Now that the Writer's Guild of America and Producer's Guild of America announced their choices, somehow,
CODA became the favorite for the Best Picture category. I'm somewhat not totally convinced it's going to win, but it does have the most precursor support right now among the American industry given its wins at PGA and WGA.
The Power of the Dog does have Director's Guild wins and other televised award wins. However, with this split, I'm wondering if another
Parasite might happen and
Drive My Car can drive it's way to the Best Picture finish line and take the prize.
As for Best Actress aka the five-way race:
Jessica Chastain won SAG while Kidman won GG (if it still has any influence these days), so people are looking at those two to take home the Best Actress award but something keeps telling me to not ignore Penelope Cruz and Olivia Colman, and to a lesser extent, Kristen Stewart.
Chastain has the most Oscar-friendly performance. Biopic, heavy transformative make-up, she gets to sing (her own voice and she's a good singer!), do an accent, plays a woman who ages decades, is larger-than-life, chews the scenery, etc. Kidman is a more restrained version of Chastain's performance (both have weird make-up jobs but it makes more sense and is much less distracting with Tammy Faye)...not quite sure if Kidman really got Lucy or Lucille but she did totally take command of Aaron Sorkin's over-written dialogue and she's truly skilled as an actress. So if those two win, it wouldn't be such a shock because they tick the boxes that we've come to expect for Oscar-winning roles. Chastain has the edge because it's a tour de force and it may be a make up for not winning for
Zero Dark Thirty and then ignoring her for the rest of the decade after lead turn after lead turn. She made the industry a good amount of money and has had box office success while producing her own passion projects. I think the actor community appreciates Chastain and wants her to win since she never won before. However, some may like the sound of two-time Academy Award winner, Nicole Kidman.
All that said, I can't count out Olivia Colman and will never do so. She shockingly won the Oscar against Glenn Close when everything was in Close's favor (except for the fact that her movie wasn't well-received while Colman's had like ten Oscar nominations including Best Picture). Colman, as Queen Elizabeth II, "upset" Emma Corwin's audience-favorite turn as Princess Diana at the Emmys, and she has a ton of movies up the pipeline. She is on a hot streak. Also, I thought she was haunting and incredible in
The Lost Daughter, a movie I'm still trying to figure out how I truly feel about while recognizing I loved Colman in it (especially in the second half). The industry and cinephiles obviously love Colman and never discount that love when the race is as close as it is right now.
While Penelope Cruz has not made any major award precursors at all (except for the Australian Academy), she won the Venice Film Festival award for Best Actress over a heavily-publicized Kristen Stewart in
Spencer and won the highest critics' prizes. Word on the street is that
Parallel Mothers has been playing in movie theaters in L.A. for three months straight now while other movies have come and gone and a lot of "secret ballots" have said they voted for Cruz. She'll be the international cinephile choice as she's not only an international star, highly respected by the cream of the crop of the film community, but she's in a Pedro Almodovar film. Some may love to pay tribute to their 7-film collaboration by giving her the award for an Almodovar film. Almodovar and Cruz are like the Cassavetes/Rowlands, Herzog/Kinski, Scorsese/De Niro, Bergman/Ullman, Ozu/Ryu and Hara, and Kurosawa/Mifune of our generation. For the pundits, her win will be fun because she'll be that rare Oscar winner who wins the Oscar without winning or even being nominated for any one of the major precursors that everybody looks at to predict the winner. The last time that happened was Marcia Gay Harden in
Pollack when the Best Supporting Actress race was WIDE OPEN with no favorite whatsoever.
Of course, there's Kristen Stewart, who was thought to be unstoppable before award season started and then ended up missing SAG and BAFTA to look like she barely beat out Lady Gaga for a nomination as
Spencer received no other nomination - not even Original Score which was thought to be a shoe in (thank goodness because that score overtook and dominated the film too much) and Best Costume which people thought would the film would get (the best costume was the photoshopped dress on the art poster that wasn't that good in the actual movie). However, she has PASSIONATE fans of her polarizing performance (she missed out on SAG and many SAG members came out of the wood work to defend the snub by publicly decrying her performance - which I agreed with). With that passion, she might end up taking it after all making the initial whispers that she has the Oscar in the bag ring true. However, passion matters more in the preferential voting system rather than simple one member-one vote and majority/plurality wins system. Still, you don't ignore a performance that has that many fans speaking out and battling it out for as long as they have, and it wouldn't be the first performance I totally did not get to win an Oscar. Sometimes award results are made just to spite me.
It's going to be exciting.
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