Sunday’s Oscar ceremony will conclude an awards season so tortuous and intricate that the announcements of the winners and the presentations of the gold-plated statuettes cannot help but come as both a huge relief and an anti-climax. Unless, of course, the Academy voters throw us some curveballs.
The thought of unlikely wins for “Nebraska” as Best Picture, Christian Bale (“American Hustle”) as Best Actor, and June Squibb (“Nebraska”) or Sally Hawkins (“Blue Jasmine”) as Best Supporting Actress explains why the Oscars remain exciting. They would be more tweetable than most of the results will be. They would wake up those of us who will be staring blankly at our television screens like Alexander Payne’s codgerly Nebraskans. They are almost certainly not going to happen, though Squibb has an outside shot — 50/1 according to Gold Derby.
Self-styled “the Rotten Tomatoes of awards predictions with a dash of Fantasy Sports” on its Facebook page, Gold Derby offers the most elaborate Oscars prognostication service. It polls 30 experts (independent journalists) and six editors at the site, as well as 22 current users and the 24 users “who scored the highest percentage of accuracy last year and shared their predictions publicly.”
These are the overall predictions for the winners of the six categories most Oscar-watchers will have their eyes on, together with the handicap:
Best Picture: “12 Years a Slave,” 8/13
Best Director: Alfonso Cuarón (“Gravity”), 1/10
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (“Blue Jasmine”), 1/10
Best Actor: Matthew McConaughey (“Dallas Buyers Club”), 1/5
Best Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”), 1/3
Best Supporting Actor: Jared Leto (“Dallas Buyers Club”), 1/10
Based on consensus, these predictions are persuasive, but no less so than those of Variety’s Jenelle Riley and Ramin Setoodeh in a cogently argued debate published in the trade paper yesterday. They concur with Gold Derby on wins for Cuarón, McConaughey, and Leto, but both think “Gravity” will win Best Picture.
Setoodeh, “going on a limb,” predicts Amy Adams (“American Hustle”) will win Best Actress. Riley, prompted by a “gut feeling” about general “love for ‘American Hustle,’” thinks Jennifer Lawrence, the early front-runner, will win as Best Supporting Actress.
Setoodeh and Riley compellingly contend that “Gravity” will win the top prize because, as the former says, “after the best picture race expanded in 2011, the votes in this category are tabulated differently — with a weighted ballot. You don’t need a majority to win. You need a plurality, and voters are asked to rank their favorite films in order of preference.” The winner needs to be the film that “needs to be mostly consistently liked.”
Although “12 Years a Slave” is clearly the film with the greatest social conscience, which would traditionally endear it to Academy voters, “Gravity” will figure high, if not top, on most ballots, and I suspect it will, indeed, win. This would be a shame. Ingenious as "Gravity"'s CGI is, and impressive as it is as a spectacle, it does not engage with human experience with anything like the trenchancy of Steve McQueen’s film.
I suggest the winners will be “Gravity,” Cuarón, Blanchett, McConaughey, Lawrence, and Leto. Having said that, the pyrotechnical acting and barnstorming Oscar campaign of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street” could wrest Best Actor from McConaughey (despite his more sympathetic performance), while Adams, nominated for the fifth time, deserves to be garlanded by the Academy for her sociopathic floozy in “American Hustle.”
