Oscars 2016

Scott Hardie | January 15, 2016
This year's contest is underway. Good luck!

It got recognized! Mad Max: Fury Road was the film I was most rooting for, and I'm glad to see it nominated for Best Picture.

If Leonardo DiCaprio can't (finally) win an Oscar with competition this weak, he'll never win.

What's the matter, Academy? Why no automatic nomination for Meryl Streep for Ricki and the Flash?

I keep hearing that no actors of color were nominated by the Academy. I say Hollywood has to give them good parts first.

Adam McKay, director of Step Brothers and Talledega Nights, is now an Oscar nominee. He's this year's Jamie Foxx.

What are your thoughts about this year's nominations?

Samir Mehta | January 15, 2016
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Scott Hardie | January 15, 2016
No love for Jurassic World? Not even for visual effects? Ouch. That movie reminds me of Avatar: White-hot at the box office and popular with audiences, then forgotten six months later. The definition of flash in the pan.

People talk, even the Academy talks, about improving the show by shortening the broadcast. It's not going to happen. The long show allows for lots of commercial breaks and thus funding. They're not going to get rid of those pointless montages or the short films categories or the best song performances, especially when three of the nominated songs have such popular recording artists singing them and goosing the ratings. Whenever you hear the producers or the network talk about the need to move things along and keep the show short, don't believe it.

I have two suggestions for improving the Oscars:

1) The Academy worries about relevance to mass audiences and wants high ratings, and yet they often fail to nominate for Best Picture the film most liked and respected by audiences. The exclusion of The Dark Knight a few years ago led to an expansion of the category in the hopes of this kind of title making it in, but The Avengers and Star Wars: The Force Awakens still failed to make the cut with nominating voters. So, why not set aside a Best Picture nomination for this film? Have someone (a committee?) decide the most popular film with audiences that year, which should be easy to call based on the box office receipts and IMDb score, and give that film an automatic nomination for Best Picture. It still has to compete for the Oscar itself like any other nominee and would likely lose, but at least it would be in the running and audiences would tune in, and the awards would gain public relevance instantly. As long as it's just an automatic nomination and not an automatic Oscar, I don't think this would cheapen the Academy Awards, though a few purists would grumble.

2) The Academy acknowledged the bias against animated films by creating the Best Animated Feature category, since those films had no shot at Best Picture or the other major categories. That's wonderful in a year where there's a really worthy animated film like Up or Spirited Away, but often there isn't, and subpar titles like Kung Fu Panda 2 and The Croods get to brag that they're Oscar-nominated films. That cheapens the Oscars. I say, eliminate the category as it is now, and if an animated film happens to get a number of votes for Best Picture that exceeds a certain threshold, that film is automatically given a special Oscar for "Best Animated Feature" similar to the honorary Oscar given to Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It's announced with the nominees and it's decided already, no runners up and no further voting necessary, and it gets a few minutes during the broadcast, like the lifetime achievement award. This satisfies the need to recognize special achievement in animated features while keeping out the riffraff. (If multiple animated films exceed the threshold, let 'em all get Oscars, but that seems exceedingly unlikely. And if one is lucky enough to get enough votes for a genuine Best Picture nomination, then by all means let it compete for Best Picture too.)

Erik Bates | January 15, 2016
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Aaron Shurtleff | January 15, 2016
Blind guesses again this year!

Scott, I love suggestion #1, but since the main reason I claim to hate these kinds of award shows is that they never nominate the films with the highest gross at the box office, it would make me have to care. Don't make me care! :D

Every year, I get to cinematography, and I always have to look it up to see what it is. I need to memorize that one day...

Scott Hardie | January 17, 2016
I have the same problem with the difference between sound editing and sound mixing. Every year I look it up, and forget again by the following year.

Samir Mehta | January 18, 2016
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Scott Hardie | January 18, 2016
I'm no fan of Shrek 2 or Dead Man's Chest or Spider-Man 3, but I don't think it would be the end of the world for them to be included for the sake of getting other worthy titles a nomination. The committee hypothetically in charge of this could have a threshold of respectability that a film would have to exceed for the nomination. For example, an minimum IMDb rating of 7.5 being the threshold would mean Best Picture nominations for The Dark Knight, Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Avengers, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II. but no such nominations for Shrek 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Spider-Man 3, Jurassic World, or Independence Day. I could live with that. I'm not proposing that this be the precise mechanic (it has weaknesses); I'm just saying that there are ways to make this automatic-nomination concept work.

Samir Mehta | January 18, 2016
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Erik Bates | January 18, 2016
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Samir Mehta | January 18, 2016
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Scott Hardie | January 19, 2016
I'm glad that we're limiting this conversation to Best Picture. All kinds of movies get nominated for the various other categories. Hell, Norbit was nominated for an Oscar.

Some random stuff that I looked up in IMDb:

The lowest-rated Best Picture winner is 1931's Cimarron with a 6.0 average rating by users.

The lowest-rated Best Picture nominee is a tie between 1928's In Old Arizona and 1934's Flirtation Walk with a 5.8 average.

The lowest-rated winner of any Oscar is 1977's You Light Up My Life for Best Song, with a 4.4 average. In fact, most of the lowest-rated winners and nominees were for the two musical categories, Best Song and Best Score. There's something about lousy movies having good music.

If you limit the same searches to the last twenty years only:

I would have guessed Crash to be the lowest-rated Best Picture winner, but no, it's a tie between Chicago and Shakespeare in Love at 7.2 each, with The English Patient close behind at 7.4. (Titanic, Birdman, Argo, and The Hurt Locker are all rated lower than Crash. Huh, go figure.)

The lowest-rated Best Picture nominee is Samir's favorite, The Tree of Life at 6.7.

The lowest-rated winner of any Oscar is The Nutty Professor at 5.6, followed closely by The Wolfman at 5.8, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas at 6.0, all of which won Oscars for Best Makeup. Trend or coincidence? Pearl Harbor, also rated 6.0, won for Best Sound Editing.

Samir Mehta | January 19, 2016
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Scott Hardie | January 19, 2016
Nah, advanced search tools. :-)

Scott Hardie | January 31, 2016
Will the Academy's changes bring needed diversity?

Aaron Shurtleff | February 2, 2016
Well, I think that is a more difficult question than it seems on the face, and with a lot of odd nuances. Will it bring more diversity to the Academy's voting group? I would assume it would, unless this turns out to be a really horrible fake-out. But, I think the real difficult questions are: Will it make an actual difference (and when)?
Let's leave off the question of whether adding minority voters specifically to get more minorities voted into contention for awards is the best way to go about getting better representation for minorities in awards. I think a bigger problem is the lack of minorities in the big roles that get nominated for awards. And I know this was spoken of already above. Do the Academy changes "fix" that? I don't think so.
I don't know what the best solution is. Does anyone? I mean I'd hate to see a movie equivalent of the NFL's Rooney Rule. For those who don't know (and if I misunderstand it, here's what I think it is), when a head coaching position opens, it is required that at least one minority candidate must be interviewed. It sounds great, but a manditory interview doesn't mean the minority candidate is hired. I am not saying therearen't great minority roles deserving of awards, but mandating that a minority must be one of the candidates for an award just seems like... I don't know.

Scott Hardie | February 4, 2016
I don't know what the answer is. I'm tempted to say again that the problem isn't really the Academy who is nominating the actors available to them, but the movie business in general that gives too few good roles (especially leading roles) to actors of color. But there's a long history of racism that informs the casting decisions, the availability of good actors to play these parts, and whether white audiences will turn out en masse for a minority lead. (I don't know what Hollywood's market research says, but I'm skeptical if it says black leads sell fewer tickets: The domestically highest-grossing movie of all time just starred John Boyega, and it was eventually beaten at the weekend box office by another movie starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart.) And yet, if we focus on what's to blame for the situation, we lose track of what specifically the Academy can do about the problem within their realm.

I'm also acutely aware of the role of chance in this. For the people criticizing the Academy for not nominating Michael B. Jordan or Idris Elba for their good work this year, they do realize that there are only five lead actors who can be nominated, right? And there are lots and lots of good lead-actor performances this year that could similarly be nominated, right? If there were, say, twenty really good performances this year, and two of them happened to be by black actors, and the five nominations happened to go to five of the eighteen white actors, that's not by itself evidence of a slight against the two black actors; that's (at least in part) just plain random chance. It might be clearer if there were only seven good performances and the five whites were chosen while the two blacks were not, but there were many other good performances this year that didn't get Oscar nods, so I doubt it.

If I were a lifelong member of the Academy who was suddenly ejected by the new rules, I'd be quite upset. You can change the membership rules for new incoming members, but to change it retroactively for people who have been in it for decades and are too retired to meet the new qualifications? Ouch. But I'm not a member, and I understand why the leadership made these choices. Regardless of just the improvements in minority representation, I think these will lead to better Oscar nominations all around.

Samir Mehta | February 4, 2016
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Scott Hardie | February 5, 2016
I like the Rooney rule too. It doesn't force minority coaches to be hired, it just forces them to be considered for the job, which represents a trivial burden for the teams and should go a long way toward defeating unintenional prejudice, as Samir mentioned. It doesn't do anything to counter intentional prejudice, but what, a racist white owner should be forced to hire a black coach who he doesn't like and won't get along with? That black coach would be better off working with teams where he'd be able to do his job well.

I work in software development, which has a different hiring problem. Our field is ethnically diverse: My own team of around 30 people includes guys from Cuba, Jamaica, Russia, Kuwait, Canada, Ukraine, Nigeria, Sweden, Brazil, and former Yugoslavia. But as you might have guessed, they're all guys. I've been with this employer for two and a half years, and I've worked with exactly two women developers, one of whom quit shortly after I started, and one of whom just started at New Years, so there was a two-year stretch with no women at all. The larger company employs lots of women and seems roughly 50/50 in gender, but development is near-universally male. And yet, what are individual managers supposed to do about it when there are so few women developers to hire? At the last company where I worked, I was the hiring manager for developers, and of the 300 or so resumés that I saw over the years, maybe 2 were from women. A Rooney rule wouldn't even help in that case because there sometimes isn't a single female candidate to consider. Everyone in this field should be doing a lot more to get women (and girls) interested in coding and learning that trade, especially as software slowly consumes other industries.

Samir Mehta | February 5, 2016
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Scott Hardie | February 18, 2016
Great idea, Samir. Someone out there in Silicon Valley is pushing this concept for start-ups, but who knows how many of them will listen.

I'm out of the loop regarding the Oscar race, not reading as much coverage as I used to, so several categories this year seem highly competitive to me even though they probably aren't. Best Picture is rarely this hard to predict. I will probably not settle on my final predictions until the weekend of the Oscars. And I learned a lesson from last year: Don't wait until the last few hours, in case a sudden and rare site outage happens to occur right as the contest is ending. :-(

Scott Hardie | February 27, 2016
Kelly found this cute collection of Winnie the Pooh characters re-enacting Oscar nominees.

Samir Mehta | February 27, 2016
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Aaron Shurtleff | February 27, 2016
I don't know about movie rooting, but there are a LOT of DiCaprio fans rooting for him to win Best Actor.

I don't really see enough movies to know what I'm missing half the time. And the ones I do see almost never get nominated (I have terrible taste, apparently).

Samir Mehta | February 27, 2016
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Scott Hardie | February 28, 2016
I'm rooting, in vain, for Mad Max: Fury Road. I don't even think it will sweep the technical awards, let alone approach Picture or Director.

I have confidence in most of my predictions tonight, but I'm still tweaking, because confidence is for suckers in this contest.

Scott Hardie | February 29, 2016
Ex Machina for Visual Effects! Crazy! That was one of the few categories where I was uncertain, but apparently I was way off. I kept waffling between Mad Max and Star Wars, and players in the contest were split nearly evenly between those two. Mad Max seemed poised to sweep the technical awards. Then out of left field, bam, Ex Machina wins. Huh.

Samir Mehta | February 29, 2016
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Scott Hardie | February 29, 2016
First, I trust my instincts, up to a point. After doing this for many years, I find they're right more often than wrong.

Then, I compare a LOT of sources, including those two that you named. I weigh which ones have proven trustworthy and not, and tweak my predictions accordingly. I've become more reliant on this in recent years as I am unfamiliar with so many of the films.

Lastly, I do a numerical analysis of other players' predictions, and make adjustments to my own that's intended to help me outscore them, regardless of who I actually think will win Oscars. It's weird to bet against myself but it often pays off in a better score.

Samir Mehta | February 29, 2016
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Scott Hardie | February 29, 2016
Mark Rylance? Yeah, that was an outlier. I saw a few predictions online but nothing approaching the expectations for Stallone. I thought briefly of switching but stuck with the Italian Stallion. Great pick for new player Anne Heckman, who just joined the site this afternoon to play this contest. By choosing Rylance, she has almost certainly won. If my math is correct, the only other possible outcome would be if The Big Short won Best Picture and Kevin Fiore tied her. We'll find out in a few minutes.

Scott Hardie | February 29, 2016
What a finish! Congrats to Spotlight on a huge upset over the little-loved but widely-predicted Revenant for Best Picture. I wonder how close the vote totals were. However, I expect it will be forgotten by this time next year. Maybe I'm just being mean, but I think when history ranks the Best Picture winners by memorability, Spotlight will be toward the bottom of the list. Even the similarly minor The Artist at least had the silent-film hook.

Scott Hardie | February 29, 2016
Another thought: As contest administrator, I dodged a bullet with Mark Rylance. If Stallone had won, I'd be giving out four cash prizes right now instead of one. But as a sort-of-competitor myself, I almost wouldn't have minded, because I would have tied for top score. :-)

Scott Hardie | February 29, 2016
Is the win for Spotlight really that big of a surprise? I meant what I said last year about the current Academy giving up Best Picture too easily to films that glorify the entertainment business. The journalism business isn't that far removed: It's information that tells a narrative and brings public attention to important ideas and issues. Had Spotlight been about a documentary filmmaker who raised attention for the same issue rather than a print newspaper, the connection might be clearer. Perhaps the Academy gaining so many new members so quickly after the "Oscars So White" controversy will change the voting makeup enough to break this dsspiriting trend.

I hope that Paul Rudd gets nominated for Best Lead Actor someday, so that when the time comes to present that award and they play clips of the five nominated performances, he can play his favorite clip.