Oscar Predictions: The Major Awards

Welcome back. Having completely, thoroughly and no doubt inaccurately predicted the Technical Awards yesterday, today I'll round off the awards season by trying to decide which films will take home the Oscars that everyone actually cares about.

Oscar Prediction: The Technical Awards

It's become something of an annual tradition on this blog for me to try to predict the outcomes of the Academy Awards, a task which I find enjoyable despite the fact that it is incredibly futile. The Oscars are always frustrating because they so often reward the least interesting films by giving them the highest accolade. On the few occasions when they do recognise films that are genuinely interesting and provocative, it only seems to underline how conservative their tastes are the rest of the time, and any gains tend to be undone the following year by a return to normalcy. (From a prognosticatory vantage, those years are also incredibly annoying because you tend to assume the Oscars will always go for the safe bet, so a curveball like The Hurt Locker winning Best Picture throws everything completely out of whack.)