For months, Cara Buckley, who writes The Carpetbagger columns for The New York Times, has been reporting on the movie awards season. As the end of that season draws near with the annual Oscars, she predicts the winners.
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
It was a fiercely competitive year in this category, from which Aaron Sorkin found himself left out, despite picking up a Golden Globe for his “Steve Jobs” screenplay. Phyllis Nagy’s elegant adaptation of “Carol,” Emma Donoghue’s screen version of her best-selling novel, “Room,” and Drew Goddard’s script for “The Martian” were all especially strong. But the Writers Guild of America and the British Academy both awarded Adam McKay and Charles Randolph for their biting and taut adaptation of Michael Lewis’ account of the corporate greed that drove the mortgage crisis, setting up “The Big Short” for a likely win.
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
“All the President’s Men” has long been the benchmark for journalism films, and might claim more dramatic flash, but “Spotlight” was far more accurate in its depiction of the largely unglamorous, tedious work lives of newspaper reporters. This was a result of Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer’s restrained script, which laid the groundwork for the film’s understated emotional punch. The film’s chances for best picture have slipped, and academy members might be keen to at least hand McCarthy this prize. He and his colleague also won a Golden Globe and a Bafta, though they do face competition from “Inside Out.”
DIRECTOR
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s sweep of key directing honors this year — the Directors Guild of America Award, the Bafta and the Golden Globe — has made him the favorite to land this Oscar for the second year in a row. After Ridley Scott failed to score a directing nomination for “The Martian,” there were forecasts that the 70-year-old George Miller, whose solid reputation had been further burnished by his masterly direction of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” could win. (Lenny Abrahamson, who directed “Room,” was a surprise inclusion, and is probably not a top contender.) But in “The Revenant,” Iñárritu created a tale that is at once visually sumptuous, painstakingly plotted and bleak — the man is nothing if not fascinated with suffering — and that seems to hew closer to what the academy likes best.
ANIMATED FEATURE
A candy-colored, whip-smart tear-jerker, “Inside Out” reminded us that as great as it is to feel joy (especially when it is voiced by Amy Poehler), we have to allow ourselves to feel sad. The folks at Pixar probably felt pretty sad themselves when “Inside Out” failed to receive a best-picture nomination, as they had hoped. (They had managed this coup twice before, with “Up” and “Toy Story 3.”) Still, that snub positioned “Inside Out” in the top spot for animated feature, ahead of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s’s critically acclaimed and transgressive stop-motion film, “Anomalisa.”
DOCUMENTARY
Another year, another documentary faceoff between tortured lands abroad and tortured songstresses. It would be reductive, though, to describe “Amy” and “What Happened, Miss Simone?” in only that way: The former film, about the unstoppably self-destructive Amy Winehouse, is an indictment of TMZ culture, while the latter examines Nina Simone, a mentally unstable genius whose passions were deemed overly political by both the music industry and her public. “Cartel Land,” a thrillerlike immersion into the horrors of the drug wars, and “The Look of Silence,” Joshua Oppenheimer’s heart-rending follow-up to “The Act of Killing,” are also strong contenders. But the bets are on “Amy.”
FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
An unsparingly intimate Holocaust film with a brutal premise, “Son of Saul,” the first feature by Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, has been the foreign film to beat since its debut last year at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix. Its biggest Oscar competition comes from another debut feature, “Mustang,” by Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, about five free-spirited young sisters bursting against the constraints of conservative rural Turkey. While also a prizewinner at Cannes, “Mustang” is projected to be bested by Nemes’ film, not least because the “Son of Saul” subject matter plays strongly to the academy’s tastes.
ACTOR
You know an awards narrative has succeeded when Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and even a mocking video game cannot slow you down. Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as the desperate, beleaguered frontiersman, Hugh Glass, in “The Revenant” has earned him prize after prize for months. Tales of how deeply
DiCaprio suffered during production were repeated until they were worn threadbare, prompting Fey and Poehler to deliver a few barbs at the Screen Actors Guild Awards (where DiCaprio also won). No harm, no foul: There is little doubt that the six-time Academy Award nominee (five were for acting, one for producing) will at last land an Oscar on Sunday, 22 years after his first nomination (for “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”), and ahead of Bryan Cranston, who is up for his first Oscar for the lead role in “Trumbo.”
ACTRESS
The year was a refreshingly strong one for actresses in leading roles, and the academy had a deep bench from which to choose. Among the women whose performances could easily have made the cut: Bel Powley, Mya Taylor, Helen Mirren, Teyonah Parris, Melissa McCarthy, Lily Tomlin and Charlize Theron. From the nominees, academy members had to make the difficult decision of whether to vote for Charlotte Rampling, a widely respected and seasoned actress who had never been nominated, and the moving, carefully wrought performances by the fresh-faced young actresses Brie Larson and Saoirse Ronan. (The other two actresses already have Oscars.) But Rampling hurt her chances with a gaffe about #OscarsSoWhite, and Larson, who played a tough role with vulnerability and grit, has been working the circuit hard and winning awards all season.
SUPPORTING ACTOR
A bit of a coin toss here. Sylvester Stallone received the only nomination for “Creed,” which helped set off complaints about the lack of diversity in the acting categories. Yet he played the campaign perfectly, with humility, while that film’s director, who is black, said a win for Stallone was a win for the movie. Stallone also won a Golden Globe, but, sowing some confusion, was not nominated by the Screen Actors Guild, which instead honored Idris Elba (“Beasts of No Nation”), who is not an Oscar nominee. (Still with me?) Meanwhile, Mark Rylance’s remarkable performance in “Bridge of Spies” reaffirmed how well this stage star plays onscreen, landing him his first Oscar nomination and a Bafta. All that said, Stallone is a sentimental favorite, and my guess is he is leading by a nose.
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Going into the season there was chatter about whether Alicia Vikander and Rooney Mara rightly qualified as supporting actresses: Both spent enormous amounts of time onscreen and could have run as leads. As a rule, the best actress category is more competitive, but this year that truism applies to the supporting category, too. Vikander — sought after, gracious and unself-consciously beautiful — has brought a breath of fresh Swedish air to the race, and she has also collected awards for her role in “Ex Machina.” Kate Winslet has proved to be an unexpectedly strong contender for her performance as Steve Jobs’ no-nonsense wing woman, winning a Golden Globe and a Bafta. Yet she already has an Oscar — this is her seventh nomination — and while she and Vikander both outshone competitors on the circuit, Vikander is the fresher bet.
BEST PICTURE
If ever there was a three-way race, it was this year’s contest. (Truth be told, it also happened in 2014, when the contenders were “12 Years a Slave,” “Gravity” and “American Hustle.”) The early favorite this year was Tom McCarthy’s quietly devastating “Spotlight,” about The Boston Globe’s investigation into the Roman Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual abuse by priests. As ardent as the admirers of “Spotlight” were, its position as an early front-runner was helped by the dearth of strong contenders in the fall. Academy watchers speculated that the film lacked the panache to claim best picture, a sentiment that seemed to be proved true at the Producers Guild Awards, where “The Big Short,” about Wall Street skulduggery, landed top picture, to much surprise. While all of the guilds share crossover membership with the academy, the producers’ group has often been a surefire predictor of Oscar winners, and also uses the same complicated preferential voting system that the academy does. The race grew more fraught when the top Screen Actors Guild Award went to “Spotlight,” and the Directors Guild gave its highest prize to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s breathtakingly beautiful, and stupendously long, tale of frontier-era vengeance, “The Revenant.” Along with winning the Golden Globe for best dramatic feature and the biggest honor, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ top award, that Western earned the most academy nominations (12). Going into the Oscars, it has the most momentum. “The Big Short,” in particular, or “Spotlight” could still pull an upset, but “The Revenant” has the strongest position.
