Oscar Contest Archive

[James]

The ballot has now been closed! Thanks to all who entered! A little down from previous years, with almost 70 entries.

Just for fun I added a new feature this year. I looked at who was predicted the most in each category by you guys and then compared that to every ballot. The last column on the score page shows how many of your picks matched the consensus picks. The consensus isn't always right of course (last year the AV consensus only got 15 out of 22 right!), but it's still a fun stat to talk about until the show starts!

The number looks something like this: "12 / 1". The first number is how many of your picks matched the consensus in the 22 categories we score. The second number is how many matched the 2 categories we use as the second tie-breaker.

[Randall]

I see that Tami and I had among the lowest number of consensus picks. Apparently, we are out of the loop again.

[James]

The votes in each category have been posted for those interested in seeing what everyone voted for. Some interesting notes on the nominees and the contest ballots:

-- Lots of agreement in lots of categories. 13 categories had at least 80% agreement from voters. 17 categories had at least 70% agreement!

-- Best Picture is a tight race. 41% say Three Billboards is going to win, while 38% picked The Shape of Water. Going into the final day of balloting, those numbers were reversed! Last minute voters flipped that category!

-- Coco was almost a unanimous pick for Best Animated Feature. One brave soul chose The Boss Baby! (If there is a spoiler for Pixar my money is on The Breadwinner.)

-- Lots of love for Roger Deakins for Best Cinematography. He's been nominated 14 times in the category but has yet to win. Be nice if he wins, but not sure Blade Runner 2049 is the movie I'd choose for him to break through! (Deakins also consulted on Wall-e, How to Train Your Dragon, and Rango.)

-- Speaking of cinematography, 4 of the 5 nominated films had readers vote for them. The odd man out is actually a woman: Mudbound's Rachel Morrison, the first woman ever nominated for Best Cinematography (the last category that had never had a female nominee.)

-- Four of the Best Visual Effects nominees are sequels and the last is a reboot! All featured "animated" characters. No Star Wars film since the original series has won an Oscar. No Marvel movie has ever won. None of the previous Planet of the Apes movies has won. The original Blade Runner movie didn't win. Kong has won one competitive Oscar, one special achievement Oscar, and the producers lobbied the Academy to create an award for the 1933 version!

-- Basketball star Kobe Bryant and animation legend Glen Keane are the contest favorites to win the Best Animated Short Oscar for Dear Basketball. You can watch the short here: https://www.go90.com/videos/261MflWkD3N

-- Beauty and the Beast is up for two awards, Production Design and Costume Design. Disney has won several Oscars with its live action reimaginings of animated classics, including Best Art Direction (now Production Design) and Costume Design for Alice in Wonderland, and Best Visual Effects for The Jungle Book. (Personally, I'm hoping it doesn't win any. I want the original to be Disney's only Oscar-winning Beauty and the Beast!)

-- The only other category with an animated film nominee is Best Original Song. AV readers overwhelming predict Remember Me from Coco will win. The Best Song award has been around since 1934. In the first 55 years, only one song from an animated film won: When You Wish Upon a Star from Pinocchio. Since 1989, 10 songs from an animated film have won. (Song of the South and Mary Poppins won, but weren't really "animated films". The Muppets have also taken home an award!) Only one non Disney or Pixar song has ever won: When You Believe from The Prince of Egypt.

[gaastra]

I am so bad at this contest. I end up at the bottom every year. This year was extra hard. So many big movies in best picture. Oh well it's the fun of guessing that counts.

[EricJ]

I'd read an anonymous-insider article that some of the new voters were distinctly divided on Darkest Hour, but were still gushing over Three Billboards.
Man, that just took the fun out of it right away. Looks like "Better luck next year" for actual mainstream commercial movies getting Best Picture, and they've still forgotten why they wanted to retire the 8-10 nominations two years ago.

As for Documentary Feature, on my various movie Twitter accounts, I've been seeing eight to twelve photos a day of critics and directors at festivals/awards posing with Edna Mode...er, Agnes Varda, so Documentary continues to be the second least-suspenseful category this year.

-- The only other category with an animated film nominee is Best Original Song. AV readers overwhelming predict Remember Me from Coco will win. The Best Song award has been around since 1934. In the first 55 years, only one song from an animated film won: When You Wish Upon a Star from Pinocchio. Since 1989, 10 songs from an animated film have won. (Song of the South and Mary Poppins won, but weren't really "animated films". The Muppets have also taken home an award!) Only one non Disney or Pixar song has ever won: When You Believe from The Prince of Egypt.

I've already padded sections of my wall to beat my head against if Remember Me wins Best Song for "Coco"--Biggest put-up rig since the Muppets song.
Yes, it was thrown in our face for most of the movie, to the point that Disney/Pixar was dangling a watch in front of our eyes and saying "You WILL nominate it for representative Best Song...."
But it's just....y'know....not an actual Best Song--In fact, it sticks out from the rest of the movie for not even remotely sounding anything like the rest of the finely crafted Mexico/mariachi atmosphere. As I joked at the time, "Why are they suddenly singing Frozen songs in Mexico?"

"But it's so important to the PLOT, when he sings it to her at the end!"--That's no excuse.
That's like saying Rapunzel's flower-incantation song from Tangled should have been nominated: Yes, it's important to the running third-act plot device, but when you have a singer up on the Oscar stage performing it for the excerpt, you start noticing it's a bit thin musically.

[Ben]

Well, if Shape takes it...and it quite possibly will...then that’ll be a mainstream movie.

Still haven’t heard Remember Me (since I haven’t seen Coco yet) so it’ll be interesting to catch it tonight and hear it out of context.

[James]

He's not wrong about that song.

[James]

The Oscars are over and we have a tie at the top of our contest! Congratulations to "woodsbaker" and "jwvaughn007" who both got an extraordinary 21 out of 22 categories right! That ties our contest record for most correct picks set back in 2014!

While both players will be listed as this year's champion in the record book, only one can claim the prize.

-- The first tie-breaker is which player got the most animation categories right (Animated Feature, Animated Short, and Visual Effects). Both players nailed this, getting all three correct! Still tied!

-- The second tie-breaker looks at the two categories that don't count in our score except in the case of a tie (Live Action Short and Documentary Short). woodsbaker correctly picked one of them, while jwvaughn007 missed both.

Therefore woodsbaker will take the $50 prize! But congrats to both champions on a great game!

And thanks to everyone who played! Next year is the 15th anniversary of our Oscar contest. Maybe we'll do something a little special for that...!

[Daniel]

61? Wow.

It's interesting, I tied with Dacey and what I got wrong he got right and vice versa. Eerie, no? (Do-do-do-do)

[Dacey]

Wow. I did pretty badly this year!

[Randall]

Not as bad as my annual flameout. I could not even defeat James' wife.

[Ben]

I’m not going to be modest...I’m really pleased with my score of 19, knowing that I actually picked 21 winners as well, since I knew my votes for Apes' VFX and Billboards for screenplay were more hopes than what I knew would win. And honestly that Sunday morning I read an article about the foreign film winner A Fantastic Woman and, had I seen that before voting, I would have gone for that too, giving me a perfect score, the first time ever I’ve done so.

I guess in these cases I should vote for what I think will actually win over hoping to karmic-ly sway the actual winner in some cases (like my vote for Apes, since that work really did deserve that Oscar and was so much better than the flashy 2049, which I had several issues with), which is where I usually go "wrong" in these kind of ballots! But my personal best of 21 is pretty cool and I think my "official" number of 19 this year is probably the best I’ve done too!

Very close this year...congrats to both high scorers, and our ultimate prize-taker! And thanks to James, of course, for running this every year and staking the prize.

[James]

Nice job Ben!

My problem is I'm always the first one to fill in my ballot the day the contest opens -- so no one accuses me of cheating! I printed my ballot the day of the Oscars and just laughed at some of my picks that had been the favorites a few weeks earlier. I think after this many years of coming in at the middle of the pack it's obvious I'm not cheating! Maybe next year I'll wait a little longer to submit my ballot.

Tami doesn't stay up for the show, but texted me from work the next day to see how she did and whether Randall beat her. I told her she came in 64th and he came in 65th, out of 69. She just got the new iPhone last week (with the animoji feature) and replied with this!

http://animatedviews.com/wp-content/upl ... 8kGziv.mp4

[Randall]

She did thaaaaaaaaaat?????!!??!!!!!

I am seriously feeling smacked down. Tell Tami that I have had the flu all week. That'll make her feel bad.

Okay, next year I am really going to have to pay attention to this Oscars thing!

[James]

Haha! It was a actually funnier with her text too, since she was "claiming" a smackdown while coming in third from last!