Oscar Predictions

Having more or less hit it out of the park two years ago but having egg on my face last year, I've become a bit more cautious in my approach to predicting the winners of next week's Oscars. Perhaps I don't need to, for this looks like a fairly easy year to predict, especially awards like Best Actor and Best Director. Some (like the top award) are far more challenging. For my take on who will win, who should win, and who should have been nominated for awards at next week's Academy Awards, read on.

But before I begin, a word on #OscarsSoWhite: They are. They always have been, and at least for the near future, they always will be. We've known this since 1996, when the media first started reporting on it (in People magazine of all places), and so it shouldn't be surprising, given that the vast majority of its members are male and virtually all of them are white. But their excuse is often to say that they are not the disease but the symptom. This is partially true. The Oscars reward movies made mostly by Hollywood, an industry that does not make movies by, of, or for people of color.

But the Academy has less of a case in the past two years. Last year, Selma, a kind of movie that the Academy usually salivates over, only earned two nominations, and this year, despite a considerable number of potential candidates (like Michael B. Jordan, Corey Hawkins, Ryan Coogler, Idris Elba, Oshea Jackson Jr., Jason Mitchell, Benicio Del Toro, and Samuel L. Jackson, among others), the Oscars nominated mediocre performances from actors like (with all due respect to them) Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, and Christian Bale. People, especially people of color, have more than enough reasons to be frustrated. I don't know if the Academy's recent measures will help solve the issue. We'll simply have to wait and see.

But given the lack of diversity in the nominations (and considering just how friggan boring the show in recent years has become), I might not watch them this year.

Beyond that, here are some predictions:

Best Picture
What will win: The Revenant
What should win: Room
What should have been nominated: Inside Out

The Revenant has successfully squeezed by as the front-runner for the top prize, as Spotlight, despite some early buzz and impressive wins, fell behind. Make no mistake about it: this is still very much a horse race, and don't be too surprised if a dark horse movie like Mad Max: Fury Road pulls off an upset. The Revenant is not much better of a movie than Spotlight or some of the other nominees, but the Academy will likely be impressed by just how epic a movie The Revenent is, and it might be able to win by riding Leonardo DiCaprio's coattails, as he's guaranteed a win for his acting in the film.

Best Director
Who will win: Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (The Revenant)
Who should win: George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road)
Who should have been nominated: Ridley Scott (The Martian)

I remain a moviegoer who still is not the biggest fan of Innaritu, but this is his best movie and best work as a director. The Academy might be uninterested in giving it to him again this year (he won last year for Birdman), and it would make him the first since the 1950s.

I'm rooting for George Miller, whose Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the most active movies I've ever seen. That being said, both Innaritu and Miller (along with a host of other directors in the past several years) have succeeded in making movies look authentic again, and so both should be applauded.

Best Actress
Who will win: Brie Larson (Room)
Who should win: Brie Larson (Room)

Brie Larson is simply astonishing in Room, the best film of the year and perhaps the decade. She plays a kidnapped mother who has been forced to raise her young son (played by Jacob Tremblay) in a shed they've been held hostage in for years. This is the most emotionally intense performance of the year, and yet Larson makes it look incredibly easy. She also deserves praise for working so well with a young actor like Tremblay, and it's a real shame that he was not nominated. Tremblay not receiving a nomination is the rob of the year.

Best Actor
Who will win: Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)
Who should win: Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)
Who should have been nominated: Michael B. Jordan (Creed)

Like Larson, DiCaprio also gives a rather messianic and committed performance. It's not a very vocal performance, as he's often alone in the wilderness and his throat has been damaged by a bear attack, so more is required of him. As many have pointed out, it's as if he's doing his very best to scream loudly and clearly at the Academy that if surviving filming in the harsh winter of North America won't win him an Oscar, nothing will.

Best Supporting Actress
Who will win: Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl)
Who should win: Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl)

Vikander had an amazing 2015, and in The Danish Girl as artist Gerda Wegener (the wife of artist Lill Elbe, who became one of the first to receive sex reassignment surgery), she shows a variety of different qualities: smart, funny, vulnerable, angry, sexy, sympathetic. If Vikander has shown us just how tremendous she can be in the movies, particularly with The Danish Girl and Ex Machina, just think of what a wonder she will be to watch in the future. I can't wait to see what she'll show us next.

Note: You may have noticed that there are no "who should have been nominated" for both female acting categories. Hollywood has a problem with racial diversity; they also have a problem with gender diversity. Year after year, there are enormous amounts of great male roles and fewer female ones.

Best Supporting Actor
Who will win: Sylvester Stallone (Creed)
Who should win: Sylvester Stallone (Creed)
Who should have been nominated: Idris Elba (Beasts of No Nation)

Stallone in some respects is lucky in that Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation was not nominated and Mark Rylance for Bridge of Spies never seemed to catch momentum. After winning the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award, Stallone is in a strong position. Momentum or no momentum, he deserves it. In Creed, the seventh installment of a franchise he helped create in 1976 (he wrote and starred in the first six and was the director of four of them), he may not get beat up like he used to, as he's now the mentor to the son of his former adversary-turned-ally, but his appearance as Rocky Balboa here is a remarkably subtle one, with enormous weight behind it.

Best Original Score
Who will win: Ennio Morricone (The Hateful Eight)
Who should win: Ennio Morricone (The Hateful Eight)
Who should have been nominated: Michael Giacchio (Inside Out)

Ennio Morricone is 87 years old, a legend not only of Italian cinema, but cinema as a whole. His score for The Mission is spiritual, hypnotic, and empowering. Similar adjectives could be used to describe his score for The Untouchables. Morricone's music for The Mission lost to Herbie Hancock for Round Midnight. It was one of five loses out of over 500 scores. His music for The Untouchables wasn't even nominated.

Morricone might be most recognizable for his western films music, even though, as he has pointed out in the past, westerns only account for eight percent of his music. Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't heard his music for Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy--A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Like the films of the trilogy, Morricone's music gets better with each one.

Morricone may not like being recognized as a composer for music for westerns, but indeed he is nominated for this year's Academy Awards for The Hateful Eight. But a win for Morricone shouldn't been seen as a career prize. It is, in fact, the best score of the year. It's haunting and appropriately so for such a horrifyingly violent movie.

Other predictions:

Best Visual Effects: Star Wars--The Force Awakens
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Big Short
Best Original Screenplay: Spotlight
Best Documentary: Amy

Best Makeup: Mad Max: Fury Road