Oscar Prediction: The Technical Awards

Hello, and welcome to A Mighty Fine Blog's sixth annual attempt to predict the Oscars, an effort so relentlessly futile that I haven't even bothered to thing of a snappy name or acronym for it. Anyway, a merry AMFBSAAPO to you all!

Joking aside, I really look forward to this time of the year because it's a chance for me to see if my predictive abilities have improved or atrophied in the last twelve months. Having read The Signal and the Noise, I kind of hope that my predictions will be a touch better than in the last few years, though that would be no guarantee that I'm getting better. It could actually just be a sign that the Oscars are getting worse at surprising us all.

As in previous years, the predictions will be split in two. This post will focus on the Technical Awards, by which I mean the ones which are unlikely to get boasted about on future Blu-ray covers. That doesn't diminish their importance to the winners, obviously, who no doubt worked very hard, but it's undeniable that most people tend to care more about the Major Awards. So for the people who just want to know about the big name awards, there will be a separate post going up just after this one. For the cinephiles, though, this is the good shit.

You've Got To Accentuate The Positive: What's Good About The 2013 Oscar Nominations?

It's very easy to be cynical about the Oscars, especially since at their worst, they're little more than a smug, self-satisfied display of onanism practiced by people who already have too many reasons to feel pleased with themselves. This year's ceremony could potentially be even worse thanks to the presence of host Seth Macfarlane, a man who is the very embodiment of smug, self-satisfied onanism. At their best, though, the Academy Awards act as a celebration of the pageantry and magic of the movies, and even a disastrous slate of nominations can provide for plenty of discourse, and a car-crash of an awards ceremony promises to be great fodder for the rubberneckers of the world.

Ed's Top 20 Films of 2012

"Now, is my movie going to be Number One, or am I going to have to make use of this?"

As 2012 recedes into our collective rear view mirror, now seems like as good a time as any to look back on what has been in anticipation of what is still to come. 2012 was a pretty good year for cinema, all told. Whilst there weren't too many unequivocal masterpieces - and what there were seemed to all get shoved into the last three months - there was a solid roster of second-tier films that ensured that nary a week went by without something good coming out. To use a tortured, ill-informed sports metaphor, it was a year with few superstars, but a deep bench of good all-rounders.

As such, this was one of the easiest Year End lists I've ever had to draw up since my Top 5 was very clear in my mind, and there was no shortage of good films to fill out the remaining spaces. (I could have easily drawn up a list of 20 more films that didn't make the cut, but which probably deserved to.) It was a year that offered up a varied mixture of extravagant experiments, some of which were more successful (Cloud Atlas) than others (Prometheus, John Carter), as well as one which offered plenty of opportunity to see good stories told well. Even the summer had a better caliber of blockbusters than usual, which is admittedly a very heavily qualified statement, but one that speaks to the generally decent quality of 2012 as a whole. Even its worst films weren't as numerous as in past years. Here's hoping 2013 can clear that (relatively low) bar.

On that somewhat muted note, let's get down to brass tacks and discuss the 20 best films of 2012.