Oscar Precursors and other Best Picture Indicators

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/01/21/oscar-precursors-and-other-best-picture-indicators/

Oscars prognosticators will quote statistics and trends at you like a sports bookie if you let them. There’s a whole cottage industry built up around predicting the big awards winners in film, and its competitors want any edge they can lay their hands on. They’ll tell you about the importance of the Best Screenplay and Best Editing categories alongside performance nominations if you’re looking to predict the eventual Best Picture winner. They also put a varying level of stock into the winners of what we call “precursors.”

What are precursors? Well, basically, these are any and all of the other film awards for the year that occur prior to the Oscars. Some of the higher-profile precursors include the Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice Awards, the various guilds (Writers, Directors, and Producers), the Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAGs), and the BAFTAs.

The BAFTAs are the British answer to the Oscars, and were an afterthought for Oscars enthusiasts for the first fifty years of their existence. This was almost entirely because they were typically held in April or May, well after the Oscars had been handed out. It wasn’t until 2001 when the ceremony was moved to February that the BAFTAs became a true Oscars precursor.

Their Best Film winner has only gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars 7 times since then, partly because their British voting body is more likely to award British productions. More significantly, there has been only one occasion (2004) in the last 23 years when the eventual Best Picture winner wasn’t at least nominated for Best Film at the BAFTAs. If you’re looking to apply that knowledge to this year’s field it would mean that Little Women, Ford v Ferrari, Marriage Story, and Jojo Rabbit are probably out of the running. But, you know, 2004 wasn’t really that long ago, was it?

The Golden Globes have been one of the more popular and idiosyncratic precursors for years for a few reasons. First and Foremost, the Globes have been telecast nationally since 1964 and have served as a sort of kick-off to awards season in recent years. The party atmosphere of the ceremony, with dinner and drinks served as the attending celebrities gather at large banquet tables has tended to help ensure that attendance, making the broadcast that much more appealing.

The Globes have had a bit of a spotty reputation over the years. Questions over how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was leveraging wins against attendance led to NBC suspending its broadcast of the ceremony from 1968 to 1974. Rumors of the small voting body (typically around just 93 members) being openly influenced by wining and dining have been rampant. 1982 saw a win for Pia Zadora in the New Star category despite the fact that she’d been in the business for seventeen years. Maybe her multi-millionaire boyfriend had something to do with it? A nomination for the widely panned Johnny Depp vehicle The Tourist also raised eyebrows when it appeared that voters had been flown to Las Vegas and a Cher concert by the movie’s producers. It’s an open joke, but somehow hasn’t managed to destroy the popularity of the Globes.

Perhaps most appealing to Oscars followers is the fact that the Golden Globes split its Best Motion Picture category in 1954 into Best Drama and Best Musical or Musical. This means twice as many nominations and twice as many winners for Best Picture hopefuls, keeping more films in the conversation deeper into the season. Sometimes it appears to serve as a framing of two big competitors, like in 2016 when the presumed favorite La La Land won for Best Comedy or Musical and the eventual upset winner Moonlight won for Best Drama. This year, the chances of both 1917 and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood appear to have been boosted by a similar split.

That said, it’s not unusual at all for the Academy to give Best Picture to an entirely different film. This happened recently in 2017 when The Shape of Water overcame both Three Billboards… and Lady Bird in the two month gap between the two telecasts. The same happened for Spotlight in 2015 when it overcame a Globes loss to beat out winners The Revenant and The Martian for Best Picture at the Oscars. The Academy’s preferential ballot may have increased the chances of this happening.

The Best Picture winner at the Critics’ Choice Awards (first given out in 1995) have ended up matching the eventual Oscar winner in 14 of 24 opportunities. That’s about a 58% success rate for a Best Picture match, which seems to make it worth looking at, but hardly makes it a lock. The Critics’ Choice nominates ten films in this category, so it might not be surprising that they have never failed to nominate the eventual Oscar Best Picture winner.