If you’ve been paying even unconscious attention to this year’s Oscars, you know who the frontrunner is for Best Picture. Sometimes it takes a longer time than usual for one to emerge, but there always appears to be consensus, even in a year with so much depth in the Best Picture category.

If the Oscars started and ended with the announcement of nominees, you’d call it a strange year for the Oscars, just by the handling of the Best Director nominations. The final list of five is somewhat mystifying, let alone figuring out who will win the damn thing.

Last year, Meryl Streep took home Oscar number three, emerging victorious on a list of incredible vets. Well, this year the picture looks quite different. It’s mostly time for the fresher faces in Hollywood to get a shot, but you can only half say that, as the category also boasts the oldest and youngest nominees […]

I can’t recall a group of five performances this strong in which the outcome was so obvious. It’s a shame that no one is really talking about the triumphs of the other non-hyphenated actors in this category because in the prediction business, all we care about is who has a shot.

This past Sunday night the Writers Guild of America Awards were held, so I waited a bit longer on this category to give a better prediction. A lot of terrific screenplays are in the hunt this year.

Last year, Christopher Plummer became the older Oscar winner and kept alive the trend of actors with “Chris” in their name winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Christian Bale and Christoph Waltz) before him. Waltz will have to win again to keep that going in this year’s competitive list of nominees.

Time to bust into the acting categories! Best Supporting Actress has been a lock in recent years and things don’t appear to have changed. Last year, Octavia Spencer was the much-deserved winner for balancing comedy and drama, a nice change from the two previous winners who played overbearing mothers (Melissa Leo in “The Fighter” and […]

Occasionally a great, critically adored foreign film will come along and impress so many people that the walls of the Best Foreign Language category cannot contain it. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was one such film. Michael Haneke’s “Amour” is only the ninth foreign language film to do it and as such, it’s the biggest favorite […]

2012 was an incredible year for animation in quality and quantity, and so five films were nominated this year, only the fourth time that’s happened in the category’s 12-year history. Interestingly in terms of U.S. box office, only two of the six highest-grossing animated films were nominated. Popular films including “The Lorax,” “Hotel Transylvania” and […]

Some rule changes for eligibility as well as other factors could shake up the precedent for the Academy to award the high-profile documentaries, but the subject matters of these films are going to be quite familiar to you.

Wouldn’t it be nice if short films got the same publicity the other 11 months of the year? At least the Academy honors these films, even if they blow right through them during the ceremony, and some theater chains will screen all the nominees together. 

If the Academy is doing nothing else right, they’ve made up for it by restoring the Best Original Song category. After just two films were nominated last year, the rules changed as to how Academy members vote for the category, namely that they don’t. Now, the number of nominees is contingent on the number of […]

Time to finish out the technical categories with breakdowns of both the Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing categories. These people have a serious impact on carrying out the director’s vision both when it’s being shot and when shooting has wrapped and the scenes are actually being turned into a movie.

After breaking down the computer-heavy categories first in Sound and Visual Effects, next on the list of Oscar categories to tackle are the three categories that involve work mostly done the old-fashioned way.

It’s time again from my annual breakdown of the categories at the Academy Awards for the month leading up to the ceremony, which is on Feb. 24. We start with the technical awards, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Visual Effects.