There are a few categories that are worth paying attention to when the Oscar nominations come out tomorrow morning. Some are the typical ones to look at while other less flashy categories are doing something quite unusual to deserve a closer look. Best Picture
Gone are the years of the automatic ten-wide field. While this helped bring attention (presumably) to smaller films with dedicated fan bases like Winter's Bone and A Serious Man, it also meant that (potentially) films that received very few votes at all could be best picture nominees over films with many more votes. How? Weighted voting.
It comes down to this. To be nominated for Best Picture, you need number one votes. Each Academy member ranks their top five films in order of preference. Number one votes count before number two votes, etc. That means, in the past few years, a minority of number one votes could be nominated over a majority of number two votes. Eliminating a ten-wide field doesn't prevent that from happening, but it does do more to support the popular choices.
This year, the top 5 nominees will be selected no matter what. That is the base threshold for Best Picture nominations. Where the variance comes in is how many other films can get in. Once the top 5 are selected, the rest of the votes are counted. Any film receiving at least 5% of the number one votes becomes a Best Picture nominee. If no other film has 5% of the votes, there are only five nominees. If more than five films have 5% of the vote (after the top 5 are selected), only the top 10 vote-getters are Best Picture nominees.
Best Picture is important this year just to see how this new voting experiment goes. Will enough films get 5% of the vote to have more than five Best Picture nominees? Will it be the popular animated film, the box office smash, or the quiet art/foreign film that benefits from the change? We find out tomorrow.
Best Supporting Actress
We have a very unusual situation in Supporting Actress. Melissa McCarthy, the brassy breakout star of monster hit comedy film Bridesmaids, has been doing very well for herself during the precursors. Problem? It's hard to imagine a performance widely remembered for a gross-out humor scene in a bridal boutique's bathroom gaining Oscar traction.
McCarthy's performance is strong. It's just in a very unusual, not-Academy-friendly, film. The last time I can find that the Academy went big for a comedy film that casts such a wide net--sight gags, violence, puns, dark humor, edgy humor, gross-out humor--was Blazing Saddles. It's a fitting enough comparison. Madeline Kahn was nominated in this category for playing a sex-crazed cabaret singer with schticky, scene-stealing moments. McCarthy plays a sex-crazed bridesmaid with schticky, scene-stealing moments.
The big difference is that the Academy has not gone for prior films from Judd Apatow regardless of quality. By the time Blazing Saddles was nominated, Mel Brooks was an Academy Awards regular. Judd Apatow has not seen his films nominated. The only difference between Bridesmaids and his previous films is a focus on female characters. Is that enough to break through?
It's hard to imagine a broad comedy performance getting in for Best Supporting Actress, but tomorrow could be the day. McCarthy's performance is so strong that it might be impossible to ignore.
Best Original Score
There's a big novelty this year with Best Original Score: none of the front-runners have been disqualified. For the past few years, critical darlings like Karen O and Johnny Greenwald have been disqualified for allegedly using too much pre-existing material in their scores. The suggestion was preposterous in those two cases--they were disqualified for the director including a licensed song and a public domain song in an otherwise all original score film, respectively--and it's refreshing to see that the field is open this year. Even The Tree of Life escaped suspicion when it incorporates a lot of public domain music around the original scoring.
It's been years since we've seen all of the possible score nominees in contention. That doesn't mean that the Academy won't disqualify someone today (they've done it the day before the nominations came out before), but it hasn't happened yet. Fingers crossed.
Best Animated Feature
I know there is a vocal minority of people who want Andy Serkis to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor this year. His performance as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is strong, but it's motion capture work. Mocap is still a dirty word for actors who fear the technology will eliminate their livelihoods. The argument goes if anyone can become anyone or anything else, why can't all roles be played by only a few actors from now on? It's a legitimate concern to enough actors that I can't see Serkis getting in anytime soon.
However, there is a category where motion capture techniques are gong to be put on trial and that's Best Animated Feature. Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of TinTin has been one of the rotating cast of possible nominees swinging in and out of the precursor nominees. When it makes the shortlist, it has a bad habit of winning. However, it's not making all of the best of lists or nominations.
The Academy Awards have not been kind to motion capture animation in the past. No mocap film has been nominated in Animated Feature. To put it in perspective, foreign language animated films have a better track record in the category than big budget Hollywood (heavily promoted, widely available) mocap animated films.
TinTin could be the film to change that. The pedigree is so high and the execution so strong that it might not be possible to turn a blind eye to motion capture animation again.
Thoughts? Love to hear them.