Oscars 2024

Scott Hardie | January 23, 2024
I'll launch our annual contest ASAP, but in the meantime, I wanted to express my shock at The Creator being nominated for Best Visual Effects today, given the recent controversy over a very tasteless choice in their trailer that apparently was cut from the final film: They reused footage of the Beirut explosion that killed 218 people to make a cool-looking explosion, drawing some new buildings on top of the footage to "fictionalize" it. I couldn't begin to fathom the outrage if a movie studio used 9/11 crash footage as the basis for something like flying saucers attacking New York in another Independence Day movie, because *wow* that's out of line. I want to give the nominating voters the benefit of the doubt that maybe they hadn't heard about this, but each branch of the Academy makes its own nominations, so VFX artists voted for on the Best Visual Effects nominees, and surely they must have heard about this controversy in their little corner of the industry, right? Is it ok because that shot was not used in the final film? I just don't know what to make of this.

What are your thoughts about this year's batch of nominees?

Samir Mehta | January 24, 2024
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Scott Hardie | January 24, 2024
The contest is underway! Good luck!

I'm also very surprised at Greta Gerwig not being nominated. Didn't Barbie bounce around between studios and writers for over a decade with no one able to figure out what to do with the it? Isn't it based on a widely-reviled (or at least widely controversial) pop-culture brand and children's toy? Nothing about the project should have yielded a tolerable movie; the fact that it somehow became a really good movie is kind of miraculous. Gerwig deserves much of the credit for its success.

Erik Bates | February 5, 2024
it's yet another year of Erik having seen hardly any of the nominated pictures.

My thoughts on Barbie as someone who has not yet seen the film and knows next-to-nothing about the plot, so my take on this is that of a complete outsider:

It wouldn't have surprised me if nobody got a nomination. I could see the academy being hesitant to recognize a movie based on a children's toy, considering the pop culture and marketing phenomenon surrounding it didn't seem to really push the subtext so much as it portrayed it as "HEY LOOK IT'S A BARBIE MOVIE! BARBIE! YOU REMEMBER THAT DOLL FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD RIGHT? WELL NOW IT'S A MOVIE! BARBIE! BARBIE! PINK!" There are probably more recent examples that completely throw my theory out the window.

Margo Robbie and Greta Gerwig being ignored while Ryan Gosling gets a nomination almost feels like the Academy is in on the joke and they're trying to help continue making the point of the movie. I know that's not the case.

I do feel bad for America Ferrera, though. Everyone is all pissed off that Gerwig and Robbie got snubbed, but then there's America over there getting her accolades for a supporting actress role and everyone just wants to be mad about Gosling getting the attention.

The very people who are pissed off about Robbie and Gerwig being ignored in favor of a man are, themselves, ignoring America Ferrera in favor of giving attention to a man.

Samir Mehta | February 5, 2024
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Scott Hardie | February 6, 2024
I can't speak as to Robbie, but I read something about Gerwig that rings true: Whether she would be nominated was a choice by the directors' branch of the Academy, which is rigid and old-fashioned about "respectability" and disinclined to nominate anything that reeks of a popular favorite. That's why Ben Affleck wasn't nominated for Argo nor Ryan Coogler for Black Panther. Had the entire Academy voted on the director nominations, Gerwig almost certainly would have gotten one.

Scott Hardie | March 10, 2024
I doubt that anybody's looking at my predictions, but I want to say for the record that I'm conducting an experiment this year rather than going for maximum points. Do I really think that Mark Ruffalo has a chance against Robert Downey Jr.? Not at all, but I'm making all of my predictions based on a specific strategy because I want to see how well it does overall. I hope that at least a couple of my out-on-a-limb predictions pay off, and give me the feedback that I need to refine this strategy for "real" play again in the future. I'll find out soon...

Erik Bates | March 11, 2024
Seeing the results, and the unfortunate outcome of your strategy, I must know: what was the strategy?

Scott Hardie | April 3, 2024
I've suspected for years that something crucial is missing from most Oscar predictions, which is the esteem in which each nominee is held by their peers. We outsiders only know actors and directors and sometimes an outlying composer or cinematographer or screenwriter. But film insiders, who are the ones voting, know many of the nominees from working on various projects with them or just by professional reputation.

In past Oscar contests, I've had good luck going against the crowd by predicting certain well-regarded industry veterans, such as Thelma Schoonmaker for editing The Aviator or Wally Pfister for photographing Inception. Of course, it's hard for me to know who's well-regarded within the industry, but generally I can ask myself: 1) Are they accomplished enough that I have heard of them? 2) Have they worked on some important films and/or with some important filmmakers? 3) Have they been nominated for Oscars in the past? 4) Are they now retired or deceased, making this their last opportunity to win?

Prior nominations are far from perfect as an indicator, but at least they're quantifiable. This year, I decided to predict whoever had the most prior nominations without winning, or many prior nominations with relatively few wins, only joining the crowd if there was a tie. If I believed the nominee to be held in high esteem, that might also tip the scale for them. (I'm well aware that I could have predicted according to who I actually thought would win and then just conducted the same experiment in private later with a calculator, but I'm painfully short on time these days -- see my taking 3.5 weeks to answer Erik's question -- and so I opted to use the contest form to do this. It was short-sighted and I regret it.)

As you can see, it did not go well for me. I would have picked at least a few real winners -- Cillian Murphy and Emma Stone (people were crazy for predicting Lily Gladstone) and Robert Downey Jr. -- but then, I would have picked several losers too. My score would have ended up around two-thirds of the way up the list instead of at the very bottom, but I would not have "won."

Comments on two specific predictions:

- I really thought that Robbie Robertson had a shot at Original Score. It's Robbie freaking Robertson, after all: Beloved member of a beloved band who are idolized by Boomers, accomplished composer and/or music producer for many well-regarded films, and he just passed away last fall, inspiring a flood of tributes. His main competition, Ludwig Göransson, is very popular these days, but just won an Oscar a few years ago and has many great films ahead of him in his career.

- Similarly, I thought Diane Warren had a shot at Original Song. Come on, it's Diane freaking Warren, who has been nominated fifteen times for competitive Oscars without winning any, and who has written some of the most famous songs in the world. Billie Eilish is popular, but she just won an Oscar two years ago! "What Was I Made For?" wasn't even the best Barbie song among the nominees! If anything hurt Warren, it was being given a career-achievement Oscar last year, but honestly, I just underestimated the intensity of Billie Eilish's popularity here.

Did any of my experimental predictions pay off? Not at all. The one and only outlier prediction that turned out to be correct -- Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron for Animated Feature -- was the same prediction that I would have made on my own. (The overconfidence in Across the Spider-Verse baffled me. Miyazaki is one of the most respected animators of all time, he came out of retirement to make this deeply personal movie about his childhood, and it's likely to be his last film. Spider-Verse is a well-crafted but very commercial product, and has multiple sequels and spin-offs coming up.)

I confess that a tiny secondary reason for this experiment was an act of defiance against the domination of Gold Derby. That website makes such consistently good predictions every year that most players simply copy what they predict, leading to a crush of virtually identical predictions. I get why people do it, but to me that misses the point of the game and sucks the fun out, kind of like using Google to solve celebrity goos instead of your own knowledge. I'm tired of running a contest where 90% of the entries are the same as the master predictors elsewhere on the web, and so I hoped that my little experiment might give me a sign that they aren't so worthy of imitation. This year, it didn't work, at least not based on the criteria that I used.

So, this year was unhappy for me. I have no plans to conduct any such experiments in the future. :-P