Oscar predictions for 2013

Who’s been nominated?
‘Argo’ is now the clear favourite to win Best Picture on Oscar night. It has everything the Academy loves. It’s a story about filmmaking (like last year’s winner, ‘The Artist’). It’s a true-life tale. It’s political, but not heavily so. It lightens the load with humour. It features endearing performances from actors close to Hollywood’s heart, like Alan Arkin and John Goodman. And it continues to do well at the US box office, proving that more serious-headed films can make money too.
 
There are eight other nominees for Best Picture. Since 2012, the Academy nominates between five and ten films in this category, depending on how many votes each receives. This makes room in 2013 for less populist films like ‘Amour’, a French-language story (from an Austrian writer-director) of two octogenarians dealing with illness and death, and the US indie ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ – as well as Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’, which was probably too out-there and violent to get many nominations across the board.

The other five nominees are more traditionally suited to the Oscars arena: Steven Spielberg’s 1860s historical drama, ‘Lincoln’; Ang Lee’s magical literary adaptation, ‘Life of Pi’; David O Russell’s romcom with a difference, ‘Silver Linings Playbook’; Kathryn Bigelow’s hunt-for-Bin-Laden saga, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’; and Tom Hooper’s big and bold musical, ‘Les Misérables’.

Who’s going to win?
We’ve come full circle this Oscars season, and now ‘Argo’ has the edge. The film has already won Best Film at the Baftas, the Golden Globes and several other American awards ceremonies in recent weeks, making it the clear favourite for Oscar glory. It’s possible, too, that the lack of a nomination for Affleck in the Best Director category has won him some late sympathy among voters.

But we still can’t bring ourselves to rule out Steven Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’. It’s the story of America’s favourite president and Spielberg last won an Oscar in 1999 (he nabbed the Best Director award for ‘Saving Private Ryan’). Are there any other contenders? We should remember that the Academy has recently favoured films like ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and 'The Artist' – feelgood, popular movies with something of the exotic about them. So if we have to pick a third, dark-horse contender for the top prize, we’d go for ‘Life of Pi’.