Oscar Predictions - 2008
Submitted by AJDaGreat on Wed, 02/18/2009 - 05:04
Tags:
- The Big Eight
- Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
- Best Director: Danny Boyle
- Best Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire
- Yeah, it's a foregone conclusion that Slumdog will sweep. I'm as sure of this as I was sure that Brokeback Mountain would win Best Picture three years ago. :-) But now that that's out of the way...
- Best Original Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black, Milk
- Who I'd Like To Win: Martin McDonagh, In Bruges, although I'd also like to see WALL-E win (which would be more likely).
- Best Lead Actor: Mickey Rourke
- Best Lead Actress: Kate Winslet
- Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger
- Best Supporting Actress: Taraji P. Henson
- Who I'd Like To Win: Anyone else, especially Tomei. Henson is easily the worst performance here, but I'm thinking in a divided category, the person in the Best Picture nominee will take it. With 13 nominations, I doubt Benjamin Button will walk away without one of the big 8 prizes, and as Michael Clayton proved last year, it doesn't have to deserve the Picture nom or the acting nom for that to happen. Still, it's my brain that believes these things; my gut tells me it belongs to Penelope or Viola, and I can't promise I won't change my mind.
- Now for these bad boys:
- Best Animated Film: WALL-E
- Best Foreign Film: The Class
- The Film I Might Be Crazy Not to Predict: Waltz with Bashir. I think the film's unconventionality might be too off-putting to the Academy, causing them to fall back on this highly acclaimed film about a teacher in a lower-class school, which did win the Palme d'Or (actually a strike against it getting Academy love, methinks) but seems more to the Academy's tastes than an animated documentary about a controversial part of the world. The fact that Waltz with Bashir wasn't nominated for Best Animated Film or Best Documentary may - or may not - be a sign.
- Best Documentary Feature: Man on Wire
- Tech awards:
- Best Art Direction: The Dark Knight
- The Film I Might Be Crazy Not to Predict: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Thing is, the Academy loves films that create their own fantasy worlds in this category, and though Button is a fantasy film, the fantasy comes more from the character himself. Dark Knight establishes more of a sense of its own fantasy world, so I'm going to predict it beats the sweeping, multi-period epic much along the lines of Sweeney Todd beating American Gangster, Atonement, and There Will Be Blood last year.
- Best Cinematography: Slumdog Millionaire
- Best Costumes: The Duchess
- What I'd Like To Win: Milk, although I haven't seen The Duchess. Of late, costume design just so often goes to the random, lavish period piece that was hardly nominated for anything else.
- Best Editing: Slumdog Millionaire
- Best Makeup: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- What I'd Like To Win: The Dark Knight
- Best Sound Mixing: The Dark Knight
- Best Sound Editing: The Dark Knight
- Best Visual Effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- What I'd Like to Win: The Dark Knight
- Music awards:
- Best Score: A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire
- Best Song: "Jai Ho"
- And finally, those blasted shorts...
- Best Documentary Short: The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306
- Best Animated Short: Presto
- Best Live Action Short: The Pig
Cloned From:
I have the Oscar results right here... and you are absolutely right.
The ultra-brilliant Nate Silver has made his Oscar predictions. It takes all the suspense out of watching the award show unless you're math geek and really into logistic regression (yeah!) or a big fan of designer gowns (yeah!) Both do involve some overfitting (double yeah!)
To take the suspense out of reading the article here are the results in order of probability:
Best Director: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Best Actress: Kate Winslet, The Reader
Best Supporting Actress: Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
For the actual probabilities: read the article, you geeks.
You'll be pleased with the probability of Ms. Henson winning and the fact that Mr. Silver is convinced that one of your predictions is wrong.
Wow, pretty impressive! I had heard Silver did an Oscar analysis, but I honestly had no idea that my predictions matched up perfectly with his top six. We shall see in an hour, though!
Nate Silver got 2 wrong! Penelope Cruz now has an Oscar. Never thought I'd see the day.
I think Penn won because of Proposition 8.
This is how I feel.
Man, has this fun movie inspired such anger in people! At least the most likely dark horse Benjamin Button didn't win, am I right? Can I get a high five to that? Anybody?
High 10, good buddy.
Right on.
As a side note, I'm glad that this is the competition that Nate Silver fucked up.
Normally right about now I'd be posting some sort of Oscar wrap-up here, but I'm honestly not sure what there is to say. I used to have a theory that predictable nominations meant unpredictable awards, and vice versa. But no more. This Oscar season was a snoozefest throughout.
Which is not to say that I predicted them correctly. Every good Oscar prognosticator knows that there are always some surprises, so you really win the Oscar pool by nailing the upsets. This year the big upset was... Best Foreign Film. It went to an obscure film that I've heard is more of a conventional Academy movie than Waltz with Bashir or The Class. Yawn.
I've heard a theory that when the Academy is all fired up about the political situation in the country at large, they take more risks with their Oscar picks, and when they're content with how things are, that's when they fall back on convention. Which seems preposterous, but maybe there's a grain of truth to it after all.
Let's just stick to the ceremony itself. Hugh Jackman was a change of pace from the recent past, but I thought he made a great host. Quite the showman, although you might not know it from watching the X-Men series. Bless the Academy for getting rid of those boring introductions to each of the Best Picture noms during the ceremony, but curse them for the absurdly long acting awards that featured the past winners. Ben Stiller does a great Joaquin, but it didn't make much sense why the hell he was doing an impersonation of him at all, and it probably made even less sense to those who hadn't seen the David Letterman interview. The Judd Apatow film was entertaining. The opening number was terrific, but the tribute to Hollywood musicals could've been much better. Finally, the Best Song medley was sort of meh; I'm glad that it saved us some time, but I'm not sure that it worked all that well, so maybe they should stick to the old format, if only to avoid pissing off Peter Gabriel. All-in-all, a decent ceremony that felt cluttered with less junk than it usually is, except for those acting awards.