The Oscar Grouch: Which Races Are Closest Heading Into the Final Days Before Nominations?

Of course, the Oscars are nothing if not a political game. Every week, new films are released, reviewed, and hyped by the Hollywood machine. And that means that every week, new frontrunners might emerge. The Oscar Grouch will be back every Wednesday to keep you updated on this year’s Oscar race.

 

We are officially less than one week away from the Oscar nominations, announced on Tuesday morning, January 24th, via some cockamamie new kind of presentation that sounds utterly horrible to a purist like me. I’m really going to miss hearing the gasps of reporters and publicists when a surprise nomination gets announced!

So this being the final Oscar Grouch before the nominations, this week’s predictions will be our finals ones. The ones we can hang our hats on. The ones history will judge us by. A few races — Best Actor; Best Supporting Actress — seem very much sewn up, while Best Picture remains in a fascinating state of flux behind the top three (La La Land, Moonlight, Manchester By the Sea), and some races like Best Director and Best Actress have one or two final slots open to a good half-dozen competitors (or more).

To help me sort through these thrillingly open races, I reached out to Oscar blogger Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience, who is always a great one to discuss the small obsessions that make up our great big Oscar obsession.

Decider.com: Which movie has the inside track on Best Director? Does an auteur like Martin Scorsese [Silence] always have a chance with the Academy? Has Mel Gibson’s heat cooled? Will it be Garth Davis or someone even more unexpected?

Oscar loves a passion project and complicated feats of engineering on a large scale in this category. So it’s been hard for me to imagine Damien Chazelle losing the Oscar for La La Land ever since its traffic-stopping opening number. This same reasoning (passion + difficult to make) is why Scorsese still has a shot for Silence — auteurs always have a shot — but the interest in his Jesuit priest epic just doesn’t seem to move beyond ‘I respect that!’ which is Oscar’s version of the friend-zone. As for Mel Gibson [Hacksaw Ridge] … if he couldn’t make it with the much more populist, much larger voting body of the Directors Guild, it’s very difficult to imagine the Academy’s embrace.

Director’s branch curveballs can be shocking, but my gut says the last spot is between Garth Davis [Lion] and Tom Ford [Nocturnal Animals]. (The generous love from BAFTA & the Globes suggests that the industry does not share my personal revulsion towards Nocturnal Animals.)

Best Supporting Actor seems set with Mahershala Ali, Jeff Bridges, Dev Patel, and Hugh Grant. Is that fifth slot a battle between Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lucas Hedges, or could things go even weirder? The surprise nominations in the recent past in this category seem to come from Best Picture nominees.

My mantra is “things could always go weirder,” even if most nomination mornings don’t pan out that way. Lucas Hedges could well be sidelined due to the acting branch’s odd resistance to young male actors (they love young women but men under 30: nope!). It’s worth noting that, if nominated, he’d be the 8th youngest ever in the category. On the other hand, I can’t help but think he’s got a better shot than Aaron Taylor-Johnson. (Of course, my aversion to Nocturnal Animals could be blinding me to whatever people are seeing in Taylor Johnson’s performance, especially when a stronger actor’s actor like Michael Shannon is in the same film and stealing it!). If there’s a previously ignored supporting actor lurking in a Best Picture contender surprise, it’s got to be either Ben Foster in Hell or High Water or Steven McKinley Henderson in Fences, right?

My fantasy is that Ralph Fiennes, easily the single most Oscar-worthy actor who can’t seem to ever catch Oscar’s eye, is nomination morning’s biggest shock for A Bigger Splash. The key word in that sentence being “fantasy”.

Best Actress has been the hottest category all year. If we posit that Isabelle Huppert and Amy Adams are more or less secure, who’s ahead in that fifth-slot jumble? Or are we in for a bigger snub than I’m expecting?

Must we posit this? I’ve been thinking that Amy Adams could be the surprise omission that no one saw coming but that in retrospect makes a kind of sense. The fact is that it’s really hard to get nominated for sci-fi films. Very few people have accomplished it. If Huppert & Adams are secure, though, then the fifth spot battle is between Ruth Negga (Loving), Emily Blunt (The Girl on the Train), Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins), Taraji P Henson (Hidden Figures), and Annette Bening (20th Century Women).

My head says Streep, my heart says Bening, and my gut says Negga. I’m just not sure which body part to listen to.

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That said, here are Decider’s current predictions for who we think will get nominated in all six major categories — not who we think deserves to be (ranked in order of “buzziness”). Enter “The Oscar Grouch“:

BEST PICTURE

Front Runners: La La Land, Moonlight, Manchester By the Sea, Lion, Hidden Figures, Hell or High Water, Hacksaw Ridge, Arrival, Fences, Nocturnal Animals 

Potentially Interesting Spoiler: Deadpool

What’s The Buzz: For the record, I don’t believe that Deadpool has a realistic shot at a Best Picture nomination. However, I can’t deny that it got a LOT of good press for its surprise Golden Globe, WGA, and PGA nominations. It’s also the one movie people want to ask me about when the Oscars come up. And in this year of brushing off someone’s chances to win because we think it’s too ridiculous to even consider it, only to be proven horribly, horribly wrong, it would be fitting for Deadpool to crash the party. If the Best Picture category gets 10 nominees … oh, hell, I don’t even know.

BEST DIRECTOR

Front Runners: Damien Chazelle (La La Land), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea), Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), Garth Davis (Lion)

Potentially Interesting Spoiler: Theodore Melfi (Hidden Figures)

What’s The Buzz: So I’m predicting all five Directors Guild (DGA) nominees to repeat as Oscar nominees. That hasn’t happened since 2009, so what I’m really doing is hedging my bets. The truth is that either Davis or Villeneuve’s slots could go to anyone from a vey crowded field: Mel Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge), Martin Scorsese (Silence), Theodore Melfi (Hidden Figures), David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water), Denzel Washington (Fences), Pablo Larrain (Jackie), Tom Ford (Nocturnal Animals) … it’s a wild race to the finish line.

BEST ACTOR

Front Runners: Casey Affleck (Manchester By the Sea), Denzel Washington (Fences), Ryan Gosling (La La Land), Andrew Garfield (Hacksaw Ridge), Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic)

Potentially Interesting Spoiler: Dev Patel (Lion)

What’s The Buzz: Tom Hanks (Sully) and Joel Edgerton (Loving) are sitting in sixth and seventh place here, but the truth is that neither one of them have had any kind of buzz for weeks. I wonder if The Weinstein Company is not regretting pushing Dev Patel as supporting when Lion is clearly popular enough to have gotten him into Best Actor ahead of Mortensen (and maybe Garfield). Patel’s case isn’t quite category fraud — he plays the film’s unambiguously lead character, but he’s only in the role for the second half of the movie. It’s a lead performance with supporting screen time. The Oscars have been known to make up their own minds about lead/supporting designations in the past (Keisha Castle-Hughes for Whale Rider and Kate Winslet for The Reader were both placed in lead after fraudulent supporting campaigns), but it’s still rare.

BEST ACTRESS

Front Runners: Emma Stone (La La Land), Natalie Portman (Jackie), Isabelle Huppert (Elle), Amy Adams (Arrival), Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins)

Potentially Interesting Spoiler: Annette Bening (20th Century Women)

What’s The Buzz: I now wonder if we’ve all come around on the idea of Annette Bening getting snubbed that we’re now under-estimating her? It’s honestly a fantastic performance, and if voters watched their screeners, you have to imagine they’d be moved by her funny, wise, layered performance. Streep and Emily Blunt are more populist picks, while Ruth Negga has become the esoteric long-shot.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Front Runners: Mahershala Ali (Moonlight), Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water), Dev Patel (Lion), Hugh Grant (Florence Foster Jenkins), Ben Foster (Hell or High Water)

Potentially Interesting Spoiler: Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Nocturnal Animals)

What’s The Buzz: Taking a stab at a surprise nomination for Ben Foster, who’s been Oscar worthy a few times in the past without any recognition (remember when Woody Harrelson got nominated for The Messenger while Foster was giving that film’s best performance?). Taylor-Johnson missing after winning the Golden Globe would be incredibly rare, but the Globes are growing ever more distant from the Oscars, so maybe this is just the awards equivalent of an iceberg breaking off of Antarctica.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Front Runners: Viola Davis (Fences), Michelle Williams (Manchester By the Sea), Naomie Harris (Moonlight), Nicole Kidman (Lion), Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures)

Potentially Interesting Spoiler: Greta Gerwig (20th Century Women)

What’s The Buzz: This race is very secure. It will also likely be the only acting category where all five nominees are representing Best Picture nominees. But we’ll know for sure on Tuesday morning!