The Awards Prediction Industry is Dumb

  With Fall Film Fest season just around the corner, the return of the "Oscar pundit" is quickly approaching. And why? For what? It can be fun enough to see 30 movies at a festival and try to guess what will win what, but sight unseen these predictors go off of conventional wisdom. If the last few years have shown us anything (in regards to the silly and frivolous world of cinema awards), it's that the Academy's push to get in younger and more international members has made all of the old rules meaningless.

 I really want to hammer home the latter part of that sentence, because I think it gets overlooked in the Academy's diversity push. Yes, the membership got more racially diverse, and added more women, but there was also a massive expansion in members who never made an American film. And the result of that has been really, really obvious. In the 94 years of Academy Awards history, there have been 13 Best Picture nominees that weren't in English. 4 of those have come, one a year, for the last 4 years. All 4 were also among the nominees for Best Director, plus Thomas Vinterberg for "Another Round" (the film's only nom outside out of the Best International category) and Pawel Pawlikowski for "Cold War" (which broke into the cinematography race as well). The conventional wisdom as recently as 3 years ago was that a foreign film could never win Best Picture. Now "Parasite" has, and it would be more surprising to not see another among the nominees this year, even if it's not obvious where that will come from (Alejandro Iñárritu has a Mexican production distributed by Netflix, the same setup as "Roma", and Ruben Östlund won the Cannes cosign that drove "Parasite" to a win, but "Drive My Car" snuck up on people until it started sweeping regional critic awards in December, so who knows what the equivalent of that might be). 

 Conventional wisdom also says that the fall festivals are supposed to make up the meat of awards shows. "CODA" blew that up last year, both by premiering at Sundance in January (the first winner ever to do that), and by releasing in August (the first winner since the basically unseen "The Hurt Locker" in 2009 to release before the last 4 months of the year). The fact that "CODA" became the first streaming service original winner was treated as an inevitable afterthought, as was the fact that the film went basically unseen in theaters. Again, nobody knows anything, and the rules are being rewritten all the time.

 One point worth discussing is whether something that already came out will be in the race. Statistically, the answer is probably exactly 1 film from before September getting nominated. That can come in a few shapes, from big action movie with critical acclaim to auteur pieces from Academy favorites to, uh, Apple+ originals that nobody will have heard of until November. Funnily enough, there's a candidate in all three of those categories: "Top Gun 2" is making all of the money in the world (the 6th biggest film in U.S. box office history at time of print) with strong reviews and strong enough craft to pick up some nominations in categories like editing and sound. Baz Luhrmann and Jordan Peele are both former nominees with great movies out this summer (offhand, the music biopic certainly seems more likely than the action-horror-comedy about the corruptive industry of producing and consuming movies, but hey, surely if "Nope" can appeal to anyone it'll be favored by international auteurs). And I've even heard very good things about Apple+ original film "Cha Cha Real Smooth", which is all it takes I suppose. Individually I wouldn't bet on any of those films breaking into the race, but math says one should. But again, nobody knows anything, and there are no rules. All one can do is hope that this year's festival films are as magical as "Mass" or "A Hero" or whatever other great film that didn't get any Academy recognition at all last year I can use as a point-prover.