Handicapping the Oscar Race: Julian Sancton

It’s about time Vanity Fair began earnestly prognosticating the Oscars—the pile of animal entrails on our desk is starting to stink.

Autumn is the most exciting period for Oscar pundits, in that it affords them a chance to justify their existence. Prestige movies have already started rolling out but big-named juggernauts are still on the horizon, which means there is a lot to discuss. And yet nominations haven’t come out yet, so anything is possible. As a casual observer, it can be tough to make sense of the cacophony. So with your sanity in mind, Little Gold Men has collected echoes from across Oscar land and simmered them down to a digestible list (see below).

There’s no such thing as a lock at this point in the race—whoever’s on the pedestal now is going to have to fight to keep their place for three months. But the best bets are in the supporting acting categories. Christoph Waltz (the evil Nazi from Inglourious Basterds) and Mo’Nique (the evil mother from Precious) have dominated chatter for second-fiddle kudos since Cannes and Sundance respectively.

Right now, the most promising contender for best picture seems to be Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, Lee Daniels’s gut-churning fable about urban despair in 1990s Harlem. Some are pointing out thematic parallels between Precious and last year’s winner, Slumdog Millionaire, which also dealt with devastating poverty and which also started breaking from the best-picture peloton at about this point in the year. Precious’s main competition is coming from Up in the Air—with which it shared the Toronto limelight in September—and the archetypal, art-house Oscar fare that is An Education.

But with five more contenders in the best-picture category this time around, it’s harder to hold onto a lead. Incoming Academy president Tom Sherak implied recently that the best-picture pool was doubled to avoid snubbing unlikely but no less critically and publicly acclaimed Oscar contenders such as The Dark Knight or Wall-E, so we can always hope for a late-inning rally by an unconventional crowd-pleaser such as Inglourious Basterds or a gritty war film like The Hurt Locker.

The closest race until recently was for best actor. But lately the buzz for Jeff Bridges in the upcoming Crazy Heart, in which he plays an aging country star, has been deafening. (Bridge’s Oscar-season arc reminds me a bit of Mickey Rourke’s last year, for a variety of reasons that I hope to explain soon.) Even so, the competition is tight enough—and talented enough—that not even Daniel Day-Lewis is assured a slot.

It’s hard to think of more than five serious contenders for best actress, but even harder to pick a winner among those five. Ordinarily we’d say the Oscar was Meryl Streep’s to lose (for Julie & Julia), but it seems to be her curse to be nominated every other year but go home empty-handed. So unless we can count on Oscar co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin to rig the envelopes in favor of their It’s Complicated co-star, we’d put our chips on Carey Mulligan for her performance in An Education, which teeters beautifully between precociousness and childish vulnerability. Then again, there's also a good chance that Gabourey Sidibe will live the red-carpet fantasies of Claireece Precious Jones and nab the award.

Best director, I’m not even willing to discuss: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) all the way. I said it in September, and I’m not budging.

The most exciting category this year may just be feature animation. The old studio standbys—Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks—are all represented (Up, The Princess and the Frog, Monsters and Aliens, respectively), as are independent auteurs such as Hayao Miyazaki (Ponyo) and animation neophyte Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr. Fox). According to Tom O’Neil at Gold Derby, the pool this year is wide enough to warrant five slots in the category as opposed to the usual three.

Finally, I’d like to step out of my pundit shoes for a moment, if I may, and make a bold suggestion: Academy, if you’re reading, please consider nominating Fantastic Mr. Fox for best costumes. Where does it say costumes have to be human sized?

Best Picture
LGM PICKS
Hurt Locker
A Serious Man
Up in the Air
The Lovely Bones
Invictus
Precious
Inglourious Basterds
Nine
An Education
Avatar
DARK HORSES
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Where the Wild Things Are
The Hangover
Public Enemies
Bright Star
The Informant
Amelia
Brothers
Sherlock Holmes
Star Trek

Best Actor
LGM PICKS
Morgan Freeman (Invictus)
George Clooney (Up in the Air)
Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
Colin Firth (A Single Man)
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)
DARK HORSES
Daniel Day-Lewis (Nine)
Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man)
Viggo Mortensen (The Road)
Tobey Maguire (Brothers)
Johnny Depp (Public Enemies)

Best Actress
LGM PICKS
Gabby Sibide (Precious)
Carey Mulligan (An Education)
Meryl Streep (Julie and Julia)
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart)
Helen Mirren (The Last Station)
DARK HORSES
Abbie Cornish (Bright Star)
Michelle Monaghan (Trucker)
Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air)
Penelope Cruz (Broken Embraces)
Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones)
Shohreh Aghdashloo (The Stoning of Soraya M.)
Natalie Portman (Brothers)

Best Director
LGM PICKS
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
Lee Daniels (Precious)
Clint Eastwood (Invictus)
Peter Jackson (The Lovely Bones)
Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
DARK HORSES
Jason Reitman (Up in the Air)
Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are)
Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr. Fox)
Rob Marshall (Nine)
James Cameron (Avatar)
Steven Soderbergh (The Informant)
Jane Campion (Bright Star)

Best Supporting Actor
LGM PICKS
Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Peter Sarsgaard (An Education)
Alec Baldwin (It's Complicated)
Christopher Plummer (The Last Station)
Stanley Tucci (Julie and Julia)
DARK HORSES
Richard Kind (A Serious Man)
Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road)
Zach Galafianakis (The Hangover)
Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker)
Matt Damon (Invictus)

Best Supporting Actress
LGM PICKS
Mo’Nique (Precious)
Rosamund Pike (An Education)
Julianne Moore (A Single Man)
Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air)
Judi Dench (Nine)
DARK HORSES
Mariah Carey (Precious)
Sophia Loren (Nine)
Marion Cotillard (Nine)

Best Animated Feature
LGM PICKS
Up
Coraline
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Ponyo
The Princess and the Frog
DARK HORSES
Monsters and Aliens
9
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Best Original Screenplay
LGM PICKS
Inglourious Basterds
Up
Whatever Works
A Serious Man
The Hurt Locker

DARK HORSES
The Messenger
Crazy Heart
Bright Star
(500) Days of Summer

Best Adapted Screenplay
LGM PICKS
Up in the AIr
Precious
An Education
Where the WIld Things Are
The Lovely Bones
DARK HORSES
Star Trek
The Informant
Julie and Julia
Sherlock Holmes