And the 88th Oscar winners will be…
LOS ANGELES—After months of reporting on the awards season, Cara Buckley of The New York Times predicts the winners of some of the most prestigious awards of the 88th Academy Awards on Sunday evening (Monday morning in Manila).
Best Picture: “The Revenant”
The race has grown 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 (Bafta) 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.
Actress: Brie Larson
The year was a refreshingly strong one for actresses in leading roles, and the academy had a deep bench from which to choose.
From the nominees, academy members had to make the difficult decision of whether to vote for Charlotte Rampling (“45 Years”), 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 (“Room”) and Saoirse Ronan (“Brooklyn”). (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.
Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio
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 Tina Fey and Amy 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.”
Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander
Going into the season, there was chatter about whether Alicia Vikander (“The Danish Girl”) and Rooney Mara (“Carol”) 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 (“Steve Jobs”) has proved to be an unexpectedly strong contender for her performance as Steve Jobs’s 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.
Supporting Actor: Sylvester Stallone
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.
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 he seems to be leading by a nose.
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
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 was 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.
Original Screenplay: “Spotlight”
“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 de- piction of the largely unglamorous, tedious work lives of newspaper reporters.
This was a result of Tom McCarthy’s 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.”
Adapted Screenplay: “The Big Short”
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 Bafta both awarded Adam McKay and Charles Randolph for their biting and taut adaptation of Michael Lewis’s account of the corporate greed that drove the mortgage crisis, setting up “The Big Short” for a likely win.
Foreign Film: “Son of Saul”
An unsparingly intimate Holocaust film with a brutal premise, “Son of Saul,” the first feature by the 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 the 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.