Oscars 2020

Scott Hardie | January 13, 2020
Our annual contest returns for its 21st year. Good luck!

Any early predictions? Any surprise at some of the nominees?

Erik Bates | January 13, 2020
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Scott Hardie | January 18, 2020
I heard that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was supposed to be about the reporter, and how he changes as a result of his conversations with Rogers. But I haven't seen it to be sure. I can't find online how much screen time Tom Hanks and Matthew Rhys each have.

I continue to be amazed by Joker's acclaim. As I said elsewhere, I skipped it because it looked like male-grievance trash, an 8chan thread adapted to film. But now it's nominated for more Oscars than any other film of the year, and likely to win several. I guess if Braveheart and Gladiator can win Best Picture with the same violent-male-revenge-fantasy appeal, why not Joker too?

Samir Mehta | January 18, 2020
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Scott Hardie | February 9, 2020
We have 67 entrants in the PTO contest this year! That's crazy! And that's after I deleted some duplicate accounts, so it was briefly higher. Before this year, the most people we ever had playing in PTO was 41 people way back in 2004. This is easily the highest day of activity on Funeratic all year long; too bad it'll go back to normal tomorrow.

I'm excited but apprehensive to see how the contest turns out. My confidence level is around 80% with my predictions, meaning that I'm confident that I've made the right pick in about 80% of the categories. If this is anything like most years, not only will I fail to have predicted correctly in that other 20%, but another 20% of my predictions will also turn out to be wrong. With 67 people playing, the odds of coming out on top are quite slim.

Scott Hardie | February 9, 2020
I haven't seen 1917, but isn't it edited together to look like a single take? That cannot have been easy. Why wasn't that nominated for Best Editing?

Scott Hardie | February 9, 2020
Well, what do you know? Apparently my predictions were better than I thought. :-) It feels good to beat the field again. The last time I had the top score was 2006, although I've managed to get the second-place score a couple of times since then.

Since I'm not really in the contest, here's congratulating our real winner Claudiu Cristian Dobre, who registered on the site only a few hours before the contest started. He beat a huge field with some pretty savvy predictions. Longtime player Mihai Rusu also did very well.

I'm happy that so many people still enjoy this little contest. I can't wait for next year already.

Erik Bates | February 10, 2020
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