2012 Oscar Prediction Update: What Did We Learn from the DGA and SAG Awards?

This past weekend offered up the Directors Guild (DGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards and there was only one surprise between the two and even that “surprise” wasn’t as much of a shock as it was just further confirmation that The Artist is going to be a big winner at the 2012 Oscars.

First, Michel Hazanavicius won for Best Director with the DGA on the heels of The Artist winning with the Producers Guild. These two wins alone essentially put The Artist in the front-runner slot for Best Picture and Director if you didn’t have them there already. Then, last night, Jean Dujardin edged out George Clooney (The Descendants) for Best Actor at the SAG awards, which is enough for me to also bump Clooney and place Dujardin into Best Actor front-runner slot.

Last night also saw The Help walk home with three SAG awards including one for Viola Davis for Best Actress, Octavia Spencer for Best Supporting Actress and an award for the cast for Best Ensemble. The question I would suspect most are wondering is whether or not these three wins for The Help aid its Best Picture chances. As far as I’m concerned, no.

The biggest problem facing The Help is the fact it wasn’t nominated for Best Director, Best Film Editing or Best Screenplay. Some have looked at the 2006 Oscars when Crash surprised us all and won Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain. Sure, it was a surprise, but Crash was not only nominated for those awards I just mentioned, but it also won for Film Editing and Screenplay. The actors branch may be big, but you need some kind of support from the others and it simply looks like The Help won’t have the support it needs in this case.

This morning I rummaged through my Oscar predictions and made only two changes. The first was to move Hugo into the #2 slot for Best Picture, bumping The Descendants down to #3 and the second was to move Dujardin above Clooney for Best Actor, which now breaks the tie I had between The Artist and Hugo with each winning four Oscars.

Now, based on my predictions, I see The Artist winning five Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Film Editing and Original Score.

I am torn on the Art Direction category between The Artist and Hugo and almost made a change there. Instead, I’m just going to wait until February 4 when the Art Directors Guild announce their winners and see if they can shed any light on the matter as Hugo and The Artist face off in the period film category. For the full list of those nominations you can click here.

And so with that, I offer my current ranked predictions for the top six categories at the Oscars and you can check out my full list of predictions in 21 categories right here. I just received screeners of the Animated and Live Action Shorts so I will be delving into those very soon and begin making my first predictions there, hopefully, by the end of the week.

Best Picture