In Contention

Tag: Oscars

  • On the preferential voting system

    As Steve Pond says in his round-up of Oscar news and notes today, he is most certainly guilty of “over-considering preferential voting.”  And frankly, someone has to be, because as I mentioned yesterday, this new system could most cetainly shake the perceived two-horse race up something fierce.

    Pond has offered his expertise on the matter to USA Today, which has put together a very helpful animated graph that shows a possible scenario (using phantom nominees, mind you).  It demands your attention.

    Courtesy: USA Today

  • Introducing the Oscar Guide

    OscarsAs of this moment we are 32 days away from this year’s Academy Awards celebration, taking place on Sunday, March 7.  That gives us 23 business days, so I’ve decided to launch a new feature here at In Contention: the Oscar Guide.

    Every week day this month we’ll be featuring one of the 24 Oscar categories in depth, beginning later this afternoon with the Best Supporting Actress field.  On Saturday, March 6, we’ll wrap the feature up with a look at the 10 Best Picture nominees and one more analysis before the big day.

    Each Oscar Guide entry will be accompanied by a sidebar poll asking you, the readership, what you think deserves to win in said category.  That worked out nicely last year.  (The supporting actress poll is already live.)  At the end of the run we’ll have a master list of what you all think the slate of winners SHOULD look like, and we’ll have fun discussing and (surely) debating each category along the way.

    So keep an eye out later today and throughout the month as we inch closer to the 82nd annual Academy Awards!

  • The bright side

    Abbie Cornish in Bright StarWell, I’ll start the good news selfishly, by noting that I didn’t entirely embarrass myself with my predictions: not counting the short categories (which I was too cowardly and uninformed to predict) I nailed 78/106, just two points behind Kris’s round tally of 80.

    But while I was pleased to see at least one of my out-on-a-limb guesses come good — seriously, why didn’t more people call that Art Direction nod for “The Young Victoria?” — I was better at predicting what wouldn’t get nominated.

    So, my season-long hunches that Julianne Moore would be frozen out in the supporting race, that “(500) Days of Summer” would be blanked, that “Up in the Air” would miss that crucial Film Editing nod, and so on, were all on the money. And my increasing sense that nobody really liked “Invictus” enough to put it atop their ballot proved right too.

    Now, if I only I’d known what would land in their place. You can’t have it all, I suppose.

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  • ‘Avatar,’ ‘Hurt Locker’ lead Oscar nods with 9 each

    Guy Pearce in The Hurt LockerSo, the AMPAS didn’t embarrass itself TOO much this morning.  At the end of the day, “Invictus” proved to lack the proper passionate support to yield a Best Picture nomination.  The beneficiary of that: “The Blind Side.” Make of that what you will.

    “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” — get this — tied with a field-leading nine nominations each.  “Inglourious Basterds” wasn’t far behind with eight, while “Precious” and “Up in the Air” tied with six apiece.  Pixar’s “Up” managed five, while “District 9” and “Star Trek,” the other sci-fi entries in the race, each received four, the former landing a Best Picture nomination and trending on Twitter as I type.  But how the hell it missed in Best Makeup is beyond me.  More on the techs below.

    “The Blind Side” and “A Serious Man” get the “winner of two Oscar nominations, including Best Picture” honors.  But at least the latter made the cut after all.  There was some nervousness for a while there.

    As I look through the nominations, I see nothing particularly eye-catching.  All of the “surprises” seem awfully reasonable and make perfect sense.  First and foremost, I’m kicking myself for blinking on Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Crazy Heart.” In fact, I had that supporting actress category pegged 5/5 24 hours ago.  That’s what I get for over-thinking it.  I’m really happy to see her slide into contention.  She worked it last month and at just the right time.

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  • Gearing up for the pool

    You might remember AwardsPicks.com, an Oscar pool site we participated in last year.  You can join Oscar pool groups and we can play with the weight of the votes, etc.  It’s a lot of fun.

    Well this year the pools will be set tomorrow, according to a press release that just landed.  So head on over and join our group and we’ll set things up post-nods.

    (Speaking of all this, my final predictions are on the way.  I’m looking at end of business, PST, maybe around, oh, 4:00?)

  • Toughest category?

    I’m working through final predictions for posting tomorrow (as if it’s something that actually matters in this world), and a couple of areas have me running and re-running the figures, so to speak.  I figured, with nothing going on but the Pro Bowl and some music awards show that I never watch, why not offer up a query to the readership?

    What’s the toughest category you’re working through right now?  Let your brain spill out.  What’cha thinkin’?  Main categories, tech categories, peripheral fields, anything.

  • EW charts the race

    This is a fantastic little guide to the race over at Entertainment Weekly, but if they really want to step it up, give me the same tool across the 80-year Academy history. Let me compare, contrast. That would be a hell of a research instrument, for those of us sick enough to take prognostication WAY too freakin’ seriously.

    Entertainment Weekly Best Picture chart

    (via Awards Daily)

  • Pride before a fall

    Forest Whitaker and Sid Ganis announcing the 2008 Academy Award nominationsRichard Roeper prefaces his Oscar predictions with the following suggestion to spice up the nominations announcement:

    They race through the lists at 5:30 a.m. PST, in order to get live coverage on the morning talk shows. That’s just stupid.

    As I’ve suggested before, the Academy should turn the nomination announcements into a one-hour special, to air on E! or some other cable channel. Build up excitement by showing clips and interviewing possible nominees. Have some cameras on set or in the homes of some contenders, to catch their reactions. If they can do it with the Heisman Trophy every year, why not the Oscars?

    The Grammy Awards have gone in a similar direction with their nominations special, though the Oscars obviously wouldn’t have musical numbers to pad things out. I’m all for making a bit more of an occasion out of the announcement, though the idea of catching some nominees’ (or, worse, non-nominees’) reactions live is super-tacky. After the cut, Steven Spielberg will show you why.

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  • Anne Hathaway to perform Oscar nomination honors

    Anne HathawayNo reason to stop the presses or anything, but good to know. If I had to get up at the crack of dawn to watch the nominations announcement (luckily, I don’t), Anne Hathaway’s face is as pleasant a sight to wake up to as I can imagine. (No offence, Forest Whitaker.) Thanks to commenter Ziyad for the tip:

    Nominations for the 82nd Academy Awards® will be announced on Tuesday, February 2, by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak and Oscar-nominated actress and Academy member Anne Hathaway. Sherak and Hathaway will unveil the nominations in 10 of the 24 categories at a 5:30 a.m. news conference at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, where hundreds of media representatives from around the world will be gathered.

  • The importance of coming up with 10

    Oscar ballotSteve Pond has WAY too much time on his hands, but God love him for his brilliant little experiment that illustrates, rather clearly, the importance of filling in the entire Oscar ballot with 10 films.  You hear that Oscar voters?  To say nothing of the fact that, if you can’t come up with 10 films you liked in a given year, you should turn in your card, it is important now more than ever that you take this a little bit seriously.

    Pond assembled all the ranked critics’ top 10 lists at Movie City News and dished them out according to a typical preferential voting system, and he came up with a very important point in the midst of all that shuffling:

    And here’s the deal with my count: in two-thirds of the cases, 81 out of 122 ballots, all or part of the vote went to the critic’s first choice. But second, third and fifth choices also counted fairly often (rarely fourth choices, though there’s no good reason for that), and a dozen voters actually helped out candidates with their sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth choices.

    Richard Roeper, for instance, unknowingly cast his vote for “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which was listed seventh on his ballot. Eric Kohn of indieWIRE did the same for “A Serious Man,” which he’d put in his eighth slot.

    Kohn’s case was a typical example of how lower-ranked films can come into play. He’d put “Sita Sings the Blues” in his number-one position – but since he was the only one to do so, that film was eliminated at the beginning of the second round of tallying. His number two and three choices, “Two Lovers” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” hadn’t gotten any number one votes and thus were never in the running to begin with. His fourth-ranked film, “The Hurt Locker,” got more than enough votes in the first round to immediately secure a nomination, so it no longer needed his vote. Finally, down in the number eight slot, was a film that was still in the hunt, and one that subsequently used his vote to help win a nomination.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Consider this

    John Malkovich and Jessica Haines in DisgraceThere’s nothing like an Oscar season to prove what a small number five (or even ten) is.

    We may only be in November, but already, months of conversation, covering a broad canvas of Oscar sure-shots and long-shots alike, have devolved into a ruthless mathematical elimination process, as previously five-wide categories fill up with safe bets. Before you know it, scores of previously fancied contenders are jostling for a mere one or two supposedly “free” slots on the ballot, and with each week that passes, the pool of possibles is culled further.

    This is, of course, hardest on independent or leftfield contenders. Having fought mightily even to enter the discussion in the first place, they must then rely on a flaky combination of precursors, DVD screeners and prayer to stay afloat.

    Miracles do happen, of course, thanks largely to the Academy’s weighted ballot system, where a number-one vote is all. (Nobody was talking about Tommy Lee Jones to take the last Best Actor slot in 2007, but there he was nonetheless. Ditto the recent likes of Michael Shannon, Samantha Morton and “City of God.”)

    With that in mind, I’d like to spotlight one contender in each major category that deserves a similarly happy outcome. Many of them are names I’ve championed before. Most of them are sitting on the furthest reaches of the sidelines. All of them deserve better.

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  • Idle trivia for a Saturday morning

    Henry Fonda. Alan Arkin. Jack Palance. And, strictly hypothetically, Jeff Bridges.

    What am I listing here? Bragging rights and an imaginary cookie for the first correct answer.

  • Hammond talks the season’s changes

    Golden GlobesIt’s a year of considerable upheaval in the film awards landscape.  This year has already brought a new AMPAS president, the addition of five new slots to the Best Picture category and a refined voting process for the top field as well.  But that’s not where the changes end.

    Pete Hammond is back on board for another year of his weekly Notes on a Season columns at The Envelope, and in this year’s introductory piece, he charts a number of other alterations to the season’s status quo:

    On Jan. 17, the Golden Globes, in a grab for increased ratings, are going to be broadcast live coast-to-coast on NBC for the first time; the BFCA’s Critics Choice Movie Awards are moving from Santa Monica to Hollywood two days earlier on Jan. 15 and will be tweaking its VH1 on-air category lineup and broadening its audience potential; the pre-Oscar Saturday tradition of a tented Independent Spirit Awards is also moving away from the sands of Santa Monica and into an unnamed venue on Friday night instead — a first in its 25-year history. Plus insiders are hinting to us that the Producers Guild may also be making a MAJOR voting change…

    That “major change,” Hammond ultimately confides, is that the PGA’s list of nominees might stretch to 10 as well this year.  Check out the rest at Notes on a Season.

  • Oscar Idol?

    OscarsI’ve been having a number of conversations today about the Academy’s new Best Picture voting rules.  Some see it as further evidence of the organization snuffing out campaigning by leveling the playing field even more (which, if we’re being honest, is bad for AMPAS business).  Others see it as the fairest way of establishing a winner.  I’m somewhere in the middle, but all of that is neither here nor there.  I ran across this comment at The Hot Blog and I just had to share:

    They need to treat the nominees as a top 10 list and not “nominees.” Then, structure the broadcast around the top 10 like American Idol and gradually count down the vote tabs from #10 to #1 throughout the program to create suspense.

    Call me crazy, but this would be brilliant.  I kind of understand the desire to spare the feelings of those who would be “voted off” first.  That’s why the tabulations are destroyed after a few years.  No one wants people to know they were in last place, but come on — the nomination is the victory in many of those circumstances.  And talk about building a viewership.  We’re already inching toward People’s Choice Awards territory as it is, so why not bring all the walls down?

    Thoughts?

  • On Oscar’s rule change

    OscarsBack on June 29, in response to the Academy’s move to 10 Best Picture nominees, I wrote, “I imagine something will have to be done to address the concern that now one merely needs something like 600 people on board to get a film in the line-up.  How many members do you think these blockbuster films, which keep studios in business, employee?  Block voting will surely thrive.”

    Two months later, it seems the Academy has taken steps to address the issue.  Sort of.

    As Steve Pond reports, in a nutshell, and in order to steer clear of “mathematical dangers,” as AMPAS executive director Bruce Davis puts it, the Best Picture winner in this new paradigm will be determined by the same preferential voting system which yields the nominees.  Members will be asked to rank the 10 films in order of preference.  The thinking is that this will effectively stifle block voting to bully forth a winner, seeing as it would have only taken roughly 1,000 votes to win the big prize otherwise.  And any awards consultant will tell you those are easy numbers to come by.

    That’s all fine and good, but it doesn’t address the issue of nominees.  It will still only take 10% plus one (more or less 600 votes, even fewer if you consider the fact that there are a good many voters who don’t participate) choosing a film as the year’s best to get a nomination — numbers that are even easier to come by.  Right?  If I’m being honest, I’m confusing myself further the more I write.  I’ll just offer up Pond’s reduction, after the jump.

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  • Hanks was AMPAS’s first choice for President, search is on for telecast talent

    Tom HanksI stumbled onto this item over at Deadline Hollywood Daily earlier this afternoon.  Apparently Tom Hanks, who was elected First Vice-President of the Academy earlier this week, was the group’s first choice for the top spot.  In fact, Tom Sherak, who was ultimately elected president, is the one who nominated Hanks in the first place.

    Here’s what Nikki Finke dug up:

    Sherak…thought Hanks could be a “Gregory Peck-type” AMPAS leader. But insiders tell me Hanks declined, saying he “didn’t feel he could put the time in”. So his name was withdrawn, and that’s when Sherak got the gig. At least it’s comforting to know that AMPAS’ and Sherak’s heads were in the right place by wanting an actor instead of two back-to-back studio shills.

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  • Streep on the Oscars: Preempt other awards shows already

    Meryl Streep at the 81st annual Academy AwardsAs we all are well aware, one of the assumed reasons for the Academy’s recent decision to expand the Best Picture category to 10 nominees is the potential for the inclusion of popular films, which, the thinking goes, could help with the telecast’s ratings woes.

    I’m less and less convinced that, had films like “The Dark Knight” and “WALL-E” been nominated, viewership would have been much better.  And the dirty little secret of the animated feature film category is that it wasn’t a field pushed through by animators wanting their work to be selectively rewarded but, in actuality, an earlier attempt to widen the net to more populist entertainment.

    I have always been of the mind that it’s not the films in the mix that necessarily affect the ratings (though that certainly has an affect), but the fact that the Oscars air after months and months of awards shows that essentially numb the public to kudos fests by the time the big daddy ceremony finally rolls around.  And it seems 15-time nominee (and soon-to-be 16-time nominee) Meryl Streep agrees with me, going so far as to suggest the Academy move it’s telecast all the way up to January 1st.

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  • Women on top

    Kathryn BigelowIt’s been a couple of months since I discussed the notion of 2009 being a watershed year for female filmmakers at the Oscars, and it’s a possibility that seems to be gaining traction. Sasha Stone recently responded to a post of mine by toying with the slogan “year of the woman,” while a new post by indieWIRE’s Peter Knegt continues the discussion.

    Like me, Knegt fancies the chances of Lone Scherfig and Jane Campion in the race, but his chief interest at the moment is in Kathryn Bigelow, whose film “The Hurt Locker” he declares “the biggest news to hit this year’s race,” based principally on the unexpected strength of its critical reception:

    Coming off a well-received run in the festival circuit, most expected Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” would find some good reviews and perhaps even make a bit of money.  But “Locker” didn’t just find good reviews, it found ecstatic ones … And while judging its promising $2.2 million-and-counting – after four weeks and without going over 100 screens – is still premature, “Locker” is certainly exceeding financial expectations thus far.

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