My 2021 Academy Award Predictions (for movies released in 2020)
Wait. What? You mean the Oscars are going ahead anyway?
Yeah, I knew they were scheduled for sometime “later this year,” but I thought that was just code for “we really can’t be arsed.” I mean, what’s the point? Not only does nobody actually remember what movies were out in 2020—because we live in the future and time moves so fast now time is, like, all compressed and stretched at the same time and the shelf-life of the average movie is now measured in dog years—but nobody actually cares because it’s nearly Christmas again in this time zone.
Also, there’s the little fact that hardly anybody went to a cinema all year. Most people saw most movies on a TV screen or computer screen or on their phone because it was streamed from AmazonNetPrimeFlix or from somewhere else or just downloaded from pirates on the dark web. How are you supposed to make sense and evaluate fairly in that kind of environment? I mean, if you’re trying to make predictions about who will actually win the awards, you might as well throw up your hands, get drunk and just make it up with your imagination. So, yes, it’s just business as usual for me again this year.
Well, not entirely business as usual. More than any other year in living memory I have seen hardly any of the nominated films. Probably like a lot of normal people, I have actually been using the pandemic lockdowns as an excuse to catch up on films I’d missed or neglected from previous years. Fortunately for me—and I am keyboarding this through gritted teeth—I have sort of been saved by the Golden Globes. Yes, the despised, derided, disdained awards ceremony that I watch every year even though I swear that I won’t. The one that no self-respecting film buff should accord any vestige of legitimacy. Just as a stopped clock is inevitably right twice a day, so the Golden Globes sometimes get something right—if only because someone apparently paid them the right bribe.
This year they gave their “Best Director – Motion Picture” and “Best Motion Picture – Drama” awards to Chloé Zhao and her beautiful docufiction feature Nomadland. That spurred me to go search out the flick and give it a watch and, you know what, I was totally taken by it. It landed immediately at the top of my ongoing, constantly-revised list of 2020 movies. Something similar must have happened with the people who decide the Oscar nominations because didn’t just today (March 15, the Ides of March, for the record) the Academy Awards nominations came out and didn’t Nomadland receive six of them: Best Picture, Best Lead Actress (for the totally deserving Frances McDormand), Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Editing. While I’m thrilled for the cast and crew of the movie, this does absolutely nothing to further my contrarian campaign against the notion that the Globes are some kind of harbinger for the Oscars and other awards.
My annual predictions are below. Please remember when reading these just before the Oscar telecast in—when is it again? October?—that I came up with these within minutes of the nominations announcement back in March. Go ahead. Read them and laugh. Make fun all you want.
It was a nice awards non-season while it lasted.
|
Category |
Most Likely to Win |
Most Deserving to Win |
Should Have Been Nominated But Wasn’t |
|
Best Picture |
Tenet |
||
|
Lead Actor |
Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) |
Steven Yeun (Minari) |
Bill Murray (On the Rocks) |
|
Lead Actress |
Carey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman) |
Frances McDormand (Nomadland) |
Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma.) |
|
Supporting Actor |
Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) |
Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) |
Bob Wells (Nomadland) |
|
Supporting Actress |
Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) |
Youn Yuh-jung (Minari) |
Miranda Hart (Emma.) |
|
Director |
Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) |
Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) |
Sofia Coppola (On the Rocks) |
|
Original Screenplay |
Aaron Sorkin (The Trial of the Chicago 7) |
Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) |
Sofia Coppola (On the Rocks) |
|
Adapted Screenplay |
Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) |
Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller (The Father) |
Eleanor Catton (Emma.) |
|
Animated Feature |
Soul |
Wolfwalkers |
My Favorite War |
|
Best International Feature Film |
Druk (Another Round) (Denmark) |
Collective (Romania) |
Summer of 85 (France) |