Oscar Nominations Eve: Predicting Tomorrow’s Picks [I-am-DB]

The Oscar nominees drop tomorrow morning at 8 eastern, and at the 11th hour, ROTI’s official Oscars expert — the eponymous author of I-am-DB.com — is here to give you tomorrow’s news today. His guesses are below. Check back at ROTI for more Oscars crossposts from this great new movie & TV site.

Predicting the nominees has been a bitch this year.

For starters, everyone seems to agree that 2011 wasn’t all that strong a year for movies. There was a lot of good and not much great…yet almost every category sports an abundance of worthy nominees. And while a few frontrunners are starting to emerge, no win feels inevitable. Usually by this time, the countless critics awards and initial guild nominations have helped clarify the field a bit, with at least one or two categories sporting a sure-fire winner. Not so this year. Without the usual sense of passion centered around a handful of films, things seem more prone to change between now and late February. All of which makes it an exciting race, but not an easy one to forecast. The new Best Picture rules don’t exactly help either. What new Best Picture rules, you may ask? Well let’s get the party started and find out…

Oh, a note for the nine of you that have actually read these in the past: normally I include my personal nomination picks for each category, but I’ve decided to hold off on that this year since there are still a few key movies that have yet to arrive in the Bay Area or which I just haven’t had a chance to see. They include The Iron Lady, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Coriolanus and Albert Nobbs. I missed the boat on a few others, including the acclaimed indie Tyrannosaur, but once again I’m pleased to say that I’ve seen pretty much everything that’s part of the conversation (I even saw Margaret during its super-quick theatrical run! ). Anyway, at some point between now and the awards, I’ll be sure to publish my own picks. Because I’m way smarter than the Academy.

BEST PICTURE

The Artist
The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life

Now then: rule changes. Note that on the list above, I’ve included eight movies. The especially astute among you will further note that eight is less than ten. Remember two years ago, when the Academy decided there would be ten nominees for Best Picture instead of the traditional five? The change benefited movies that, it’s safe to say, wouldn’t have made the cut on a five-film list. (Think The Blind Side, 127 Hours and District 9, to name a few.) Well last June, the Academy announced it was shaking up the process even further. The number of nominees will now fall somewhere between five and ten, and we won’t know the tally until the nominations are revealed.

Those of you familiar with Johnny Dangerously will understand if I pause at this point to quote Roman Maroni, who always had a colorful way of putting things.

Based on how many of the roughly 6,000 Academy members return their ballots and make selections in the Best Picture category, the accounting aces at PricewaterhouseCoopers will determine what percentage of first place votes a movie needs to earn in order to secure a nomination. According to the Academy’s press release on the topic, this new system means that the nominated films will more accurately reflect Academy members’ favorite movies. The downside is that because of the way the calculations work, a significant number of voters’ ballots will essentially be tossed out. It’s a system that favors consensus but means not every voting member will have their voice heard. For statistical nerds out there, Steve Pond of TheWrap.com is an expert in crunching Oscar numbers and has examined and explained the process in detail.

What this boils down to for schmucks like me is that predicting the Best Picture nominees just got a lot trickier. But schmucks we are, and predict we shall.

Count on The Artist and The Descendants, which have grabbed the lion’s share of the critics awards and each took home top Golden Globes recently (the former in the musical/comedy category, the latter for drama). The Help and Hugo are close to certain, and Midnight in Paris is probably in there too. After that, the real guesswork begins. Two movies with late December releases that were widely expected to be contenders are War Horse and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. But War Horse, despite strong reviews and good box office, has failed to gain traction with the industry. While cited by the Producers Guild of America and the American Cinema Editors, it went unnominated by the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of America (which has been generous to Steven Spielberg over the years) and the American Society of Cinematographers. Those omissions hurt. Has War Horse been left out to pasture?

As for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, it was the last move of the year to screen for critics and guilds, with some of the season’s first voting critic circles convening before they’d seen it. The lack of recognition by the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild could be due to ballots being cast before the movie was seen. But mixed reviews and the same lack of guild support slowing down War Horse‘s chances indicate the movie just hasn’t caught on. There have been a smattering of nominations from this group or that, and it could factor into a couple of races further down, but Best Picture no longer seems in the cards.

The unlikely beneficiary of those two movies’ lackluster showings appears to be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which in contrast to both, has scored big time with the guilds. It’s been nominated by the PGA, ACE, ACS and most surprisingly, the DGA and WGA. With all that support, its Oscar chances look better than anyone would have expected (and better than it probably deserves, but that’s another story). Then there’s The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s poetic rumination on life, death, the universe and really gorgeous swirls of color. It was admired by critics, and no doubt it has ardent supporters within the Academy. The question is whether it has enough to earn the necessary number of first place votes.

An assured ten-picture field might have opened the conversation up to movies like The Ides of March, My Week With Marilyn, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Drive, or even some populist choices like Bridesmaids, Rango or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. (Don’t laugh; Potter was one of the year’s best-reviewed movies, and even within the industry a lot of people feel it deserves recognition as the closing chapter of the most financially successful franchise ever.)

War Horse could still muster the support it needs, while The Tree of Life may not have the necessary backing. Moneyball is a question mark too. But this is the list I’m going with.

BEST DIRECTOR

Michel Hazanavicius – The Artist
Alexander Payne – The Descendants
Martin Scorsese – Hugo
Woody Allen – Midnight in Paris
Terrence Malick – The Tree of Life

This category has three sure things: Hazanavicius, Payne and Scorsese. Two spots remain, and a lot of people are in the mix for them. The affection for Midnight in Paris will probably carry Woody Allen, but I wouldn’t call him a lock. Although The Help is a safe bet for Best Picture, its director Tate Taylor has been largely ignored throughout the season. The film’s direction isn’t especially dynamic (not that it needed to be), so he’ll probably fall prey to bigger names and bolder visions. If War Horse misses in Best Picture, it will kill any chance Spielberg has…which I sense isn’t much at this point anyway. David Fincher, on the other hand, could benefit from the lovefest that has swarmed Dragon Tattoo.

If the Academy goes with Hazanavicius, Payne, Scorsese, Allen and Fincher, it will match the DGA’s nominees five-for-five. That rarely happens. In the last 25 years, it’s only happened three times (1998, 2005, 2009). When the two bodies diverge, the Academy often favors an auteur or an indie filmmaker. (Mulholland Drive‘s David Lynch, City of God‘s Fernando Meirelles, The Sweet Hereafter‘s Atom Egoyan and Red‘s Krzysztof Kieslowski are among those who scored Oscar nods but weren’t cited by the DGA.) This year, that could mean good news for Drive‘s Nicolas Winding Refn, who took the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival last summer. But Drive is feeling more like a critic’s darling and less like a movie that’s connecting within Hollywood. The more likely nominee would be Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life. While the movie is divisive and it certainly isn’t perfect, Malick is a visionary filmmaker and one who has the admiration of many colleagues. Whatever the movie’s chances in the Best Picture race, I think it has a good chance of landing here.

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