Oscar Predictions!

On March 7, 2010, dozens of celebrities will thank the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (for doing whatever it does) and accept gilded statuettes for their cinematic accomplishments.  But most will remain in their seats and hold back tears (later they will order another drink and heap artificial praise on their rivals).

Who will the little golden men go home with this year?  Read on.

My brother John and I have wagered cold cash on the outcome.  Regardless of what filmmakers actually deserve the awards, we predict merely who will win them.  We base our predictions upon a combination of industry buzz, personal opinion and insider information.  Below are my predictions, followed by John’s.  For the sake of competition, disagreements are in italics.

Best Picture: AVATAR

Acting

• Best Lead Actor: Jeff Bridges in CRAZY HEART (though Jeremy Renner in THE HURT LOCKER is tempting)
• Best Lead Actress: Sandra Bullock in THE BLIND SIDE (though Carry Mulligan in AN EDUCATION is tempting)
• Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Walz in INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (though Matt Damon in INVICTUS tempting)
• Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique in PRECIOUS, without any real contest

Directing (this is the real race this season)

• Best Director: Katherine Bigelow for THE HURT LOCKER, though James Cameron (AVATAR) and Jason Reitman (UP IN THE AIR) are probably equally deserving, and Lee Daniels (PRECIOUS) is very close behind them.

Writing (there are a number of close races on the lit side too, for those of us who care)

• Best Original Screenplay: I call Mark Boal for THE HURT LOCKER, but might regret it because voters are itching to give the Pixar team kudos for UP, and Tarantino (INGLORIOUS BASTERDS) has become a go-to awards guy because for some reason the French people like him.
• Best Adapted Screenplay: I predict Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner for UP IN THE AIR, but in a perfect world it would probably go to Geoffrey Fletcher for PRECIOUS.

Music

• Best Original Song: “The Weary Kind” for CRAZY HEART by Ryan Bingham (yes, like the protagonist of UP IN THE AIR).

And John’s picks:

Best Picture: AVATAR.  We agree, therefore it must happen.

Acting

• Best Lead Actor: Jeremy Renner (though George Clooney is a good possibility)
• Best Lead Actress: Helen Mirren (though Carry Mulligan is tempting in more than one way)
• Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer (though Christoph Waltz is a good one)
• Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, agreed

Directing

• Best Director: James Cameron

Writing

• Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino for INGLORIOUS BASTERDS
• Best Adapted Screenplay: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner for UP IN THE AIR

Best Original Song: “The Weary Kind” (because he has heard me humming it constantly since before the CRAZY HEART premier)

John and I agree on the more obvious choices with the exception of Best Actor.  Renner may give a better performance in THE HURT LOCKER than Bridges does in CRAZY HEART, but the Academy has historically voted for more than just the performance in question.  Renner is totally new on the awards scene, while Bridges’ career included THE BIG LEBOWSKI for which he would have won the Oscar in 1998 if he wasn’t up against Roberto Benigni in LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL….  Bridges was nominated four times and never won, and now CRAZY HEART is a convenient reason for the Academy to congratulate him.

Biggest Oscar letdown?  NINE.

Movie Metrics: Is it Possible to Quantify the Experience of Film?

How can some number-crunching grad students really think this is possible? Analyzing the potential success of a screenplay with a computer?  Measuring brain reaction to find a winning story formula?

Some professors at Wharton have even proposed a metric for analyzing screenplays to predict the Return on Investment of a film(pdf here).   The method uses such criteria as vocabulary, genre, number of characters and sentence length.

“We compare the performance of our portfolio against two benchmarks. In the first benchmark, 30 movies are randomly chosen to form a portfolio. Each of the 81 movies in the holdout sample has equal probability of being selected in the portfolio. The ROI of this portfolio is recorded, and this procedure is repeated 1000 times. Then, the mean ROI based on random selection is calculated by averaging the ROI that results in 1000 portfolios. We find that the mean ROI in this case is -18.6%. In the second benchmark, we try to replicate more closely the way studios select movies by MPAA ratings.  Studios in general make roughly 60% R-rated movies and 40% non-R (G / PG / PG-13) rated movies
(MPAA 2004). Thus, we replicate this rule of thumb by fixing the number of R-rated movies to be made in the 30-movie portfolio case to be 18 and the number of non-R rated movies to be 12. Then we select 18 R-rated movies randomly from the pool of R-rated movies in the 81 holdout movies, and likewise for non-R rated movies. The mean ROI of a portfolio selected using this “MPAA-based” selection method is -24.4%. Our method outperforms both benchmarks by a significant margin. Indeed, as shown in Figure 6, our approach always produces a significant economic gain no matter how many movies are selected for the portfolio, suggesting that our model is able to capture determinants from the textual information in movie scripts and hence significantly improve the studio’s profitability.”

Their results are surprising, however I would guess that a thoughtful, experienced person could pick the most profitable scripts with more accuracy than this formula.

Analyzing the profitability of scripts based on comparable precedents is one thing – but trying to increase a movie’s impact by scanning the brain’s reaction to scenes is another.  Some well-intentioned brain specialists at MindSign have coined the term neurocinema.  My first reaction was that the whole concept is idiotic and deeply misunderstands the purpose and nature of Story.  In an NPR interview, Philip Carlsen of MindSign said:

Ideally, a director could send dailies out to us and we can scan the dailies. For those of you who don’t know, dailies are all the shots at the end of the day. They’ve got seven shots that look exactly the same, but we can give you the most activating shot of these seven, and you can use those. You can actually make your movie more activating based on subjects’ brains.

First of all, a story contains much, much more than a collection of images and scenarios.  Anyone who presumes to measure the impact of a story by measuring the impact of individual scenes is not a story-teller.  A story digs deep into universal human principles; it opens up the world of things unsaid and unseen – of intimation and connotation – and it affects us on different levels.  I don’t think this technique could even work on a popcorn flick, because the arc of a story is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Because this FMRI reveals individual brain responses to film clips, its most valuable purpose appears to be in determining what kinds of images excite the individual’s brain most.  I still have a problem with this, because an image or scenario is profoundly affected by what precedes it. For example, the image of a man running through a tunnel affects us differently if we sympathize with him or fear him. Is he chasing something or being chased? So this goes back to my previous point; a movie is more than a collection of moving images – it’s a story that is experienced as a whole.

I really hope that Dr. David Hubbard is related to L. Ron.

FX in B/W: Nuit Blanche short film

This short is a beautiful example of narrative time (a moment is extended into 3 min 40 sec) and some great CG composition with live action in black and white. The short film is by Arev Manoukian at Spy Films. Who funds a project like this?

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

Even cooler is the making of:

Making Of Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.