2018 Magic 8-Ball Oscar Picks
The conventional wisdom for 2018 is pretty much unanimous: Go with the guild winners; engrave Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell & Allison Janney’s names on the acting awards now; Best Picture will totally be The Shape Of Water, unless it’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, or Get Out wins the consensus vote, or if not enough voters have seen Get Out then maybe Phantom Thread has a shot.
But if everyone goes by the conventional wisdom, then 10 people win your Oscar pool, and you only make $2 in the end. And so we turn to the Magic 8-Ball.
You know how this works by now: I put all the nominees in all the categories to my Magic 8-Ball and recorded the most positive answers. After reading the cosmic signs on over 200 nominees in two dozen categories, here’s what the over-it oracle predicted:
Best Picture: Get Out
Lead Actor: Daniel-Day Lewis, Phantom Thread
Lead Actress: Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water
Director: Jordan Peele, Get Out
Adapted Screenplay: The Disaster Artist
Original Screenplay: Lady Bird
Animated Feature: Coco
Animated Short: Negative Space
Cinematography: Mudbound
Documentary Feature: Strong Island
Documentary Short: Edith+Eddie
Live Action Short: Watu Wote/All Of Us
Foreign Language Film: A Fantastic Woman
Film Editing: Dunkirk
Sound Editing: Dunkirk
Sound Mixing: Dunkurk
Production Design: Beauty and the Beast
Original Score: Dunkirk
Original Song: “Mighty River” from Mudbound
Makeup and Hair: Darkest Hour
Costume Design: The Shape Of Water
Visual Effects: War for the Planet of the Apes
And now comes the part where we talk about how no one has a clue who’s going to win Best Picture. Oh, sure, some people will say they do, and at the end of the night a different group of people will say they knew it all along. At least half the people who got it wrong will oh-so-cleverly declare that there must have been another envelope mix-up. Drunk people will say things that the next day they’ll claim they don’t remember. Life will go on.
There have been two major Academy innovations in recent years: Making a concerted effort to invite new voters who aren’t rich, 60-something white guys who all see the same campaign billboards on Santa Monica Boulevard as they drive home from work; and using preferential voting to determine the Best Picture winner. This means a movie that as many people hated as loved can lose out to a movie that everyone liked pretty well, and it could be argued that last year was proof that it makes a difference: Reading the trades, it looked like as many people didn’t like presumed winner La La Land as loved it. Moonlight was always in conversation as a movie that everyone liked pretty well but didn’t stand a chance against a pre-ordained winner… until it did.
This year The Shape Of Water rules the nominations, and Three Billboards has racked up key wins. Still, I’m not reading about a ton of industry people who looooooved The Shape Of Water. Hollywood loves it some Guillermo del Toro; that he’s finally attached to a well-loved title makes his Best Director win as close to a lock as there is this year. The movie has that whole “love letter to film” thing, but, honestly, that’s kinda played out this year. (If it weren’t, The Disaster Artist - aka “La La Land for the rest of us” - would have had more nominations.) Meanwhile, a lot of people love the performances in Three Billboards, but are tepid on the movie as a whole. (I’m one of them.)
Get Out would seem to have everything going against it. It’s a movie made on the cheap by a guy who’d mostly worked in television. It came out over a year ago. While it features respected actors, none of them are in the name-above-the-title stratum. And it’s explicitly about what it’s like to be an African-American man in contemporary America.
The Academy tends to prefer movies that treat racism as a thing of the past. If a contemporary movie acknowledges race, it’s an intersectional incidental. The villains of Get Out look a lot like the people who make those movies, and who have historically dominated the Academy: White, wealthy, mostly male, getting older, can’t possibly harbor any prejudice because they loved Barack Obama. Get Out is an exquisitely-constructed movie that makes the right people uncomfortable. Jordan Peele deserves the Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the introduction of “The Sunken Place” alone: Putting words to something that people just haven’t been able to put their finger one is a rare feat.
Plus, Get Out made gobs of money. Hollywood loves that even more than Guillermo del Toro.
Universal has been very clever with their marketing. They position Get Out as a Very Important Film For The Ages - a tactic which usually makes me roll my eyes, except this time it’s… kinda right. Will that be enough to get a critical mass of older voters to watch it and give it the consideration it deserves? Or will it be left in the wake of safe bets?
