Oscars 2014 Prediction Scorecard

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, I broke down the Academy Award nominations and set about predicting which films I expected to win which awards. As part of that process, I predicted that Gravity would sweep most of the technical awards and take Best Director, that Dallas Buyers Club would take home three awards, and that American Hustle, despite being nominated for ten awards, would win only a handful. I think Meatloaf has a song which is pretty pertinent to those predictions.

Let's see how I did overall.

Oscar Predictions 2014: The Technical Awards

At this point, it's pretty clear to me that the Oscars are largely meaningless to everyone except the nominees. For them, they represent the respect of their peers and greater opportunities for future work, be it in more acclaimed films or taking big paycheques for terrible superhero movies. For everyone else they're a chance to see who wore what best and to act as a reference guide for what were considered the best films of a given year, as chosen by a consensus of a relatively small, self-important group.

However, just because they don't really mean anything doesn't mean we can't have a bit of fun with them. As I have every year for the past few years, I have endeavoured to predict which films will win in each and every category. Some of these guesses are more educated than others, based either on how the awards season has played out so far, how the Academy has voted historically, or just based on what I think has the best chance of winning. It's a method that has worked fairly well in the past (apart from last year which, to use a technical term, was an absolute shit sandwich for me) and I'm hoping that it will prove itself again, or that I'll be so utterly incorrect that I can excoriate myself in my round-up on Monday.

As in previous years I've divided the various categories into the Technical Awards, which you can see below, and the Major Awards, which will run tomorrow. That's enough waffling; just because the ceremony will be super long doesn't mean this article should. Read on if you want to see what I, with my very patchy record on the subject, think will win on March 2nd.

Film Review: American Hustle (2013)

There's a scene in David O. Russell's previous film, Silver Linings Playbook, in which all the major figures in Pat Solitano's (Bradley Cooper) life finally collide in one room. His feisty dance partner/love interest, his parents and one of his best friends are all thrown together so that they can hash out their differences, and gradually reach a point from which they can progress to the finale. It's a crucial scene, one that shuffles all the different relationships and fundamentally changes the stakes of the story, but it's also the worst scene in the entire movie; it lacks any particular focus, and feels like the early stages of an improv session in which the actors are trying to find their way to a conclusion. It has plenty of energy, but it's energy that is being fired off in every direction at once.