I’ve already posted my personal Oscar predictions right here and now it is time for you to weigh in with your predictions so we can see what the RopeofSilicon collective has to say.
I have listed 21 of the 24 Oscar categories below (excluding the short categories), and next to each I have included a statistic and/or fun fact for you to think about while voting. Before you start, here’s a second look at the top ten films getting the most nominations:
- The King’s Speech – 12 nominations
- True Grit – 10 nominations
- The Social Network – 8 nominations
- Inception – 8 nominations
- The Fighter – 7 nominations
- 127 Hours – 6 nominations
- Toy Story 3 – 5 nominations
- Black Swan – 5 nominations
- Winter’s Bone – 4 nominations
- The Kids are All Right – 4 nominations
Based on those numbers, I thought you may like to know that prior to The King’s Speech‘s 12 nominations 24 other films have been nominated for 12 or more Oscars. Of those 24 films, 15 of them went on to win Best Picture. Of the nine that didn’t win Best Picture, two of them lost to a film that also had 12 or more. The nine that lost are Mary Poppins, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Song of Bernadette, Reds, Johnny Belinda and Becket.
I don’t know about you, but those look like pretty good odds for The King’s Speech if you ask me. But enough, let’s move on, there are more stats to discuss along the way…
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The King’s Speech won with the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild and as I said above has 12 nominations in its favor. In the last ten years six of the PGA winners have gone on to win the Oscar and eight of the DGA winners have gone on to win the Oscar.
However, one award The King’s Speech didn’t win leading up to this point was with the American Cinema Editors, a guild that has matched the Academy’s Best Picture six out of the last ten years and has predicted the Best Film Editing Oscar eight of the last ten years. The Social Network was ACE’s winner this year. It also pretty much swept the critics awards from Los Angeles, New York, the BFCA and National Society of Film Critics. |
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There is talk of a potential Annette Bening surprise. Bening has been nominated three times before and all three times gone home empty handed, the last two times to Hilary Swank. However, Natalie Portman has everything going for her.
Portman already won at the BAFTA Awards, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild and I expect will win at the Independent Spirit Awards this Saturday. |
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Colin Firth has pretty much swept the board winning at the BAFTA Awards, Broadcast Film Critics Awards, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards. And there hasn’t been a peep of a possible upset.
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Like Firth, Bale won at the Broadcast Film Critics Awards, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards. The only difference was a loss to fellow nominee Geoffrey Rush at the BAFTA Awards.
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Melissa Leo’s credits are exactly the same as Bale’s and she too lost at the BAFTAs to fellow The King’s Speech nominee Helena Bonham Carter.
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The only time Toy Story 3 failed to win a Best Animated Feature award this year was when How to Train Your Dragon won at the Annie Awards, an org Disney and Pixar boycotted complaining about the voting process among other things such as the fact DreamWorks Animation pays for membership and Disney doesn’t.
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This year the Art Directors Guild awarded Black Swan (contemporary), Inception (fantasy) and The King’s Speech (period). The ADG has matched the Academy in this category six of the last ten years. However, one thing to note is that no Tim Burton film nominated for Best Art Direction has ever lost. Which way will you vote?
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The American Society of Cinematographers awarded Wally Pfister for Inception. However, they have matched the Academy only four out of the last ten years. Roger Deakins has been nominated eight times before, has often been thought the front-runner and has always gone home empty handed.
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The Costume Designers Guild has matched the Academy only five times in the last ten years and this year they awarded Black Swan, The King’s Speech and Alice in Wonderland. It is also interesting to note that no Tim Burton film has won for Best Costumes when nominated and only two true fantasies have ever won this award in the past — The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Star Wars.
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Tom Hooper won with the Directors Guild and six times since the DGA Awards began in 1948 has the winner not gone on to win Best Director.
However, David Fincher won the Golden Globe, BFCA Award and BAFTA Award along with a slew of awards from critical groups. Hooper, by comparison, was pretty much blanked outside of the DGA Award. |
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Inside Job won with the Writers Guild and Directors Guild and I’d say the only other film winning an award of note among the nominees is Restrepo winning with the National Board of Review. Otherwise, Exit through the Gift Shop is the most talked about documentary of the year in film circles.
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Rick Baker (The Wolfman) has been nominated for the Best Makeup Oscar 10 times before, winning six of those times. By comparison to the field, Yolanda Toussieng (The Way Back) comes closest with four noms, one of those was with Baker. Add up the nominations and wins from everyone else and you still don’t match Baker’s total.
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As I already mentioned, The Social Network won with the American Cinema Editors and their winner has matched the Academy eight of the last ten years.
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Susanne Bier’s In a Better World won at the Golden Globes for Best Foreign Language Film, but Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Biutiful is the only one of the Foreign Language nominees to also be nominated elsewhere (Javier Bardem for Best Actor).
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Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score for The Social Network won at the Golden Globees and BFCA. Alexandre Desplat’s The King’s Speech score won the BAFTA Award.
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Randy Newman has been nominated for Best Original Song eleven times before this year (twice before for a song from the Toy Story franchise) and one only once (Monsters, Inc. in 2001). This is Alan Menken’s 14th nomination and he’s won four times already.
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Inception‘s Richard King won with the Motion Picture Sound Editors and this is his fourth nomination having won twice before for The Dark Knight and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Michael Silvers is also a multi-nominee having been nominated five times prior, all for Pixar films and winning once for The Incredibles. Gwendolyn Yates Whittle was part of the Avatar team that lost to The Hurt Locker last year. |
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True Grit was awarded by the Cinema Audio Society for Best Sound Mixing, but they are a group that has agreed with the Academy only three times in the last ten years. However, if you are thinking of going for Inception in both Editing and Mixing, know that only three times in the last ten years has a film won both awards and only nine times in the last 25.
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Inception is the front-runner based on its wins with the Visual Effects Society, a group that has matched the Oscars six times in its eight years of existence. Its most notable difference was when it awarded Transformers in 2008 and the Academy voted for The Golden Compass.
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The Writers Guild selected Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network and has pretty much every other guild, society and award show. The WGA has matched the Academy seven times in the last ten years, although it did miss last year when it awarded Up In the Air and the Oscars surprised us with a win for Precious.
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The WGA has an even better record matching the Academy in the Original Screenplay column over the last ten years as eight of their named winners have gone on to win the Oscar. This year the WGA awarded Christopher Nolan’s script for Inception. David Seidler’s script for The King’s Speech, however, won the BAFTA, the BFCA and the Satellite Award.
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Again, if you want to see my predictions you can click here and also be sure to return on Sunday, February 27, 2011, when the results of the user polls will be posted and I will be here live-blogging the 2011 Oscars starting around 3 PM PST. Hope you’ll join me.
