Final 96th Oscars Predictions

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Final 96th Oscars Predictions

The time has come to close the curtain on the films of 2023 with this Sunday’s crowning of the 96th Annual Academy Awards! Honoring the very best cinematic achievements of last year, this year’s Oscars sees Jimmy Kimmel return for his fourth stint as Oscars host, and you can catch all the action on ABC beginning at 7pm ET.

Last year’s ceremony capped off an incredible and improbable awards season run for the multiverse genre-hybrid Everything Everywhere All at Once, as it won Picture/Director/Screenplay, and became only the third film in Academy history to snag three of the four acting Oscars. Its seven total wins set a new record for Best Picture winners since the expansion of the Best Picture lineup in 2009, though that record is likely to be toppled by this year’s juggernaut: Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan’s biopic is the total package and checks off just about every box an Oscar frontrunner can check: critics’ favorite, box office behemoth, pop cultural impact, acclaimed and overdue director and stars, prestige subject, and impressive crafts on displayed recognized by nearly every branch of the Academy. I think it’s locked and loaded for eight wins from its thirteen nominations, though between seven and ten is possible depending on how the night goes.

In other categories, there’s the usual mix of sure-things (the United Kingdom will win its first International Feature Oscar for Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest), close contests (which “Stone” takes Best Actress: Emma or Lily Glad-?), and wide-open races (Visual Effects could go any number of ways). Despite the impending Oppenheimer steamroll, it looks very possible that almost all of the pretty excellent lineup of Best Picture nominees will walk away with a statue (sorry, Past Lives - I love you!), so I’m looking forward to a lot of worthy artists getting some recognition.

Settle in, mix yourself a cocktail or two (in lieu of our traditional Oscar Menu, we’ll be downing dirty gin martinis all evening), make sure you have enough hot dogs (that’s a May December reference, btw), and follow along with my predictions below!

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2023-2024 Oscar Nominations Reactions

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2023-2024 Oscar Nominations Reactions

With the Oscars just a week away, it’s past time I went back and assessed the nominations and how I fared with my predictions! The nominations for the 96th Annual Academy Awards were unveiled back on January 23rd by Zazie Beetz and Jack Quaid. As expected, Christopher Nolan’s megahit Oppenheimer led the pack with 13 nominations in just about every eligible category (it likely would’ve tied the record of 14 if the visual effects branch had shortlisted the film). There weren’t too many big surprises among the nominee list, certainly nothing as big as last year’s Andrea Riseborough nomination - though many would argue the misses for Greta Gerwig in Best Director and Margot Robbie in Best Actress for Barbie were shocking (not in the least to this longtime Oscar predictor).

I correctly predicted 93/120 of this year's nominees (77.5%), which landed me in the top 3% of prognosticators over at GoldDerby (347th place finish of 10,893 participants). A very respectable finish, though when I’ve tasted victory and outright won twice (including just last year) and finished within the top twelve 3 others times in the past decade, the accomplishment feels less sweet.

Read on for a list of the nominations and my predictions results.

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Final 2023-2024 Oscar Nominations Predictions

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Final 2023-2024 Oscar Nominations Predictions

Ho ho ho and happy holidays! It’s finally Christmas Oscar season!

The 96th Annual Academy Awards nominations will be revealed on Tuesday morning January 23rd by Zazie Beetz & Jack Quaid beginning at 8:30am ET (you can view a live stream of the announcement via the Oscars website).

The nominations will honor the best cinematic achievements from 2023. Just as ‘Barbenheimer’ dominated the culture upon release last summer, expect those two juggernauts (Barbie and Oppenheimer), plus Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, to heavily feature into just about every category at this year’s awards. All four of those films are likely to pick up double-digit nomination totals, though I’m predicting a few surprise misses for each…well, except Oppenheimer, which has to be considered the odds on favorite to take home the big prize.

As usual, I still have a lengthy list of 2023 titles I want to catch up to before finalizing my own personal list of favorites for the year, but the expected Oscar lineup seems likely to be a very solid collection of (mostly) great films that I won’t quibble with too much (even if I’d drop something like Barbie or Maestro for my beloved May December).

Read on for my final nominations predictions!

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Final 95th Oscars Predictions

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Final 95th Oscars Predictions

It’s time to finally put a bow on 2022 with tonight’s presentation of the 95th Annual Academy Awards! Honoring the best cinematic achievements of last year, this year’s Oscars will thankfully return to presenting all 23 categories live on air. Jimmy Kimmel returns for his third stint as Oscars host, and you can catch all the action on ABC beginning at 8pm ET.

Last year’s awards saw the Apple-bought little indie that could CODA break all sorts of Oscars stats to take home wins from all three of its nominations, including Best Picture. This year’s indie underdog also happens to be a stealth-surprise industry titan, with A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once absolutely dominating the awards circuit this season. The question (probably) isn’t if it will win Best Picture, but rather, how many awards with the absurdist, multiverse comedy-drama collect? Since the Academy expanded their Best Picture lineup in 2009, no Best Picture winner has taken home more than 5 awards (films like Gravity and La La Land have won more, but failed to also garner the top prize). I’m predicting Everything Everywhere to nab six Oscars, but as few as two or as many as nine feels possible!

In other categories, there’s the usual mix of sure-things (might as well engrave Avatar: The Way of Water on that Visual Effects Oscar right now), close contests (excitingly three of the four acting categories are total toss-ups!), and wide-open races (who on Earth is winning Best Score??). We’re Team Everything Everywhere here at CineMunch and look forward to seeing one of 2022’s best films get crowned in multiple categories!

Settle in, mix yourself a cocktail or two (in lieu of our traditional Oscar Menu, we’ll be alternating between chocolate martinis and Avatar: The Glass of Waters), and follow along with my predictions below!

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2022-2023 Oscar Nominations Reactions

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2022-2023 Oscar Nominations Reactions

The nominations for the 95th Annual Academy Awards were unveiled way back on January 24th by Riz Ahmed and Allison Williams. The multiverse comedy-drama-action Everything Everywhere All at Once continued its incredible (and improbable) awards run, leading the nominations with 11 mentions. The biggest shocks came in the competitive Best Actress category (both for who missed and who was included), 2022’s highest domestic grosser Top Gun: Maverick missing a Cinematography nomination, and, more personally, that I did so well on my predictions this year.

I correctly predicted 97/120 of this year's nominees (80.83%), which landed me at the very top of the leaderboard over at GoldDerby for the second time in my prognosticating career (1st place finish of 9,900 participants, baby!). I got the opportunity to chat with some of GoldDerby’s editors following the nominations about my predictions and who we thought was ahead in each race at that time.

Read on for a list of the nominations and my predictions results.

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Final 2022-2023 Oscar Nominations Predictions

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Final 2022-2023 Oscar Nominations Predictions

Tis the season! It’s finally Christmas Oscar nominations morning!

The 95th Annual Academy Awards nominations will be revealed on Tuesday morning January 24th by Riz Ahmed & Allison Williams beginning at 8:30am ET (you can view a live stream of the announcement via the Oscars website).

The nominations will honor the best in cinema from 2022. With the state of the film industry still reeling from COVID disruptions and an overall decrease in movie-going (not to mention studios reluctant to even release films in theaters these days), expect some familiar titles to crack the Best Picture lineup - as at least two sequels, but possibly as many as four, are likely to nab a mention. 2022’s box office behemoth’s Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water are pretty assured Best Picture nominees, so even if some smaller indies gain recognition, the public can’t complain that Oscar nominated films they never saw this year!

I’ve still got a lot to catch up on from last year to really assess my favorites from 2022, but I’ll definitely be happy to see the A24 indie-that-could Everything Everywhere All at Once among the nomination leaders when all is done and counted.

Read on for my final nominations predictions!

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Final 94th Oscars Predictions

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Final 94th Oscars Predictions

The time has finally come to open some envelopes and find out who will take home Oscars at tonight’s presentation of the 94th Annual Academy Awards. It’s been a long, strange season that has boiled down to two very different films directed by women and released via a streaming service duking it out for Best Picture with Netflix’s The Power of the Dog vs Apple TV+’s CODA. One is the critics’ fave with the most nominations of any of this year’s films (Power of the Dog has an even dozen mentions), while the other is tied as the least nominated Best Picture nominee this year (CODA is hoping to become the first Best Pic winner with fewer than 4 nominations since Grand Hotel in 1932). Either way, a streamer will take the top prize for the first time, cementing an industry shift several years in the making.

Last year’s Oscars, a muted and awkward affair, saw Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland take the highest honor along with trophies for Zhao’s direction and Frances McDormand’s third Best Actress statue. Academy producers then made the bizarre choice to push Best Actor to the final award, assuming a posthumous honor for Chadwick Boseman only to be surprised with an absent Anthony Hopkins victory to close the show. While this year’s shindig promises to be a return to a bigger and grander ceremony, the Academy has also made several perplexing choices - punting eight of the categories to be handed out during a non-televised pre-show is unprecedented and insulting, not to mention a truly strange and desperate attempt to court younger audiences to take time on the broadcast to shout out the results of a Twitter poll asking for #OscarsFanFavorite and #OscarsCheerMoment. After going hostless for the past several years, the trio of Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, and Wanda Sykes will handle hosting duties.

As ever, there’s a healthy mix of sure-things (Dune will net a handful of technical awards, likely being the most awarded film of the year; 3 of the acting categories feel locked up), tight battles (Billie Eilish or Lin-Manuel Miranda for Best Song?), and wide-open question marks (Best Editing is a true 5-way race and one of the most exciting categories this year - too bad it’s one of the eight that will be awarded off screen before the ceremony even officially begins). We’re Team Power of the Dog at CineMunch and are hoping Jane Campion’s masterpiece (not a word we throw around lightly) takes wins wherever it can!

So settle in, mix yourself a cocktail or two (in lieu of our traditional Oscar Menu, we’ll be sipping chocolate martinis), and follow along with our predictions below!

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2021-2022 Oscar Nominations Reactions

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2021-2022 Oscar Nominations Reactions

The nominations for the 94th Annual Academy Awards were unveiled back on February 8th by Leslie Jordan and Tracee Ellis Ross. There was the usual mix of surprises (Judi Dench?!) and shocking snubs (where on Earth is Denis Villeneuve?! Sorry, Lady Gaga!), including Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog leading the nominations with 12 over technical powerhouse Dune (which netted an even ten noms).

I correctly predicted 87/120 of this year's nominees (72.5%), which landed me my worst ever finish at GoldDerby (874th place finish of 9,721 participants - top 9% though!) Having finished 12th, 1st, 8th, and 4th in years past, this year’s results were nothing to write home about. In particular, the short film categories proved trickier than usual for most every prognosticator (likely owing to the fact that the shortlists for those categories increased from ten to fifteen).

Read on for a list of the nominations and my predictions results.

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Final 2021-2022 Oscar Nominations Predictions

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Final 2021-2022 Oscar Nominations Predictions

And just like that…the day has (finally) arrived - Oscar nominations morning!

The 94th Annual Academy Awards nominations will be revealed on Tuesday morning by Leslie Jordan & Tracee Ellis Ross beginning at 8:18am ET (you can view a live stream of the announcement via the Oscars website).

The nominations will honor the best in cinema from the past 10 months (January and February of 2021 were lumped into last year’s Oscar eligibility window to accommodate the many changing pandemic release dates). As COVID continues to disrupt life in and outside of Hollywood, assessing the tea leaves has become even more challenging for us Oscar prognosticators. Expect Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune to lead the nominations, though it seems likely to boil down to Belfast vs The Power of the Dog for the Best Picture win (we’re very strongly in the Power of the Dog camp here at CineMunch).

Read on for my final nominations predictions!

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Final 93rd Oscars Predictions

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Final 93rd Oscars Predictions

The longest and strangest film awards season in history is finally reaching its end with this evening’s presentation of the 93rd Annual Academy Awards! Honoring the best in film from 2020 (plus the first few months of 2021), this year’s batch of mostly excellent nominees proved the global pandemic didn’t stop great cinema from reaching our homes - even if it did prevent us all from viewing them from the comfort/discomfort of movie theaters. While the Academy needed a few more months leeway to put everything together, here at CineMunch we need even more time before we can definitively announce our favorites from the year (though we’re both rooting for Nomadland among the Best Picture nominees). In any case, the show must go on, so it's time to double down on some final predictions.

Last year’s Oscars, which feels like an entire lifetime ago, saw the historic crowning of Parasite, the first foreign language film to be awarded Best Picture. A number of narratives are at play among this year’s contenders — after 7 loses, might this finally be Glenn Close’s year? will Chadwick Boseman become just the second posthumous Best Actor winner? how many of the Academy’s 9,000+ members actually cast ballots this year?— but one milestone seems guaranteed as Nomadland director Chloé Zhao looks set to become just the second woman, and first woman of color, to take home the Best Director statue.

As always, there’s a healthy mix of sure-things (Soul has Score all sewn up and, unsurprisingly, Sound of Metal is a lock for Best Sound), tight battles (will it be Promising Young Woman or The Trial of the Chicago 7 in Original Screenplay?), and wide-open question marks (the Best Actress contest is excitingly all over the map).

So settle in, mix yourself a cocktail or two (in lieu of our traditional Oscar Menu, we’ll be sipping Old Fashioneds and snacking on whatever is laying around), and follow along with our predictions below!

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