Oscars 2012 Category Breakdown: Best Picture & Best Director

I do this every year now. I break down all the individual Oscar categories. It’s actually something I love doing, since it sets up all the categories. It familiarizes them to me (and hopefully everybody else), and allows for a more colloquial referencing to them come Oscar night. Because I do these, on Oscar night, I can be like, “Oh, yeah, Buzkashi Boys…” and it’s just understood what that is, what it’s nominated for, and everything else.

So, like always, we start from the top and work our way down. We start with Picture and Director, the two big categories.

What I do is list all the previous winners in the category, then talk about maybe some notes and things about it, whatever that may be (each category has its own thing), and then I go over this year’s crop of nominees, and rank what I think, at this point in time, each one’s chances at winning are.

And we’ll start with Best Picture.

Best Picture

This year’s nominees are:

Amour (Sony Pictures Classics)

Argo (Warner Bros.)

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Fox Searchlight)

Django Unchained (The Weinstein Co., Columbia)

Les Misérables (Universal, Working Title Films)

Life of Pi (20th Century Fox)

Lincoln (Touchstone, DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox)

Silver Linings Playbook (The Weinstein Co.)

Zero Dark Thirty (Columbia)

This one, like last year, was pretty easy to guess. Seven of these were guaranteed before they were nominated, and the other one – Beasts of the Southern Wild – got a PGA nomination, which is so hard for indie films to do, so even that was all but guaranteed. Amour was the only wild card, and it’s not that far off a wild card. There were 8 guaranteeds, and the final two spots were basically between Amour, The Master and Skyfall. And we only got one spot.

And honestly, I have no problem with these nominees. Argo, Django, Les Mis and Silver Linings were in my Top Ten for this year, and Lincoln was my #11. And I enjoyed all the nominees. I wasn’t crazy about Life of Pi or Zero Dark Thirty, but I can live with them. Personally I’d have gone with Skyfall and The Impossible and Moonrise Kingdom instead of something else. But I’m cool with the list. So that’s good.

What’s most fascinating to me about these last two years since they switched to the sliding scale voting system – we’ve only had nine nominees both times. It’s weird to me that there weren’t ten films that got enough #1 votes to qualify as a nominee.

Though, I will say – I think all of these nominees will hold up well over time. The one that’s least likely to hold up is probably Beasts. The rest – I think they’ll do pretty well. Silver Linings might have a problem, being the most decade specific, but it’s David O. Russell, so that’ll always be timeless as part of a great filmmaker’s filmography.

As for their chances of winning the big one, I’d say, right now, it shakes out as follows:

9) Amour. I just don’t see it happening. How many people love this film enough to vote for it over everything else? I know there are some, but are there actually enough to bring this thing a win? We can quibble over the actual number, but there’s really no chance of this ever winning. If Crouching Tiger didn’t win this, this will never win.

8) Django Unchained. At least Basterds had the benefit of a Director nomination. The Weinsteins aren’t campaigning for this, it has no traction — it’s just not a contender. Clearly one of the bottom three in terms of likelihood to win.

7) Les Misérables. I have to. People seem to fucking hate this. Which is fucked up. Since normally everyone is for the standard, obvious “Oscar” choice and I’m the one that’s like, “Fuck that!” But this year, I’m totally willing to vote for this. So naturally this is the most hated Best Picture nominee. The internet fucking loathes this movie. It’s really messed up. But I’m not pretending like this has a shot. People won’t rally behind this. And normally I’d say it would get votes, but honestly it’s not gonna happen. There are too many people who will vote against this to think it has any shot.

6) Beasts of the Southern Wild. Because it has a stronger base of support than Les Mis. The people who love Les Mis are more likely to go, “But it won’t happen, so maybe I should switch my support over to Argo.” The people who love this will vote for this. I don’t know if this has enough support to win, but it’s definitely not bottom three. But it’s in this middle section.

5) Zero Dark Thirty. I still think this will get votes, but honestly, at this point, I think Beasts has more support and is probably more of a contender. But to split hairs between #5 and #6 is meaningless. I think we all agree that neither film really seems to have a shot. At this point there’s just too much negative buzz around this one for it to happen. Plus some other things that aren’t worth getting into, because they’re the wrong discussions to be having.

4) Life of Pi. It has a lot of nominations, but I haven’t seen any amount of actual support for this. This is just a statistics call. But either way, in every year, nothing outside the first three can really be considered a major contender, so it doesn’t matter. This’ll get three Oscars and be one of those movies. I don’t think people will actually vote for this. Not enough, anyway.

3) Silver Linings Playbook. It’s the upset film of the year. For better or worse, it’s in that spot The Descendants was in last year. This has a base of support, the Weinsteins are campaigning like crazy — it’s easily the third choice here. Russell got a Director nomination — people will vote for this. Will it be enough? I don’t know. I don’t see it. But this is definitely your upset film.

2) Lincoln. It has it all — the most nominations, the master director, the Best Actor winner (who are we kidding?) — class all around. But… to this point, it hasn’t won anything. Every single major award went to Argo. This still has a shot — people might just vote for this for Picture and Director if they want to be traditionalists. The older members of the Academy might hanker down and stick with the safe choice. This is very much your second choice. But it can’t be considered a first choice, given the insane amount of precursors that have gone against it.

1) Argo. It’s won everything. The PGA, which is huge, even BAFTA and SAG, which could have easily gone another way and no one would have batted an eye. The DGA, KNOWING Affleck wasn’t even nominated for the Oscar, gave him the award. There is no way I can actually see this losing at this point. Nothing shocks me anymore, so it’s not like if I hear Lincoln get called on Oscar night, my pulse will even rise, but at this point, I can’t see this losing. What do we have to say that this is gonna lose? 12 nominations and the whole “Well, it is the ‘Oscar-y’ choice…” thing. I was ready to call it with the PGA win and I did call it with the DGA win. I don’t think this loses. I’m not gonna be the person voting against this come Oscar night.

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And now Best Director, one of the two most interesting categories this year, because we’re already guaranteed to have a choice that no one sees coming. Ben Affleck was won every major award this year, and he’s not even nominated. This year, the Director’s branch went way out of left field with their choices, leaving off Affleck, Kathryn Bigelow, Tom Hooper and Quentin Tarantino in favor of Michael Haneke and Benh Zeitlin. Which, my guess is – each person ballots their top five choices, so Haneke and Zeitlin were on more lists than the others and that’s how they got on. I’m not sure specifically how that balloting works, so I don’t know. It’s not that far out in left field, but it’s certainly not what most people were expecting.

What I do know, though, is that this will be one of the SEVEN times (now) that the DGA Award and Best Director Award will not match. The other six times – Anthony Harvey won the DGA in 1968 and Carol Reed won the Oscar, Francis Ford Coppola won the DGA in 1972 and Bob Fosse won the Oscar, Steven Spielberg won the DGA in 1985 and Sydney Pollack won the Oscar (Spielberg wasn’t even nominated), Ron Howard won the DGA in 1995 and Mel Gibson won the Oscar (Ron Howard wasn’t even nominated for Best Director, which makes it a lot like this year in that regard), Ang Lee won the DGA in 2000 and Steven Soderbergh won the Oscar, and Rob Marshall won the DGA in 2002 and Roman Polanski won the Oscar. And then there’s an unofficial eighth time, where Joseph Mankiewicz won the first DGA Award in 1948 for A Letter to Three Wives and then won the Best Director Oscar in 1949 for that film. So that’s a weird little gray area with that statistic.

Anyway, here are the previous winners:

Best Director

(Note: Red means it was the Best Picture winner.)

This year’s nominees are:

Michael Haneke, Amour

Ang Lee, Life of Pi

David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook

Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

If Argo wins Best Picture, it’ll be the first time since Driving Miss Daisy that a Best Picture winner wasn’t nominated for Best Director, and the third time ever, the other two being in the first five years of the Oscars.

So let’s rank… even though we have no idea what the fuck is gonna happen, since Affleck has won EVERY major directing award this year. All of them. The ones that matter. That’s… rare.

5) Zeitlin. The nomination was a shock, and I don’t think he has any support at all outside of the hardcore fans of the film. Not enough to beat the heavy hitters in this one.

4) Lee. This is a tough call. A lot of people think he can and will win this. At this point, it’s all open, for the most part. We could be looking at a 2002 Best Actor situation here (which maybe I should have said in #5). But I just feel like there are more people willing to vote for the other three contenders than there are for Lee. Of course, in a logjam scenario, all bets are off. But right now, I consider him fourth because of the other three.

3) Russell. He has a Best Picture nomination and a lot of support. He’s been nominated before and I think people really like his film. I feel like he’s still the wild card, upset candidate here. Most people would think Lee, and I sometimes think Lee, but I still think it’s him. I don’t know. It’s a tough call, though, this category.

2) Haneke. He’s a beloved director, people love the film — I think he’s a legitimate second choice here. If he wins this, then no one really bats an eyelash.

1) Spielberg. I just feel like he wins it. He’s beloved, and this is a perfect chance to get him an Oscar without having to give him Best Picture. He’s becoming the John Ford of this generation. He’s that guy that’s gonna have a bunch of Best Director statues without Best Picture wins. (Ford’s only Best Director film that also won Picture was How Green Was My Valley. The other three, he won Director and the film didn’t win Best Picture.) This is a perfect chance to give him this Oscar for his entire body of work. And he doesn’t have a great track record with the Oscars, which I think works both for and against him. He just seems like the easy choice in this one. He’s the choice that no one argues with, even if he did beat Affleck if he were nominated. It’s all fair game at this point, but I still say he has to be considered the favorite. This absolves the people voting for Argo. It’s a win-win for almost everybody. I think he’s the favorite and probably winner.

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So those are our first two categories. Tomorrow we talk about Best Actor and Best Actress.