Wednesday, January 9, 2013

85th Oscar Best Director Updates (1/9/12)

It’s always dangerous to predict a split between the best picture and best director winners, but I’m going to do it anyway. If the torture politics continue, it’s possible that the Academy will reward her for the technical skill of bringing Zero Dark Thirty together, while granting the best picture award to Ben Affleck’s Argo for all the joy it brought us.


1. Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty (Predicted Winner)
2. Steven Spielberg for Lincoln
3. Ben Affleck for Argo
4. Ang Lee for Life Of Pi
5. Tom Hooper for Les Miserables

Alternates:
6. Michael Haneke for Amour
7. Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained
8. David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook
9. Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master
10. Benh Zeitlin for Beasts Of The Southern Wild
11. Wes Anderson for Moonrise Kingdom
12. Joe Wright for Anna Karenina
13. Robert Zemeckis for Flight
14. Christopher Nolan for The Dark Knight Rises
15. Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski for Cloud Atlas
16. Juan Antonio Bayona for The Impossible
17. Peter Jackson for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
18. Ben Lewin for The Sessions
19. Sam Mendes for Skyfall
20. Kim Ki-Duk for Pieta


As always, check the Tracker Pages in the upper right hand corner of this blog for the most updated predictions in all categories!   
See Best Director predictions for other years HERE.
See predictions for other categories at the 85th Oscars HERE.
Switch to another year: 85th,  86th,  87th,  88th,  89th  
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6 comments:

  1. Well big surprise! Neither Affleck Nor Bigelow made it to the final five....

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    1. Yeah, It's a bit of a shocker. I'm really happy for Haneke and Zeitlin though!

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    2. Me too. Although I really think Bigelow deserves at least a nomination. Zero Dark Thirty is, in my opinion, even better than the Hurt Locker!
      Also, without a best director nomination, Argo's chance of winning the best picture is now close to zero. In the Oscar history, only three films did that: Wings, The Grand Hotel, and Driving Miss Daisy. The first two can almost be viewed as outliers, and even the third one happened more than two decades ago....

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    3. The stats would point in that direction, but I'm not entirely convinced it puts Argo out of the running. Lincoln definitely looks to be the favorite of course, but I keep asking myself: What do Affleck & Bigelow's absence mean for the year as a whole? Does it mean that ZDT and Argo aren't in the top 5, but instead in the bottom 4 of these 9, as is often thought when people compare the picture to director list? And if we aren't willing to go that far -- if their absence isn't caused by the same reasons that usually cause people's absence in this category, then is the logic behind the statistics not applicable as well?

      Not sure where I am with all that yet, but it's definitely got me thinking!

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    4. Well my answer to your questions is that ZDT and Argo are still in my top 5 list, as Affleck and Bigelow both deserved the nominations. I guess from the pure award-prediction perspective, statistics may speak louder but I will not let that spoil the fun of choosing my favorite movies. :)

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    5. Oh yes. My personal favorites almost never line up with the Academy's exactly (although there's usually a lot of overlap). In fact, I just posted something on the difference between popular tastes and Academy tastes in relation to this race where I actually kind of scared myself by going all the way down the rabbit hole!

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