2014 Best Picture Nominee Predictions

With this year's  crop of Oscar nominees coming out tomorrow, there's a lot of buzz of which films will make the cut and which will be snubbed out of contention - especially for Best Picture.  2014 was a strange year of movies: where the best of the best were crowd-pleasing blockbusters and the typical prestige films were simply alright - not bad, but not especially good either.  This can certainly change the second that I see what few stragglers have managed to escape me so far (I'm seeing The Imitation Game tonight, for instance), but I seriously doubt that it, or the others, can upstage Captain America: The Winter Soldier & Co. sitting at the top of my favorites from the year.  But this isn't about what I think, it's about what the Academy does.

Best Picture has always been a weird category, and has only gotten weirder in recent years.  It started off with three nominees, then immediately moved to five, had ten for the longest time, had as many as twelve at one point, then settled back on five.  After the controversy surrounding The Dark Knight's exclusion from the category, the Academy bumped things back up to ten, before settling into the awkward arrangement of today: where a range of films - as few as five and as many as ten - rather than a set number, are our nominees.

The key with Best Picture is how passionately, rather than how widely, a film is loved (basically the same difference between Meta Critic and Rotten Tomatoes).  In order to be nominated, a Best Picture candidate has to secure 10% of the #1 votes from the academy: anything less won't earn you anything.  So which films from 2014 not only inspire that kind of passion, but that kind of passion among the cinematic elite?

Boyhood, the current Best Picture front runner, seems like an obvious choice.  Richard Linklater's twelve years in the making coming of age epic is just the right balance of gimmicky and sincere that tends to go over well with the Academy, plus he is a staple with the writing branch, who are sure to lend him their support.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is another: an intelligent critique of fame and its price with enough digs at mainstream blockbusters to make voters feel superior to the lesser rabble of film goers.  The fact that it simultaneously marks Michael Keaton's return to meaningful roles, is reminiscent of Hitchcock's finest films (particularly Rope) and is sure to garner more support from the acting branch than any other likely contender is simply icing on the cake.

Interstellar is a bit more of an outside choice, to be fair, but if Academy voters were even half as blown away by this Nolan cum Kubrick science fiction epic as audiences were, it has as much chance as anything here (and probably a better shot than most).  Intelligent, grandiose and monumentally ambitious, Interstellar might finally earn Nolan the Academy acceptance that he has always lacked.

It should come as no surprise that the Academy has always loved Clint Eastwood, especially as the gritty, noir-ish director that rocketed to the big leagues with 2003's Mystic River.  His films have won Best Picture twice - for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby - and even his misses always seem to garner the right kind of critical praise to stay in the conversation.  American Sniper takes Eastwood's clout and marries it the kind of War on Terror narrative that earned The Hurt Locker, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty Oscars.

The Academy is always a sucker for race dramas and biopics, which is why Selma is probably a safe bet for a Best Picture Nomination.  Joining the recent ranks of 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, The Help and Precious, Selma is the intelligent, slow-burning drama about Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle against voter registration denial in Alabama.  While the supporting cast comes off cooler than could be hoped for, the principle three - David Oyelowo, Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth - are sure to garner considerable support from the acting branch for their intensely memorable performances.

After the above five, the waters become considerably murkier.  How many total nominees will we get?  5? 6? 7? 10?  The increasingly unlikely list of dark(er) horse contenders is even more speculative than above.

If any outside pick stands a chance at pushing their way into the running, Whiplash is the most likely candidate.  Universally praised for its unrelentingly intense performances, this film hits all the right buttons with audiences: whipping them up into a frenzied passion.  This is yet another film that will draw heavy support from the acting branch, so whether there's ultimately enough love to go around remains to be seen.

Steve Carell's transformative performance in Foxcatcher has been the subject of much speculation in the weeks leading up to tomorrow's announcement.  That he'll get an acting nomination is almost a foregone conclusion at this point, but the question remains whether the film can rally that support for the overall production.  It's certainly possible, but like a lot of the films on the latter half of this list, it's drawing too deeply from an already tapped source of support.  It's entirely possible that Selma, Birdman and Whiplash didn't leave Foxcatcher with enough votes to sneak in under the radar.

I'll certainly have a better idea about the merits of The Imitation Game after tonight's screening, but the preliminary buzz has been exceptional.  The Academy has always been sympathetic toward gay rights, and this biopic of the Alan Turing - the man who broke the Enigma Code in World War II, laid the groundwork for the development of modern computers and then committed suicide after being chemically castrated by the British government for the crime of homosexuality - stands to hit all the right buttons with the Academy.  While the overall feelings for this film seem somewhat less than that of Whiplash and Foxcatcher, The Imitation Game is thankfully not banking completely on the acting branch's fascination with Cumberbatch's performance: drawing on the same social guilt that is sure to nominate Selma.  The only real question is if Hollywood's moral activism can be split two ways in the same year.

Both Nightcrawler and the last film on this list aim to be "the people's nominee:" filling the role that films like Gravity, Toy Story 3, Inception, Up and Avatar filled in previous years.  This is one of those rare movies where critics and audiences seem to generally agree on its worth, and the Academy is keen to not be seen as quite so stuffy as they actually are.  But while previous years have had two or three of these kinds of films, the new 10% rule might prohibit more than Interstellar making the list.  Still, if a second winds up among the nominees, Nightcrawler is a likelier choice than any other.

David Fincher's pulpy adaptation of a soccer mom thriller might not seem like something that even stands a chance at getting a Best Picture nomination - and it admittedly doesn't stand much of one - but there's just enough talent and just enough support for it to keep it from being out of contention just yet.  Dark, spellbinding and with a thoroughly twisted screenplay, Gone Girl is another critical and popular overlap that the Academy is often quick to capitalize on.  What is likely going to keep it out of the running, though, is the 10% rule and two more likely candidates than it filling the exact same role.

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