This year's Best Picture contest has been crazy. We've had a three-way race all season between Spotlight, The Big Short, and The Revenant, all winning at least one of the main six precursors: PGA (Producers Guild of America), DGA (Directors Guild of America), SAG (Screen Actors Guild) Best Ensemble prize, BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), the Golden Globes (Hollywood Foreign Press Association), and the BFCA (Broadcast Film Critics Association, also known as the Critics Choice Awards).
Okay, so, the normal way an awards season goes is...
Phase 1: Pre-Nominations: The Critics and the Golden Globes
So, there are a shit-ton of regional critics groups representing the critics from different cities and states that all announce winners throughout December and early January. They usually coalesce to make a frontrunner in many of the categories. Most of the time these winners also correspond with the winner of the Critics Choice Awards, so I tend to use the Critics Choice winners as a representation of all the critics (even though the BFCA is just a random group of like 50 critics who often just like to predict the future Oscar winners). The Golden Globes also announce their winners around this time, but the HFPA are a bunch of foreign journalists who sometimes have weird ass taste. So, even though the critics and the Globes voters aren't actually members of the Academy, they have televised awards shows where you get to see people collecting wins and making speeches, and they can build momentum toward a future Oscar win.
Phase 2: Post-Nominations: The Guilds and BAFTA
The Academy is composed of 6,000+ members from various branches across the movie industry. Many Academy member are also members of larger guilds. The directors branch of the academy, for example, is around 500 directors. There's also a Directors Guild (DGA) that has like 15,000 members. And they give out their own awards. This is when you often start seeing momentum changing. Last year Boyhood was winning everything in Phase 1, and then Birdman won PGA, DGA, and SAG in Phase 2 and then eventually Best Picture. The same thing happened in 2010 between The Social Network and The King's Speech.
This is how the precursors have gone down the last five years:
2010:
The King's Speech: PGA, DGA, SAG, BAFTA (won Best Picture/Director)
The Social Network: Globes, Critics
2011:
The Artist: PGA, DGA, SAG, BAFTA, Globes, Critics (won Best Picture/Director)
The Help: SAG
2012:
Argo: PGA, DGA, SAG, BAFTA, Globes, Critics (won Best Picture, not nominated for Director)
2013:
12 Years a Slave: PGA (tie), BAFTA, Globes - Drama (won Best Picture)
Gravity: PGA (tie), DGA (won Best Director)
American Hustle: SAG, Globes - Musical/Comedy
2014:
Birdman: PGA, DGA, SAG (won Best Picture/Director)
Boyhood: BAFTA, Globes - Drama, Critics
Aside from 2013, when 12 Years a Slave just barely managed to win Best Picture away from Gravity, most years you have one film dominating the whole awards season (Argo, The Artist, The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, etc.). Or you have one film sweep the critics and then another film come in and sweep the guilds and Best Picture (The King's Speech vs. Social Network, Birdman vs. Boyhood).
But not this year! First Spotlight was the clear frontrunner ordained by the critics. Then The Revenant won the Globes. Then Spotlight won Critics Choice. Then The Big Short shocked at the PGA. Then Spotlight won the SAG Best Ensemble prize. Then The Revenant won the DGA, and finally The Revenant won the BAFTA. So that means this year we have:
The Revenant: DGA, BAFTA, Globes
Spotlight: SAG, Critics
The Big Short: PGA
We've had this crazy bouncing back and forth between these three movies all season, but it looks like we might have finally settled on The Revenant. It won the last two major awards and now it has the most amount of wins (like 12 Years a Slave did two years ago). The only thing that's really giving me pause is that The Big Short beat The Revenant at the PGA. The PGA and the Oscars both adopted "the preferential ballot" for determining Best Picture in 2009. This means that instead of just counting the number of votes for Best Picture, voters now have to rank all of the nominees from 1 to 8 (or 9 or 10, depending on the number of nominees that year). So the film that is ranked numbers 1, 2, or 3 on the most number of ballots (i.e. the consensus) should be the ultimate winner, rather than the film that may be number 1 on a lot of ballots but also number 7 or 8 (i.e. the passionate but divisive vote). Since adapting the preferential ballot, the PGA winner has matched the Best Picture winner every year. But then again, 12 Years a Slave and Gravity tied at the PGAs two years ago. So if Gravity would have had ONE more vote than 12 Years a Slave, Gravity would have won and the PGA wouldn't have matched the Best Picture Oscar winner that year. So maybe I'm putting too much stock in the PGA.
The PGA happened in late January, and I'm thinking that The Big Short might have lost some of its momentum since then. It hasn't won anything else since then. And now The Revenant seems to be the movie most people are talking about in February. It has certainly made the most money. Then again, American Sniper made $300+ this time last year and it only won one Oscar. And Gravity made like $200 million more than 12 Years a Slave and it lost. There are also a lot of records The Revenant will break if it wins Best Picture:
- First film to win Best Picture released in December since Million Dollar Baby for 2004 (and the first super early (sight unseen, like a year in advance) predicted winner since Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for 2003.
- First film not nominated in either of the Best Screenplay categories at the Oscars since Titanic for 1997.
- First film not nominated for Best Ensemble at the SAGs since Braveheart for 1995.
And most importantly:
- First film ever by the same director to win Best Picture two years in a row (and only two other directors have won Director back-to-back: Joseph L. Mankiewicz for 1949-50 and John Ford for 1940-41)
Another possible record to consider:
The Big Short or Spotlight seem really unlikely to win any other category besides one of the Best Screenplay categories and Best Picture, so either of them would be the first Best Picture winner to win only 2 Oscars since The Greatest Show on Earth for 1952.
Then again, The Oscars are bucking tradition more often recently. Last year Birdman was the first film to win Best Picture without a Best Film Editing nomination since Ordinary People for 1980, and Argo was the first film to win Best Picture without a Best Director nomination since Driving Miss Daisy for 1989. So who knows?
Obviously, the problem this year is that none of the big 3 choices seem to be liked enough to become the consensus choice. The arguments against each film seem to be:
- Spotlight: too boring, unremarkable filmmaking
- Big Short: too Hollywood, from a comedy director, rough around the edges
- The Revenant: too violent, long, divisive, doesn't have really glowing reviews
So I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what might actually be the consensus choice for The Academy. I would think that Spotlight would totally fit that role, because come on, who could dislike that movie? But I'm finding that people really just aren't WOWed by it. I keep hearing "it looks like a TV movie!" The response to Spotlight really reminds me of the response to Boyhood last year. I spend so much time on Film Twitter, so I tend to forget that the critics actually aren't representative of the average film-going public. The Academy members tend to land in some gray space between a film critic and an average viewer. The Revenant doesn't seem like a consensus choice to would favor the preferential ballot (like the generally agreeable Argo did in 2012), but I would have thought Birdman was going to be too weird for the Academy. I think the trick is to find a mixture of passion and consensus instead of just consensus. And Best Picture just needs to be exciting nowadays. The movies that people find boring don't win Best Picture anymore. Argo was exciting, after all. So was Birdman. I guess 12 Years a Slave was somewhat boring, but white guilt led the Academy to pick that movie because it felt IMPORTANT. And 12 Years a Slave had dynamic filmmaking, which is also really important nowadays. The Social Network was dynamic, but the Academy just didn't want to give Best Picture to the movie about Facebook. Just like they didn't want to give it to the movie about gay cowboys. Ugh. I can't.
But yeah, anyway! I actually feel pretty confident that The Revenant is going to win. I tend to really overthink what the Academy is going to do, but you can usually just tell when something FEELS like a Best Picture winner. And I think The Revenant just makes the most sense. It's just such a bummer because I thought that movie was... eh. It's pretty but it's dumb. And I thought The Big Short, which I definitely think is in 2nd place, was fun but messy. Both of those are my least favorite nominees in this category. Go figure! And the critics agree with me! Either of these two films will end up as the worst-reviewed Best Picture winner since Crash (SHUDDER!!). Whatever, I just want Mad Max to win, but that's not going to happen. Then I would prefer Spotlight, but I think that's running a distant third. We'll see! I'm over it. Lemme just go work on my predictions for next year's Oscars jajaja.
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