The 87th Academy Awards are still a good month away, which gives you ample time to make educated picks in your office Oscar betting pool. There’s a formula to it too, a method to measuring the likelihood of how the Academy will award their Oscars.
Do I have that method? No, but I do have a cynical calculator.
It’s a neat little thing with a keypad, a solar panel and a grumpy face. When I type in a category and the nominees, the calculator uses the Academy’s previous awards results from the past decade or so and the power of formulaic cynicism to make a very convincing – though maybe not entirely accurate – prediction of who will win.
So let’s see the calculator’s predictions for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Director.
Best Adapted Screenplay
In the running: Jason Hall (American Sniper), P.T. Anderson (Inherent Vice), Graham Moore (The Imitation Game), Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything), Damien Chazelle (Whiplash)
The screenplay awards have an interesting history; the Best Picture winner typically scored its respective screenplay Oscar, with 2004 and 2011 being recent exceptions. With that in mind, I’ve cynically calculated each Adapted Screenplay nominee’s chances of taking home Best Picture. The result: 0% – collectively.
So which recent adapted screenplays have won without a Best Picture Oscar to complement it? There’s The Descendants, The Social Network, Precious, Brokeback Mountain and Sideways to name a few.
What does this tell us? That, in this situation, the Academy will go for an extremely polite and conventional choice that will stir the least amount of controversy possible.
The Imitation Game will win.
Best Original Screenplay
In the running: Richard Linklater (Boyhood), Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo (Birdman), E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman (Foxcatcher), Wes Anderson and Hugo Guiness (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler)
With Boyhood and Birdman both in hot contention for Best Picture, the cynical calculator says you can instantly rule out Frye and Futterman for Foxcatcher, Anderson and Guiness for The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Gilroy for Nightcrawler.
The only time a non-Best Picture winner has trumped a Best Picture winner for Original Screenplay in the 21st Century is when Midnight in Paris upset The Artist. In that case, you may as well have called that The Woody Allen Award. Plus, that film had dialogue.
The winner of Best Original Screenplay will be the winner of Best Film. You’re going to have to wait for cynical calculator to predict the Best Picture winners to know who that is.
Best Cinematography
In the running: Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman), Robert Yeoman (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Dick Pope (Mr. Turner), Roger Deakins (Unbroken), Lukasz Zal & Ryszard Lenczewski (Ida)
Lubezki is great at not turning his camera off, but he already snagged a win using that same talent last year with Gravity. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in this category.
Wes Anderson’s long-time buddy Robert Yeoman finally gets his first Oscar nod, but you can consider this a mere ‘welcome to the club’ nomination.
Dick Pope got that same nod with 2006’s The Illusionist, but aside from a politely amusing “poop” incident, nobody’s really talking about the talented cinematographer.
Grand messiah Roger Deakins must have slept with the Academy president’s wife or something – this is the Oscar-less cinematographer’s 12th Oscar nomination for a mediocre film that probably won’t win anything. Consider his winless streak to remain… Unbroken. (Yuk yuk yuk!)
It’s great to see Zal and Lanczewski in the running, gaining the once-in-a-blue-moon nomination the Academy gives to cinematographers of foreign language films. They’re even awarded the Oscar every six-or-so years, with the most recent examples being Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000 and Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006.
This is an opportune time for the Academy to continue this longitudinal trend and to show their diversity in a year that lacks it. Plus, the film is in 4:3 AND black-and-white – the Academy loves that shit.
The cynical calculator says Ida will win.
Best Director
In the running: Richard Linklater (Boyhood), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman), Bennett Miller (Foxcatcher), Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game)
Sorry Miller, Anderson and Tyldum – this battle is once again between Linklater and Iñárritu, with the Best Director award typically going to the director of the Best Picture. The only exceptions granted are for directors who pull off some mind-numbing directing feat (Gravity) or directors whose names happen to be ‘Ang Lee’.
But this year becomes a tad tricky to predict, for both filmmakers have achieved a directorial style that critics have marveled over: Linklater filmed for a dozen years while Iñárritu filmed for two hours non-stop (seemingly).
The cynical calculator reckons that, no matter what wins Best Picture, this award will go to the director whose style wooed the Academy more. Unfortunately for Iñárritu, the idea of a feature done in one unbroken shot isn’t entirely novel (see: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope). However, the Academy has never seen a film shot annually over 12 years.
Boyhood will win.
Check back shortly to see the cynical calculator’s predictions for the four acting categories.
