The 86th Annual Academy Awards nominees won’t be announced until January 16, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a pretty good idea who will be nominated this year. It’s a popularity contest, damn it, so the buzz matters, and the buzz has been flying non-stop for months.
For those of you prognosticating at home, remember: ignore the critics awards. Those winners may be just as meaningful as the Academy’s (heck, maybe even moreso), but they don’t necessarily reflect what the Academy voters actually think. To get a sneak preview of what the Academy is leaning towards in any given year, you have to look at the what the guilds are nominating, since those voters largely – although not entirely – overlap with the Academy’s.
The Screen Actors Guild is the largest voting body in the Academy, so their guild nominations frequently provide a preview of what’s to come. Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave completely dominated their nominations this year, earning nods for Best Ensemble (the SAG equivalent of Best Picture), Best Actor for Chiwetel Ejiofor, Best Supporting Actor for Michael Fassbender, and Best Supporting Actress for Lupita Nyong’o.
For months, conventional wisdom has stated that 12 Years a Slave was the film to beat this year at the Oscars, and that seems to still be the case. However, the SAG Awards also recognized the film’s two closest competitors – David O. Russell’s American Hustle and Lee Daniels’ Lee Daniels’ The Butler – with multiple nominations. All three films are period pieces with buzzworthy ensemble casts, and Jennifer Lawrence in particular seems to be emerging as a late-in-the-game spoiler for Best Supporting Actress, an award that many had written off as Lupita Nyong’o’s to lose months ago.
But… then there’s the Producers Guild Awards. In the 24 year history of the PGA Awards, the winner has accurately predicted the eventual Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards 17 times. Not too shabby, but not necessarily bankable odds. How’s this then? In those same 24 years, only one film has ever won the Oscar for Best Picture without a PGA Award nomination (that would be Braveheart, for those keeping score). And Lee Daniels’ Lee Daniels’ The Butler was completely shut out this year, so maybe it’s not the serious contender we all thought it was.
The PGA Awards nominate 10 films for Best Theatrical Feature, and most of them usually synch up to the eventual Oscar nominees, which can number anywhere from 5-10 for Best Picture. (The rules are based on a ranking system, so in order to be nominated each film has to rank #1 on somebody’s list, no matter how many people technically nominate it.) So we can expect the final Oscar nominees to look a little something like this year’s PGA nominees: 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Saving Mr. Banks and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Lee Daniels’ Lee Daniels’ The Butler could still eke out an Oscar nomination, as could any number of films that didn’t make the list, including acclaimed dramas Inside Llewyn Davis and August: Osage County, as well as a number of foreign films that are ineligible for guild consideration but are allowed to be nominated by the Academy, including the celebrated, topical coming-of-age lesbian drama Blue is the Warmest Color, although that film probably has a better chance in the acting categories than it does for “the big prize.”
The big question on many prognosticators’ minds is whether the recent controversy surrounding The Wolf of Wall Street -relating to whether Martin Scorsese’s film does too little to condemn the gross hedonism and criminal malfeasance of its stockbroker “heroes” – will affect the film’s chances at the Oscars. (The controversy mostly began after the Guild nominations were collected.) The SAG Awards chose to neglect Leonardo DiCaprio’s acclaimed lead performance, but then again they also neglected Robert Redford’s supposedly awards-bait turn in the survival drama All is Lost, so perhaps that doesn’t mean anything after all.
CraveOnline will be back next week with our official Oscar Predictions, followed by the official nominations on January 16, 2014.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
