Oscars 101: My Oscar Predictions

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

For your convenience, here is my complete list of Oscar predictions for all 24 categories.  For more detailed, check out all of my Oscars 101 articles.

Best Picture:  Boyhood
Best Director: Birdman
Best Original Screenplay: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Imitation Game

Best Actor: Birdman
Best Actress: Gone Girl
Best Supporting Actor: Whiplash
Best Supporting Actress: Boyhood

Best Original Score: Mr. Turner
Best Original Song:  Selma
Best Sound Editing: Birdman
Best Sound Mixing: Whiplash

Best Animated Feature Film: How to Train Your Dragon 2
Best Animated Short Film: The Dam Keeper
Best Documentary Feature: CitizenFour
Best Documenary Short Subject: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1

Best Foreign Language Film: Leviathan
Best Live Action Short Film: The Phone Call
Best Film Editing: Boyhood
Best Production Design: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Best Costume Design: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Best Cinematography: Birdman
Best Visual Effects: Interstellar

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Oscars 101: Best Picture

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

This is it folks, the category that you've been waiting for:  Best Picture.  This is the one that people are going to be talking about for weeks to come - which of this year's nominees can truly be called the single greatest film from 2014.  So without further ado, here are the 2014 Oscar nominees for Best Picture:

American Sniper
Birdman
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

I've already gone off about why Interstellar should have been nominated for Best Picture, so I won't retread that same argument here.  What does warrant particular attention, though, is Nightcrawler's glaring omission from the race.  It was without question the most seethingly intelligent take on journalistic ethics since Network and deserved far better than a single nomination for Best Original Screenplay.  How this could not be considered one of the best films from this year is completely beyond me.

American Sniper - Much has been made of American Sniper from critics on both sides of the aisle, ranging from those who would call its detractors unpatriotic to Bob Chipman assuring us that "American Sniper sucks - and it's okay to admit that."  I fall somewhere in between these two camps.  Although I initially loved it,  American Sniper is the kind of movie that fails to hold up under further scrutiny.  While exciting in the moment, it doesn't have enough narrative meat on its bones to keep me engaged upon retrospection

American Sniper's well of support will largely come from two places: the patriotic fervor of Academy voters and its blockbuster status.  It is the people's choice in the Best Picture race - the one that everybody's seen and will tune in to see how it does.  While that shouldn't be the deciding factor in crowning a Best Picture winner, it does give it an edge with ratings-conscious Academy members looking to secure the telecast's popularity for another year.

Birdman - The darling of the director's branch has perhaps the widest appeal across the various Academy branches.  It ties The Grand Budapest Hotel for most nominations at nine - including ones for Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing.  Its broad praise and front-runner status in many races might just be enough to propel it to the lead in the night's big race.

Despite its incredible praise across so many branches of the Academy, it's safe to say that Birdman is still only second best in this race.  It will have to draw out the nostalgia vote with Keaton or the anti-blockbuster vote a bit more than it currently has if it hopes to stand up to Boyhood.

Boyhood - Richard Linklater's latest character study is undoubtedly the most likely candidate to win Best Picture at this year's Oscar ceremony.  Some have argued that Boyhood "manipulates you with nostalgia into thinking that it's a good movie" and that its decades-spanning story is "only a gimmick," but nothing could be further from the truth.  Boyhood is the most organically executed and authentic feeling film to come out of 2014.

The film is a cinematic time capsule of the Bush and Obama years through the eyes of a child growing up in a broken Texas family.  Whereas most other films would have broadened its scope to include all of the dramatically ripe moments surrounding its protagonist - such as the mother's abusive relationship with his alcoholic stepfather - Boyhood restrains itself to only the events that the child himself is cognizant of.  While it certainly draws a lot of support from its nostalgic look back over the last two decades and for its decision to shoot intermittently over a twelve year production to allow its actors to grow and age naturally with the characters that they're playing, it drives itself home by simply being one of the best films of the year.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - In a weaker year, The Grand Budapest Hotel feels like it could have been the Best Picture front runner.  It ties Birdman for the most number of nominations and will most assuredly win writer-director Wes Anderson his first Oscar.  Its broad critical acceptance is matched only by how many years Wes Anderson had to work to achieve it, making him feel overdue for an Oscar even when his other efforts ultimately seemed to be lacking.

When push comes to shove, however, The Grand Budapest Hotel's odds of winning aren't especially high.  It's probably the fourth most likely of winning, and draws from the same wells of support of its better regarded competition.  Its unique support within the writing branch will probably fail to make up the difference against the likes of Boyhood and Birdman.

The Imitation Game - This is actually Becky's favorite film from the Best Picture nominees, although even she isn't willing to bet on it actually walking away with the final prize of the evening.  And that's really a shame, because it is such an exceptional and, dare I say, important film that champions a social issue that is too often overlooked in films today.  Seriously, the last time that there was a high profile Gay Rights movie was when Brokeback Mountain was shafted for Best Picture in 2005.

Its unique subject matter and overall high quality won't translate into an Oscar, however.  The acting branch has other films that it would prefer to champion (Birdman, The Theory of Everything and the sadly overlooked Selma), as do the directing (Boyhood and Birdman) and writing (The Grand Budapest Hotel) branches.  It also lacks the overall appeal of films like Whiplash or American Sniper that keep their hopes alive despite not carrying any one branch of the Academy.

Selma - So much has been made over Selma since the Oscar nominees were announced that a win purely to silence the ludicrous accusations of racism would not be entirely out of the question at this point.  And that's really a shame, too.  Selma doubles as both one of the best and most socially important films of the year, so to have its potential Oscar legacy tarnished by the well-meaning (if misguided) #OscarsSoWhite movement is really more of a disservice to it in the long run than not being nominated for this or that specific award.

That being said, however, Selma's chances of winning are real.  It's not uncommon for the Academy to favor important films to good ones, and Ferguson has propelled this Civil Rights drama to the top of that particular pecking order.  Combine that with its allegedly racially motivated snubs in several big categories and the fact that it actually is a great film, and it could very easily upset the established front runners by the end of the night.

The Theory of Everything -  Despite being easily my least favorite of the Best Picture nominees, The Theory of Everything is a touching, well-produced biopic that avoids the schmaltz typical to its genre in favor of authentic drama and meaningful character arcs.  And even though it doesn't hold up well against its fellow nominees, it does find pockets of support in all the right places (mostly among actors and writers).

When the category was first broadened to include up to 10 nominees, one commentary theorized that Up - inoffensively good, which everybody liked and nobody hated - could draw enough wide-spread support in a race that was defined by increasingly narrow margins.  The same could be the case for The Theory of Everything: liked by most, disliked by few, and supported by just enough votes to eek out a narrow lead.  It's certainly unlikely, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

Whiplash -  Whiplash is easily the most intensely energetic movie that I saw last year: essentially the Full Metal Jacket of Jazz.  What's more is that it's incredible performances and writing have seemingly energized its fan base into an intensely loyal and passionate movement.

Whiplash tells the story of a dysfunctional creative partnership between a drum protegee and his mentor.  It starts at a near crawl, but rapidly accelerates until its in a near frenzy during its last 15-20 minutes.  This movie was what I was talking about when I mentioned how some have a large overall appeal that belies their lack of specific nominations.  With how passionate people get about this film, I wouldn't count it out of the race by any means.

Safe Bet:  Boyhood

Long Shot:  Birdman

Longer Shot:  Whiplash

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Oscars 101: Best Director

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.


With the Oscars looming ever larger on the horizon, we come to our penultimate category: Best Director.  Historically, Best Director has been a litmus test for Best Picture hopefuls.  On the rare occasion that a Best Picture nominee wasn't nominated for Best Director as well, it could safely be ruled out as a serious candidate for the night's big award.  And whatever won Best Director almost invariably won Best Picture too.  With the expansion of Best Picture nominees to as many as ten, however, these trends are not necessarily true anymore.  Films that struck a chord with the directing branch could very well fall flat with the Academy as a whole, and films adored by the Academy proper might find themselves with little enough support in any one particular branch.  For instance, the last two years have seen a split between the two categories winners.  This year's nominees are:

Alejandro Gonzales Iñáritu for Birdman
Richard Linklater for Boyhood
Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher
Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel
Morten Tyldum for The Imitation Game

While everybody's exploding over Ava DuVernay's lack of a nomination for Selma, the real head-scratching exclusion for me has been Christopher Nolan for Interstellar.  To me, Interstellar is the definitive directors' movie from 2014: epically scoped, intimately shot and thoroughly entertaining.  It's 2001: A Space Odyssey for a new generation, brilliantly brought to the big screen from one of the most skilled auteurs in the business today.

Alejandro Gonzales Iñáritu for Birdman - Of all of this year's nominees, Birdman has the best chance of walking away with Best Director.  Like last year's winner - Alfonso Cuarón - he's a high profile Hispanic director with previous Oscar nominations under his belt, but no statuettes to show for it.  His film is lauded as one of the two Best Picture front runners and it is by far the showier of the two (which tends to matter more in the Director's race).

Iñáritu succeeds at so often and so skillfully transitioning between reality and fantasy in Birdman that not only do the two become virtually indistinguishable, but each actually lends increasing significance to the other as the film goes on.  It's an inventive, entertaining and well-rendered vision of one man's madness and the collective insanity of the theater.

Richard Linklater for Boyhood - I cannot come to terms with this being Linklater's first nomination for Best Director.  The man who helmed the Before trilogy has never once bee recognized by this particular branch of the Academy for the way in which he constructs a narrative and sets his actors to work.  Boyhood, however, is a film that simply demands attention.  Shot intermittently over a twelve year period of time with the same cast (allowing them to age in real-time before our eyes), Boyhood is the kind of sometimes explosive yet willfully subtle project that would earn any director - let alone one with such a high critical profile - the respect of the Academy.

It's pretty safe to say that Boyhood is firmly entrenched in second place behind Birdman in this particular race.  It's not quite as flashy, not quite as inventive and not quite as nuanced as its competitor, preferring to capture authentic moments of post-millenial childhood than crafting a story as a matter of inventive will.  The Academy may think differently, but their usual tastes lie decidedly with the competition.

Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher - In years past, Foxcatcher would have been a complete non-factor in this race: a Directing nominee that failed to win over the Academy as a whole.  But with an increasingly polarized voting body, there is no such thing as an Academy consensus.  Pet favorites can not only secure nominations in any given branch, but win them outright.

Foxcatcher plays out like a fatalistic Greek tragedy.  A pervasively ominous mood pervades every frame, unrelentingly telegraphing its foregone conclusion to anybody who cares to take note of it.  It's thoroughly unsettling to watch, because you know for a fact that something bad is going to happen and that nobody is going to stop it from happening.  Director Bennett Miller pulled the same tonal tricks in Capote, but they make far more sense here, where it is building to something more than just personal devastation.

Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel - Although I've not been a fan of Wes Anderson in the past, there is no denying that he's one of the most uniquely minded auteurs working in film today.  His body of work is eccentric, but grounded in a kind of airy realism.  They're colorful, but never cartoonish.  They are the work of high brow intellectualism that are never so far above themselves to not dabble in models and childish sound effects when that suits their goals.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson's first film to break out of the writing (and animation) branch(es) and hit a certain sweet spot across the entire Academy, and it's really no wonder why.  This is unquestionably his best film to date, featuring his greatest flair and most focused vision of a romantic, pop-up-book world that could only possibly exist inside Anderson's head.  While it still has some ground to make up to come out on top of the likes of Birdman and Boyhood, it's not all that far fetched for it to walk away with every single Oscar that it was nominated for.

Morten Tyldum for The Imitation Game - While The Imitation Game is certainly one of the premiere achievements in directing from this last year, it's probably the weakest of the five nominees - or at least the one with the least support.  It fails to be as pervasively moody as Foxcatcher, as eye-catching as The Grand Budapest Hotel, as inventive as Birdman or as realistic as Boyhood.  It is simply second best at everything Morten Tyldum does in the film, which won't serve to keep it in the running tonight.

That being said, what Tyldum does accomplish here is remarkable.  He succeeds at balancing a trio of temporally separate, tonally different narratives about the same one man, intercut them so that they serve the needs of the film as a whole, then brings them all to a head in a riveting three-part climax.

Safe Bet:  Alejandro Gonzales Iñáritu for Birdman

Long Shot:  Richard Linklater for Boyhood

Longer Shot:  Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel

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Oscars 101: Best Adapted Screenplay

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Coming off of my Original Screenplay high, Best Adapted Screenplay looks especially sparse this year.  While some strong candidates are mixed into the nominees, the writing branch has chosen to safely stay squarely within its box of acceptably high-brow films, constricting the category to one of its dullest lot of films within recent memory.  This year's Adapted Screenplay nominees are:

American Sniper
The Imitation Game
Inherent Vice
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

There had been rumors circling before the nominees were announced that Guardians of the Galaxy was a sure choice to get a Best Adapted Screenplay nod.  While I did dismiss this as too radically mainstream for the Academy, I cannot help but wish that it was true, because Guardians of the Galaxy has one of the freshest, funniest and all around most unique scripts of any movie this year.  It found the proper balance of comedy, drama and action while never losing sight of its end-game or incredibly entertaining characters.  Pair that with a surprisingly weak crop of actual nominees, and it's an absolute shame that it never stood a realistic chance in the category.

American Sniper - I've come to terms with the fact that American Sniper is not one of the best movies of the year a while ago.  It was undoubtedly a great one, right down to its Mark Boal-styled script, but honestly doesn't even register in my top thirty films of the year, given how unprecedentedly outstanding 2014 was for movies.  And despite ending on such a perfectly somber note that not a single person in the sold-out showing that I went to spoke a word until they were out of ear shot of the auditorium, it just can't measure up to the nominees that were more than just serviceable - more than just very good.

Chris Kyle isn't interesting because he's written that way, he's interesting because Bradly Cooper made us take interest in him.  In fact, the most interesting things about his life - the controversial, polarizing, politically incorrect media magnet that he became after the war - wasn't addressed at all.  And in the increasingly negative atmosphere it exists in, criticisms against its script are most often and most loudly  repeated.

The Imitation Game - One of the likelier candidates to win the award tomorrow, The Imitation Game found a way to balance three competing narratives about three radically different time periods in one extraordinary man's life with a perfect eye to what was important and when.  Rather than fighting one another for screen time, they augment the surrounding segments, illuminating key details and important information right before or after they are addressed in the other segments.  In this regard, acts like an Academy friendly version of Cloud Atlas or Oculus.

The trouble for the film comes in when trying to attribute who was truly responsible for this narrative entanglement's ultimate success on screen.  Was it the script that wrote and arranged the scenes in such a way as to be increasingly edifying, or was it the director who took a hopelessly tangled script and made it work as a film (and with both aspects of the film nominated for Oscars, whichever one they choose to honor is anybody's guess)

Inherent Vice - The challenge with adapting a novel to the big screen has as much to do with how it's rendered as a script as it does what kind of text is being adapted in the first place.  The majority of literature is, and always has been, introspective: focused on the inner thoughts, feelings and reactions of the characters when faced with often extraordinary circumstances.  The majority of films, however, are extroverted: showing, rather than telling, what is happening from an exterior vantage point.  This is why I feel that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas failed as a film (an unpopular opinion, I know) and why One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest drew such heat from the novel's enthusiastic readership.

Thomas Pynchon, the author of the film's source material, is perhaps one of the most intensely extroverted writers to ever live.  And while that's certainly no indication of a film's merits on its own, it does start it off fighting an uphill battle over whether or not audiences will "get it" or if it will even makes sense on its own at all.  Granted, the Academy has taken a shine to it, but the question remains whether or not it will be enough to take on more traditionally conceived films based upon more readily understood texts.

The Theory of Everything - The way that I go on about it, people might start to think that I disliked The Theory of Everything.  I do not.  It was a remarkably entertaining and well-made film that was far from the sappy biopic that I had initially taken it to be.  And beyond that, it obvious has struck a chord within the Academy, as evidenced by its branch-spanning support of the film.  But, like I said about Best Actress nominee Felicity Jones, its a comparatively weak nomination in the field that could have easily be put aside for a more interesting and well-crafted nominee.

The real strength of The Theory of Everything lies in leading man Eddie Redmayne and director James Marsh, not in Anthony McCarten's script.  It's an emotional story, to be sure, but not an especially interesting one, nor one with sweeping events and memorable dialog.  It is, in short, a fairly average script that is only ever serviceable to the needs of the film.

Whiplash - So intense is its group of supporters that I cannot rightly throw Whiplash out of the running for anything, especially in such a comparatively open category.  If other films earn just middling levels of support, Whiplash's devoted following may very well prove to be enough to propel their given favorite to Oscar gold.

The script grants equal weight to both halves of a dysfunctional, and abusive creative partnership.  The director compels the protegee to achieve greatness, even at a monumental personal and physical cost.  In turn, the protegee derails the director's best laid plans, coming to an explosive head in not just one, but two separate climaxes.  The writing is memorable, insightful and thoroughly energizing, but risks being perceived as an actor's movie, rather than as a writer's one, losing out on support by those who think J.K. Simmons carried the weight of the film on his shoulders.

Safe Bet:  The Imitation Game

Long Shot:  Whiplash

Longer Shot: Inherent Vice

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Oscars 101: Best Original Screenplay

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Of all of the Oscar races this year, none is so closely contested - nor could potentially go so many different ways - than Best Original Screenplay: not even either of the two Best Actress contests.  All five nominees feature such strongly written and wildly different scripts that it's almost a complete shot in the dark to determine which one will actually comes out on top.  Almost.  This year's nominees are:

Birdman
Boyhood
Foxcatcher
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Nightcrawler

In fact, these five nominees are so strong that I almost can't name another original script that's on-par with them enough to call it a snub (or at the very least an oversight).  For all of its supporters, Selma is hardly the script that Birdman & Co. are and could hardly be considered worth the nomination.  In most other years, yes, it would have been a solid inclusion, but not in 2014.  The only thing that I can think of that stood an honest chance in this category against the actual nominees is Interstellar, which so strongly blended advanced conceptions of astrophysics with real human drama - the dual realities of a latter day dust bowl with the possibilities of interstellar adventure - that it blew the mind of seemingly everybody who saw it.  Still, even now, I can hardly call it more than an equally strong script that there sadly just wasn't any room for.

Birdman - Birdman probably features the most outrageously over the top writing of any script in either writing category.  A man, suffering from presumable delusions / hallucinations, insomnia, paranoia, mood swings, agitation and a myriad of other ailments while trying to revitalize his superheroic acting career by adapting a serious piece of literature to Broadway faces an absurd method actor, a disinterested daughter, a vindictive critic and his own resurging inner demons.  Oscillating wildly from comedic, dramatic and action-packed, it never loses sight of where its narrative is going nor who it's really about.

If you had asked me earlier today who would win this category tomorrow, I would have said Birdman (did say Birdman, in fact).  It is the most confidently self-assured script of the nominees, most of which are so constrictly restrained in their realism as to prevent them from venturing out into potentially more interesting directions.  While it lacks Wes Anderson's appeal in the writing department, it does brazenly present a wildly original (and incredibly well realized) story unlike anything that's come out against it.

Boyhood - One thing that I have long admired about Linklater's writing is how authentic it feels.  His scripts never feel stagy nor gimmicky nor artificial.  In a way they almost seen unscripted, as if he was perfectly able to capture the way that real people really talk in real life and utterly transfix us with the mundanities of the world.  While certainly no Before Sunrise / Sunset / Midnight, Boyhood is ultimately no different from its celebrated forebears.

Boyhood captures with organic certainty the life of a boy growing up in twenty-first century America.  It is structured in the exact way that an older person looking back on their childhood would remember things: sparse memories early on (largely dominated by his father's intermittent presence in his life), then more and more dominated by increasingly recent events.  Many critical events that shaped his and his family's life happen off screen (divorces, separation, abuses) that he as character would not have been privy to, but what lesser features would have drawn in more fully to dominate his narrative.  It has a courageous authenticity to it that may be lost on some voters just as much as it completely wins others over to its side.

Foxcatcher - Although more has certainly been made of Foxcatcher's directing and acting nominations than its screenwriting one, it never the less features one of the most taught, refined and pervasively moody narratives to come out in 2014.  The reason why acting and writing nominations so often go hand in hand is because the latter gives the former the necessary material to work with while the former advertises the strength of the latter.

If I had to choose a weak link among the nominees, it would probably be Foxcatcher.  Despite its innumerable strengths, it just isn't nearly as flashy as some (unlike Birdman) and relies too much on its actors to convey the often unspoken bonds between men (unlike, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel).  It is undoubtedly a marvelous piece of writing, but likely won't be able to pull together the needed support in such a closely contesting category.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - I don't think that I've had to eat more crow about any Oscar prediction this year more than with The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes Anderson's latest quirky masterpiece about the storied history of a luxury hotel and the eccentric employees housed therein.  While I certainly didn't count it out of other award categories, neither did I give it its fair due.  Calling its odds of earning non-writing nomination dubious at best, it tied Birdman for the most overall nominations at 9, ranging from technical nods to a coveted Best Picture nomination.

There's no question that the writing branch of the Academy loves Wes Anderson.  His scripts are refreshingly off-beat and unpredictable, flowing with an eccentric energy that can only be described as Anderson-esque.  This is his third nomination for writing and will almost certainly be the one that pays off for him.  It will undoubtedly be a close race no matter what, but Anderson's in with this branch in particular gives him the edge.

Nightcrawler - It's astounding to me that for as resoundingly excellent and invasively unnerving a film as Nightcrawler is, its only nomination is for its script.  No Best Picture nod, none for Gyllenhaal or Russo or Ahmed, not even one for its cinematography (which was, in a word, breathtaking).  Like The Lego Movie, it was snubbed for the category that it was made to win (in this case Actor) and this is the Academy's one chance to make it up.

Based purely on the strength of its writing, however, Nightcrawler would easily claim the award in a weaker year (really any other year from this decade).  The script is not only dynamite, but perfectly realized by a pitch perfect cast who remind viewers of that in every scene.  The subject matter might be a bit low brow for the Academy, but its scrutiny of media ethics and practices is direly relevant.  If voters can see it as more than just Drive with a film crew, it stands a very strong chance stealing the day.

Safe Bet:  The Grand Budapest Hotel

Lon Shot:  Birdman

Longer Shot:  Nightcrawler

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Oscars 101: Best Actor

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Bradley Cooper - American Sniper
Michael Keaton - Birdman
Steve Carell - Foxcatcher
Benedict Cumberbatch - The Imitation Game
Eddie Redmayne - The Theory of Everything

Best Actor has been a point of great contention since this year's crop of nominees were announced last month.  That was mostly because of the omission of David Oyelowo's groundbreaking turn as Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma which - combined with Ava Duvernay's lack of a Best Director nomination, Paul Webb's lack of a Best Original Screenplay nomination and Carmen Ejogo's lack of a Best Supporting Actress nomination - prompted the #OscarsSoWhite backlash that's been all the rage for socially conscious and media savvy cinephiles in recent weeks.  But while his snub is easily one of the most blatantly egregious of the year, Jake Gyllenhaal's turn as the sociopathic Lou Bloom from the incessantly creepy Nightcrawler is the definitive snub in this category for 2014.

Bradley Cooper in American Sniper - In any weaker of a year, Bradley Cooper would have been a strong contender for Best Actor.  This is the 39-year-old actors third acting nomination in the last three years, proving that he has consistently energized the Academy with his selection of roles an innate skill at bringing them to life on screen.  Not only are based-on-real-life characters a popular choice for category winners (8 of this century's Best Actor nominations have been based on actual people), he's doomed to be the Julianne Moore of Best Actors: outclassed on every side by virtually all of his fellow nominees (and by a few notable snubs as well).

Although not in my personal acting lineup for the year, it cannot be understated just how exceptional of an actor Cooper is and what a tremendously gripping performance he gave in this film.  I doubt that the Academy will lose too much sleep over passing him over this year, especially with the certainty that he will be back again (probably as soon as next year).

Michael Keaton in Birdman - There was a time where Michael Keaton was the go to actor for everything from action to comedy.  Between Batman, Beetlejuice, Multiplicity and Mr. Mom, he earned both critical and popular notoriety for his combined raw talent and unusual taste in off-beat roles.  And then he was gone - having disappeared seemingly overnight, relegated to minor voice-over work alongside Mark Hamill.

Birdman saw him simultaneously return to form and shatter the mold of our expectations for him.  His energetic performance in the film, which so closely mirrors his life I cannot possibly believe that the part wasn't tailor made for him personally, brought him back to the forefront of critical and popular discussions after decades of seeming exile.  This is without a doubt Keaton's race to lose.  Only a majorly unprecedented upset by one of his fellow nominees will keep him from the Oscar that he so rightfully deserves.

Steve Carell in Foxcatcher - Although much has been made of Carell's performance as the utterly insane millionaire John du Pont, I can't bring myself to humor him with the vaguest shot of winning the Best Actor race.  His dark, unnerving and transformative role - although certainly excellent - wouldn't even make my top five of the year (and wouldn't beat Cooper besides that).  And, when all is said and done, it perplexes me to think that Carell's side-role is considered more of a lead performance than Channing Tatum's Mark Schultz, who unquestionably drove the narrative to its ultimately tragic conclusion.

The thing about Foxcatcher is that it's not just one centrally strong performance with narrative sinew enough to string it into a film, but an engrossingly fatalistic, uncomfortably intimate and rewardingly subtle interplay between its three chief players.  It's not Ray, Capote or even Lincoln; its place in cinematic history will be owed to more than just one performance (and the weakest of the three, at that).

Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game - The one thing keeping Benedict Cumberbatch squarely out of the Oscar limelight for his turn as the coldly brilliant professor Alan Turing - other than Michael Keaton - is his age.  As I have previously mentioned, the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences prefer to wait for young actors to prove their worth over an entire career than to acknowledge a performance from a novice actor in the nascence of his career.  For all of his indisputable skill and unrivaled popularity, he is still a young and critically untested actor up for his first Academy Award.  In the eyes of the Academy, that will probably be enough.

There is no question in my mind that Cumberbatch will live to compete for another Oscar.  His performance as the father of modern computers is brilliantly intoned with nuance and insight into the kind of man that he was and the personal injustices that drove him to commit suicide at the age of forty-one.  It is further reassurance that Marvel chose an indispensably talented actor to be their new Doctor Strange.  Given time, he will doubtless become an Oscar regular.

Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything - If any actor has a hope of upsetting Michael Keaton's Oscar certainty, it's Eddie Redmayne.  His transformation into the crippled Professor Hawking is so absolute that it took every once of my being to remember that it was a fictional production - not a documentary - that I was witnessing.  Like Ellar Coltraine, it's actually not one but a plurality of performances that he gives throughout the film: a new one for each stage of Hawking's muscular degeneration, forcing him to communicate more and more through subtle facial expressions.

Redmayne's detractors have argued that his performance is derivative of Daniel Day-Lewis' in My Left Foot.  And while there are some striking similarities between the two, to be sure, they are as different from one another as any one man  with a remarkable ailment is from another.  Redmayne also has the benefit of acting in a much better film than Day-Lewis, even if the performance itself is a shade less skillfully wrought.

Safe Bet:  Michael Keaton in Birdman

Long Shot:  Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything

Longer Shot: Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game

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