10 Tips to hustle your Oscars pool — and win
1. Win the Best Director category
2. Win the Best Makeup and Hairstyling category
The Academy has to choose between the work done on the
prestigious Dallas Buyers Club, the
critically panned Lone Ranger and the
lowbrow Bad Grandpa. The last two are the most showy, but if you look to the past you can see that Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean makeup lost to both The Lord of the Rings (2004) and La Vie en Rose (2007). Lesson learned: go with the prestigious film, not the Jackass.
3. Win the Best Sound Editing category
No need to vote for the prestige film here. The loudest
movie takes Best Sound
Editing,
period. Speed, Pearl Harbor and
Bourne Ultimatum have all won Oscars, for real.
4. Win the Best Foreign
Language Film category
The foreign film that was
playing at the Angelika Dallas during the month of the Oscars has won Best Foreign Language Film for eight of the past nine years.
5. Win the Visual Effects category
Historically, a Best
Visual Effects nominee that also has a Best
Picture nomination will always win. This is bad news for The Hobbit. Also noteworthy, for seven of the past 10 VES Awards, the winner
for Outstanding VFX has gone on to win the Visual
Effects Oscar.
6. Win the Best Costume
category
Period movies have won Best Costume for 19 of the past 21
years. Exceptions were Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Dracula and Alice
in Wonderland. Last year, Anna Karenina won even though it was not even nominated for Best Picture.
7. Win the show’s-running-time tiebreaker.
In 2002, the show ran four hours and 23 minutes.
Whew! But just like its ratings, the show has been getting smaller ever since (except
for last year’s much maligned show).
Here are the timings on the past five years:
2008: 3 hours, 21 minutes2009: 3 hours, 30 minutes
2010: 3 hours, 37 minutes
2011: 3 hours, 15 minutes
2012: 3 hours, 14 minutes
2013: 3 hours, 35 minutes
8. Win Best Documentary and Best Short Subject
Forget how folks have won for the past few
decades in these categories. Beginning in 2013, ALL members of the Academy (not
just category peers) can pick the winners of: Best Documentary Feature
Best Animated Short Subject
Best Live Action Short Subject
That means everyone from actors to musicians will have a say instead of just documentarians. For Best Animated Short Subject, vote on something with a cute animal or, for Documentary, maybe one that speaks to struggling actors, just saying.
9. Win the Best Actor categories
The SAG voters are
all actors and are the largest block of voters for the Academy Award. Choose
the SAG winners and you’re guaranteed three out of four (and likely four out of four).
10. Win the Best Picture
category
Go with the SAG winner, right? Not
so fast, American Hustle. The movie
that wins Best Cast (not Best Picture) at the SAG Awards has just
a 52.1 percent chance of winning the corresponding Oscar for Best Picture.Turns out, The Producers Guild of America most consistently predicts Oscar Night success in the Best Picture category. This year, the Producers Guild of America chose both 12 Years a Slave and Gravity in a tied win. Oh. Oh.
Will there be a tie? Well,
Gravity has three
problems. Not only is a big award for that film going to
the director, but only two films in the last 57 years have won best picture
without a Best Screenplay nomination,
the most recent being Titanic (1997). And lastly, people respect 12 Years a Slave and Gravity, but not many love them. Good
news for American Hustle, it’s a
three-horse race.
So darn, only nine tips out of 10 will give you a solid
hustle on your ballot.
Go with your gut for Best
Picture — and good luck!
