioned screenings of all five movies, gives the most popular and likable film a leg up on the rest, and that should just about seal it up for 20 Feet; but I can't help but feel that The Square is so unbelievably overt in its obvious historical importance that the voters - who do like to feel important - won't be able to pass it by. It's a hard call between those two, though. Cutie feels relatively trivial, Dirty Wars is obviously not going to get in over The Square for the "politics first" bloc, and Act of Killing has the problem of being impossible to describe without making it sound like a nightmare; I suspect that most members haven't even watched it.


Best Documentary Short Subject
CaveDigger
Facing Fear
Karama Has No Walls
The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall

WON: THE LADY IN NUMBER 6: MUSIC SAVED MY LIFE
Will Win: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Spoiler: Karama Has No Walls
My Pick: I have not seen any of the nominees

Let's be crude: The Lady in Number 6 - whose subject passed away just last week, at age 109 - is a Holocaust movie. It's been a little while since one showed up, but the short categories have been the last holdouts of the Academy's incredibly visible Holocaust movie fetish, and I see no reason to bet against that.


Best Animated Short Subject
Feral
Get a Horse!
Mr. Hublot
Possessions
Room on the Broom

WON: MR. HUBLOT
Will Win: Get a Horse!
Spoiler: Mr. Hublot
My Pick: I have not seen all of the nominees

The recent rule change that started last year - no proof is necessary that the voter has seen all five films - puts anything studio-related at an unfair advantage; it puts glossy films featuring madly iconic pop culture figures that were attached to massive Zeitgeist hits during their theatrical run at what I would tend to consider a prohibitive advantage.

Best Live-Action Short Subject
Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn't Me)
Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything)
Helium
Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?)
The Voorman Problem

WON: HELIUM
Will Win: The Voorman Problem
Spoiler: Helium
My Pick: I have not seen any of the nominees

The category has been favoring English-language films lately, and only The Voorman Problem fits that bill of these five (bonus: it stars famous people, and it was using that logic that led me to my second-ever correct prediction in this category with The Shore a couple of years ago. Helium is about a dying kid,and for that reason can't be discounted; nothing about the other three on paper sounds like a natural fit for the Academy's established taste in this category (least of all Just Before Losing Everything, which I've fairly uniformly heard to be the best of the five).