Alright, this is it. My final predictions for the ‘Big Five’ (well, I guess it’s Big Six, but you know what I mean) Oscar nominees of 2021. I’ve listed each of my predicted nominees by how confident I am in my prediction, and I’ll briefly explain my choices for each category. Without further ado…

Precursor nominations are listed in brackets beside each nominee. Bold indicates a win, Italics indicate that the award in question has not yet been given out, and an * asterisk indicates that the film was nominated in a musical or comedy category.

BEST PICTURE:

1. Nomadland (GG, CC, BAFTA, PGA)
2. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (GG, CC, BAFTA, PGA)
3. Promising Young Woman (GG, CC, BAFTA, PGA)
4. Mank (GG, CC, PGA)
5. Minari (CC, PGA)
6. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (CC, PGA)
7. One Night in Miami (CC, PGA)
8. Sound of Metal (CC, PGA)
9. The Father (GG, BAFTA)
10. Judas and the Black Messiah (PGA)

Note: The top 7 are locks, but the bottom three are pretty up-in-the-air. Historically, the Oscars usually go for eight or nine nominees and there’s no reason why that’d be different this year, so it stands to reason that at least one of the bottom three will ultimately be nominated. I’ve gone back and forth on it a lot, but I’ve decided to put my proverbial money on Sound of Metal as the #8. it’s hit at exactly the same precursors as my #5-7 (and has the potential for nominations in a myriad of categories, including Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Editing and Sound).The Father also seems fairly buzz-y to me – it has Actor and Supporting Actress behind it, and in general feels like a Best Picture movie, if you know what I mean. The only issue is that it’s apparently been having some issues getting screeners out to voters, which is likely why it didn’t pick up nominations at the Critics’ Choice or the PGA. We don’t yet know whether this issue will affect the Oscars or not. Judas takes the bottom spot; it does have a solid chance of getting nominated, but ultimately it’s not a strong contender in any category other than Supporting Actor, which is a pretty abysmal package for Best Picture.

BEST DIRECTOR:

1. Chloe Zhao, Nomadland (GG, CC, BAFTA, DGA)
2. David Fincher, Mank (GG, CC, DGA)
3. Aaron Sorkin, The Trial of the Chicago 7 (GG, CC, DGA)
4. Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman (GG, CC, DGA)
5. Lee Isaac Chung, Minari (CC, BAFTA, DGA)

Note: This is a rare category this year in that all five nominees are pretty much locked in. All five were nominated for the DGA, and each picked up at least two nominations elsewhere. I feel pretty confident in this one.

BEST ACTRESS:

1. Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman (GG, CC, SAG)
2. Frances McDormand, Nomadland (GG, CC, BAFTA, SAG)
3. Viola Davis, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (GG, CC, SAG)
4. Vanessa Kirby, Pieces of a Woman (GG, CC, BAFTA, SAG)
5. Andra Day, The United States vs Billie Holiday (GG, CC)

Note: The Best Actress race is pretty locked in at this point. The #5 spot eluded us for a while but Andra Day’s win at the Globes secured it for her, even if she’s only been nominated at half the major precursors.

BEST ACTOR:

1. Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (GG, CC, BAFTA, SAG)
2. Anthony Hopkins, The Father (GG, CC, BAFTA, SAG)
3. Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal (GG, CC, BAFTA, SAG)
4. Gary Oldman, Mank (GG, CC, SAG)
5. Steven Yeun, Minari (CC, SAG)

Note: The top four in this category are looking pretty strong, with only one missed nomination between them. Less secure is Steven Yeun in the #5 spot, but I’m not sure who exactly could upset that. Delroy Lindo’s chances are pretty much dead after he only got a Critics Choice nom. Tahar Rahim is a possibility after nominations at both the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, but The Mauritanian isn’t a Best Picture contender like Minari is. All in all, Yeun is the safest pick for #5, but that’s not a high bar to clear.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

1. Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (GG, CC, BAFTA, SAG)
2. Olivia Colman, The Father (GG, CC, SAG)
3. Glenn Close, Hillbilly Elegy (GG, CC, SAG)
4. Youn Yuh-jung, Minari (CC, BAFTA, SAG)
5. Amanda Seyfried, Mank (GG, CC)

Note: This category is all over the place, and honestly any one of these five could be snubbed in favour of someone like Jodie Foster (who, remember, won the Globe) or Ellen Burstyn or even Helena Zengel. But I think this is the safest five possible, and one that I am, relatively speaking, more confident in than any of the other combinations I could have chosen.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

1. Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah (GG, CC, BAFTA, SAG)
2. Sacha Baron Cohen, The Trial of the Chicago 7 (GG, CC, SAG)
3. Leslie Odom Jr., One Night in Miami (GG, CC, BAFTA, SAG)
4. Chadwick Boseman, Da 5 Bloods (CC, SAG)
5. Paul Raci, Sound of Metal (CC, BAFTA)

Note: I feel fairly confident about this one, but I’d keep an eye out for Jared Leto, who has the same number of nominations as #4 & 5. Ditto for Bill Murray, although I think he’s lost a lot of steam later in the season. I wouldn’t put too much trust in the Alan Kim surge. It’s possible, but seems unlikely.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:

1. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (GG, CC, BAFTA, WGA)
2. Promising Young Woman (GG, CC, BAFTA, WGA)
3. Mank (GG, CC, BAFTA)
4. Sound of Metal (CC, WGA)
5. Minari (CC)

Note: Admittedly, Minari looks a little weak here, but I don’t know what to replace it with. Judas and the Black Messiah also has a single nomination, but I’ve chosen to prioritise the Critics’ Choice over the WGA, for reasons I can’t quite explain. If you really want an extremely unlikely but not entirely impossible longshot, predict Palm Springs or Another Round.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

1. Nomadland (GG, CC, BAFTA)
2. The Father (GG, CC, BAFTA)
3. One Night in Miami (CC, WGA)
4. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (CC, WGA)
5. The Mauritanian (BAFTA)

Note: As you may have noticed, I’ve gone for a longshot in this category. It’s not usually my style, but sometimes I like to liven things up a bit, and so I’ve predicted The Mauritanian in the fifth slot. There’s usually at least one Screenplay nominee that doesn’t really get any other nominations (think First Reformed), and I’ve chosen to believe in the post-Globes Mauritanian surge, which is either really smart or really stupid.

I’ve realised that, to ensure some more consistent content on this blog, I can always just port over some of my short reviews from Letterboxd (I’m, unsurprisingly, named Huncrweo on there if you want to give me a follow). It’s a bit lazy, I’ll admit, but it’s still writing about film and it’s nice to have something short to post every now and then. With that in mind, here’s about five hundred words on George Clooney’s 2005 Best Picture nominee Good Night, and Good Luck, which – spoiler – I did not like at all…

I know that people like this film, but I can’t help but feel that it had all the personality of a high school history lesson. And not from the teacher you liked either, from the one who droned on for twenty mind-numbing minutes and then gave you questions to do from the textbook. Yes, the cinematography and lighting were very nice and the acting was generally quite good across the board, with the particular standouts being David Strathairn and Ray Wise, but Clooney delivers what should be an engaging and emotionally involving story in an extremely sterile fashion. 

We’re shown so few scenes set outside of the characters’ workplace that we never get any sense of who they actually are as people, and none of them is allowed to develop beyond how they are when we first meet them. Nor are their actions given any discernible consequences – am I meant to care that the network lost a sponsor? The stakes were high for these people in real life, but you never get a sense of that from the film. There is absolutely nothing to latch onto for the viewer.

While watching, I thought a lot about Jay Roach’s Trumbo. That was a film that explored McCarthyism through a very human perspective, thereby emotionally engaging the viewer regardless of their knowledge of the history going in. Good Night, and Good Luck, by contrast, relies entirely on the viewer already having a degree of investment or interest in the subject matter, because it never presents the situation to us in any compelling way. This is epitomised in the second scene of the film – instead of communicating the idea of McCarthyism and the fear that it instilled in America through more creative means (like, I don’t know, dialogue?), Clooney instead opts to just throw a few paragraphs of scrolling text on screen, a CliffsNotes explanation of the Red Scare. It feels, and I don’t use this word lightly when talking about film because I know how much work goes into each one, lazy. 

As a whole, the film just feels slight. It’s just over ninety minutes, and although it feels a lot longer due to the lack of emotional investment, I think that it would have benefitted greatly from an extra half-hour, even forty-five minutes. That way, maybe it would have time to give the characters the same attention that it gave the plot. Maybe it would have been able to make sure that substance existed alongside the style. Or maybe it would be the exact same, except longer. All I can say is that, despite it being by far his most critically-acclaimed film, Good Night, and Good Luck has done nothing to dissuade me of the notion that George Clooney is a great actor but a poor director.

Best Supporting Actor: Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah

I was having a bit of a wobble, so to speak, with my confidence in Daniel Kaluuya. I still left him on my predictions, but I was beginning to wonder if the fact that Judas had only been nominated in Supporting Actor and Original Song was a sign of a general lack of love for the film on the part of the HFPA. I considered moving Trial of the Chicago 7‘s Sacha Baron Cohen to my #1 spot. Thankfully for my abysmal prediction accuracy, I left Kaluuya where he was, giving me a correct prediction to begin the night with (it wouldn’t last). What this says to me is basically that Kaluuya is easily winning the Oscar. The Supporting Actor race floundered for a long time without a clear frontrunner (Cohen, Odom, Murray were all in contention but none of them seemed like Oscar-winning performances), but as soon as Judas confirmed its February release date it solidified Kaluuya as a late-breaking success in the style of Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained.

Best Animated Feature: Soul

No surprises here. A part of me did wonder whether the Globes would go for a pick other than the clear frontrunner, like they did when they chose Missing Link instead of Toy Story 4 last year, but clearly Soul has won over pretty much everybody, and fair enough too.

Best Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Trial of the Chicago 7

I think the race for Best Original Screenplay this year is pretty clearly one with two horses; Aaron Sorkin and Emerald Fennel with Promising Young Woman. Sorkin is in my #1 spot for now, but I do take this win with a grain of salt (as with many of the others). If there’s one thing the HFPA has been consistent on (other than not hiring Black people), it’s their love of Sorkin; they’ve given the man a whopping eight nominations for Original Screenplay, of which he’s won three (The Social Network, Steve Jobs and now Chicago 7). It would have been a big win for Fennel to triumph despite the HFPA’s Sorkin worship, but I wouldn’t rule her out on the basis of this. The Best Screenplay winner at the Globes tends to have a bit of a hit-and-miss track record when it comes to actually winning one of the two Oscar awards; over the last five years, Sorkin’s own Steve Jobs wasn’t even nominated, while La La Land, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood all lost the Oscar despite Globe wins, meaning that the only time since 2016 that the HFPA and the Academy have matched up in their screenplay winners was Green Book. Chicago 7 will either break or continue this trend.

Best Original Score: Soul

As with Soul‘s other win, this was no great surprise. Basically, it served to solidify that, of the two Reznor/Ross collaborations this year, Soul is clearly the stronger while Mank has been left behind. Unlike with Screenplay, the Globes and the Oscars tend to line up pretty neatly on Score, with the only three outliers over the past decade being the Globes going for All is Lost over Gravity, The Theory of Everything over The Grand Budapest Hotel, and First Man over Black Panther.

Best Original Song: ‘Io Sí (Seen)’, The Life Ahead

This was the first big surprise of the night, though there was already a lot of uncertainty around this category. Unlike the past two years, during which the race for Original Song has been graced by such iconic artists as Elton John and Lady Gaga, there’s no clear frontrunner this time round. My pick for the Oscar winner remains ‘Speak Now’ from One Night in Miami, simply because I think it’s a song that people will associate with that film, sung by a well-known actor. The win for this song does seem to indicate that it’s stronger than anyone initially thought, and it does have a clear narrative for the Netflix campaigners to pick up on when you consider that songwriter Diane Warren has been nominated eleven times before (for songs in films such as Con Air, Pearl Harbour, RBG and Breakthrough) but has never won. I’m still gonna predict ‘Speak Now’, but I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

Best Actress – Comedy/Musical: Rosamund Pike, I Care a Lot

This was where the night started getting crazy. Like many, I was fully expecting Maria Bakalova to nab herself an easy win. After all, she’s the only one with actual Oscar buzz, albeit in Supporting rather than Lead. But no, the Globes went instead for Rosamund Pike, star of the new Netflix (or Amazon Prime, in Australia) dark comedy I Care a Lot, which only came out a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve yet to see. It’s difficult to diagnose exactly why this happened; recency bias may be a factor, given the proximity between the movie’s release and her win, and it also should be said that the Globes prefer to give their awards to recognisable stars, as opposed to newcomers like Bakalova. Kate Hudson was probably too controversial a pick, Anya Taylor-Joy was winning anyway in TV, and Michelle Pfeiffer was in a movie that might have been too weird for them, so I guess I can see how the honour fell to Pike. If I squint. For Oscar predictors, I wouldn’t worry too much about Pike showing up at the Oscars – the Globe winner for Best Actress in a Drama later on established a pretty clear lock for the fifth slot in the Oscar category, alongside Viola Davis, Carey Mulligan, Frances McDormand and Vanessa Kirby.

Best Foreign-Language Film: Minari

As far as Oscars go, this is one of the more irrelevant categories, since the Academy do not hold the same rules as the HFPA do and thus will not nominate Minari in International Feature (which is as it should be, being that it is an American film that just happens to be partially or even mostly in Korean). On Oscars night, I expect this category will go to the clear #2 pick, Thomas Vinterberg’s excellent alcohol dramedy Another Round. But I think the fact that Minari did win this award shows that it’s well-liked among the more mainstream award bodies (even if they didn’t nominate it for anything else), and is almost certainly in the running for Best Picture. The only thing that concerns me about its chances is that it doesn’t have an especially strong ‘nominations package’ for a Picture nominee: maybe Director, maybe Actor, maybe Supporting Actress, maybe Screenplay, maybe Cinematography. It’s not locked into any category, unlike the other contenders, and that could really hurt it. I hope it goes well – I did really love the film.

Best Supporting Actress: Jodie Foster, The Mauritanian

Another crazy category (all of the female ones were this year). Instead of going for any one of the three actresses who are duking it out for the Oscar in this category – Glenn Close (who was terrible in Hillbilly Elegy, by the way, and it’ll be embarrassing if this is what she finally wins an Oscar for), Olivia Colman and Amanda Seyfried – they instead went for Jodie Foster, for her role in The Mauritanian, which I’ve also yet to see. Now, I’m all for a Jodie Foster resurgence (a Fosteraissance, if you will); she was fantastic in the Nineties and early-2000s in things like The Silence of the Lambs, Contact and Panic Room, but hasn’t had many chances to shine since. However, that doesn’t make this win any less surprising, and it felts to give predictors any clarity on exactly who’s going to win in this competitive category. The real question is, does this guarantee a nomination for Foster? And if so, who does she push out? Maria Bakalova, who failed to show the strength in Comedy Actress that was needed to secure her? Yuh-jung Youn, who wasn’t even nominated? Plus, are Ellen Burstyn’s chances dead in the water at this point?

Best Actor: Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Chadwick Boseman’s win here was nothing surprising, and I doubt anyone will be too mad about it. To those who are beginning to push back with the “he’s only winning because he died” argument; calm down. One, Boseman gave a career-best performance and easily one of the year’s greatest (though admittedly not quite as good as Riz Ahmed if we’re just talking the Lead Actor category). Two, even if his being deceased is a factor, so what? Ahmed will have plenty more chances to win in the future. Hopkins and Oldman already have gold statues. Boseman was a well-loved actor in Hollywood who has been an icon for countless Black children, giving a career-best performance while he was literally dying of cancer – yes, he bloody deserves it. Stop raining on the parade because you can’t help but be cynical.

Best Actor – Comedy/Musical: Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Not especially surprising – Cohen is great in the film and the only competition he really had in this category was Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton – which, by the way, is not a film. But it does make the Best Actress – Comedy/Musical winner even more of a headscratcher. If the HFPA liked Borat Subsequent Moviefilm – and they clearly did, since they gave it Best Actor and Best Motion Picture – then what exactly stopped them giving the Globe to Maria Bakalova? After all, she’s easily the standout in the film, and Cohen acknowledged as such in his acceptance speech. Either they really loved Rosamund Pike – which is possible, seeing as they nominated her for both Gone Girl and the acclaimed yet comparatively unpopular A Private War, which I haven’t seen – or we can circle back to my original speculation, which is that they wanted to give it to someone with star power. Who knows?

Best Motion Picture – Comedy/Musical: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

As with Cohen’s win, it was pretty much the frontrunner. Some people expected the HFPA to go for Hamilton instead, but I held out hope that enough members would recognise the fact that it is, once again, not a film, and I was rewarded for this faith in the Globes. I was holding out hope that maybe Palm Springs could pull a surprise upset, since I watched that film earlier this week and absolutely loved it (which was a bit of a surprise, since I’ve never been the biggest Andy Samberg fan – maybe I’ve been underrating him all these years), but Borat is certainly a good pick, and definitely the most quote-unquote ‘important’ film in the category. Certainly more so than Music – I haven’t watched it but I did read a very interesting Twitter thread from an autism organisation about all the ways the film is offensive, complete with stills and clips, to which I can only say “yikes.” To be clear, I don’t blame Maddie Ziegler at all for her performance – it’s been mentioned several times that she didn’t want to take the role but Sia kind of forced her into it, or at least that’s how I read the situation. What was I talking about again? Oh yes, the Golden Globes.

Best Actress – Drama: Andra Day, The United States vs Billie Holiday

All three of the Actress categories went in completely unexpected directions this year, but Andra Day’s win might have been the most surprising among them. Like most people, I had established a pretty clear top four in my predictions for the Best Actress Oscar – Viola Davis, Carey Mulligan, Frances McDormand and Vanessa Kirby, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Davis is the most Oscar-baity but she’s been overshadowed by Boseman, Mulligan has the most passion behind her but the film she’s in isn’t exactly typical Oscar fare, McDormand has the most critic awards but her performance is maybe too subtle for the Academy, and Kirby has been a consistent presence in nominations but has failed to garner many (if any) wins. All four showed up here, and I fully expected the Globe to go to one of them, or at least either Davis or Mulligan. Instead, the HFPA opted for who I viewed as easily the #5 pick, Andra Day. I’ve not yet seen Billie Holiday (it doesn’t come out in Australian cinemas until a few days after the Oscars, so I’m not sure I can really be bothered) but surely she can’t be as good as the other four? It’s eminently possible that the Globes just couldn’t resist giving an award to a performance in which the actor plays a real-life musician and sings – this is the fourth time they’ve done it over the past couple of years, with Rami Malek, Taron Edgerton and Renee Zellweger all winning for this sort of performance. I do wonder why they didn’t just go for Viola Davis if that was the kind of winner they wanted – the fact that Davis couldn’t even win the Globe is not a good sign for her chances of winning the Oscar. Day’s win is so out-of-left-field that I doubt it’ll translate to many ceremonies other than this one, but it does solidify her as one of the probable nominees.

Best Director: Chloé Zhao, Nomadland

Like an idiot, I had convinced myself that the HFPA would go for David Fincher over Chloé Zhao, which, although it completely ruined my accuracy on Gold Derby (to be fair, Pike/Foster/Day had already done that), I was happy to be proven wrong about it. I loved Mank, but Nomadland was absolutely transcendent, the kind of film that Terence Malick wishes he could make. With stunning cinematography, beautiful writing and excellent acting, it’s impossible not to love it, though some inevitably don’t, mainly because of the slow pace and stream-of-consciousness plotting. A lot of this comes down to Zhao, who is being praised left and right by all the people who worked with her on Nomadland and has established herself as a humble yet intelligent presence in all the times I’ve seen her speak, be it on The Hollywood Reporter’s roundtable or in her acceptance speech here. She’s won more directing awards for one film than any filmmaker in history, as far as I know, and I hope that she can continue to sweep all the major precursors and end up with the Oscar that she so obviously deserves.

Best Motion Picture – Drama: Nomadland

Chloé Zhao’s win in Director was obvious to everyone but me, it seems, but her film’s win in the Best Picture category was far more of a surprise. Nomadland did not strike me as something particularly up the HFPA’s alley – it’s slow, it’s indie-ish, and it doesn’t have any big stars save for McDormand. I was expecting them to go for the much more crowd-pleasing The Trial of the Chicago 7, which a) had won Screenplay and b) was from their golden boy Sorkin. But I couldn’t be happier that it eventually swung towards Zhao’s film, even if it dropped my Gold Derby score even further. Long live Nomadland. Let’s hope it can continue its streak to the Oscars.

My Gold Derby Score:

As I’ve mentioned, it wasn’t stellar. You may recall that I ranked in the top 100 out of about 6,000 for last year’s Globes, a fact that I wasted no time in bragging about on this blog. As this year’s Globes drew closer, I felt that I needed to live up to the legacy my extreme accuracy left last year, and at that I failed miserably. I scored a mere 57.14%, which left me with a ranking of 1,829 out of 4,661 predictors. Not my finest hour, I will admit, though in my defence the wins were pretty wacky this year. I’m hoping for the opportunity to redeem myself at the Critics’ Choice, the BAFTAs, the PGAs and, eventually, the Oscars (where I also need to redeem myself from 2020, when I ranked at a fairly pathetic 5,406 out of 10,257).

The next thing to keep a look out for is, I guess, the Critics’ Choice Awards tomorrow. It might take me a solid second to get my post about that one out (it took me a week to do this one), if at all, but I’ll do my best. You can always trust that I’ll make a post about the Oscar nominations in eight days, so don’t worry about that.