From about the age of ten, I have been inexplicably fascinated with the Academy Awards. If pressed to explain the foundation of this obsession with an awards show from what is ultimately just an arbitrary body of members with vastly varying tastes across the many different disciplines it requires to put a competent movie up on the silver screen, I'm not sure I could muster up a satisfactory response.
I suspect at the time my Oscar obsession grew from what seemed like the perfect marriage between the art of cinema and the competition of sports, but even now, these many years later after hours of voluntary studying of countless Oscar books (to the point where I can name every Best Picture winner chronologically from memory), I still can't explain it in any way that doesn't make me sound like some freakish Oscar junkie. Nevertheless, between the Oscar season and the NFL playoffs, you can guess this is one of my favorite times of the year, and one of my favorite past times of the awards season is predicting the Academy Award nominees.
While I may not be at the level of some of the top Oscar prognosticators out there in the blogosphere, I usually bat a fairly good percentage. After so many years of anticipating the early morning announcements, and all the disappointments and jubilation that come with it, you get an almost sixth sense to the Academy's quirks and hang-ups. Of course, looking at precursor award announcements such as the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Golden Globes gives you a rough idea of what the nominees will look like, but the fun is predicting the deviations, such as last year's Max Von Sydow Best Supporting Actor nomination for his turn as a deaf-mute man in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's in predicting these surprises that you really earn your bones as an Oscar prognosticator and gain gloating rights for your "insight" into the Academy.
With that in mind, below is my best guess on how 2012's Oscar nominations will play out. For the bigger categories (Picture, Director, Acting categories, and Writing categories) I have provided in depth analysis of the races as I currently see them. For the below the line categories, I have simply listed my predictions. If you want to skip the analysis altogether and just glance over my predictions, at the bottom of this article is the list of all my predictions in total, so feel free to check it out.
I have also included an alternative choice for each category (as a cheap way to get in one extra prediction) and also a possible pleasant surprise, as well as a possible unpleasant surprise. The nominations for the 85th Academy Awards will be announced this Thursday morning, so if you want to come back and rag on how wrong I was, or praise my brilliant forecasting (I hope the latter) in the comment section below, feel free to do so. Here goes nothing!
