AND THE WINNER IS...

A reader just posted the following comment about my initial post-nomination projections: "I knew you would place Juno at the top. Same way you did with Little Miss Sunshine last year."

The reader is absolutely correct that I regarded Little Miss Sunshine as the leading contender for Best Picture last year—until just days before the Oscars, at which time I finally felt I had sufficient reason to change my call and went with The Departed on my final projections. But why am I leaning towards the critically-acclaimed, crowd-pleasing, little-indie-that-could again, you ask? Because there are some major differences between the two films, the nominations they received, and their fields of competition, among other things...

To begin with, Juno comes in with (1) a Best Director nominee, (2) a very viable Best Actress nominee, and (3) even more impressive box-office numbers that will only continue to grow during phase two of the awards season, thanks to a late season release, as opposed to one in August. It is heating up at just the right time.

Also, I am presently of the belief that No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood will split the vote of those who feel the need to support a completely 'serious' film, and that Juno—which might have enough passionate support anyway—would be the most obvious beneficiary... not Michael Clayton, which is solid filmmaking but rarely passion-inducing, and not Atonement, which at first seems to fit the model of past winners (period piece, British accents, sweeping score and cinematography, etc.) but lacks nominations for its director and lead actors, which is indicative of shallow support. Indeed, only two films have ever won Best Picture without a Best Director nomination.

Now, of course, comes the same question we pondered with Little Miss Sunshine: "How can Juno win without a Best Editing nomination?" It is true that only nine films have ever won Best Picture without a Best Editing nomination, and none since 1980... but this year's Best Picture field—not to mention the recent Oscar wins for nominees like The Departed, Crash, Three Six Mafia, Eminem, etc.—are anything but historically conventional. Besides, try looking at it this way: If a nomination for Best Editing remains such a good indicator of Best Picture support, then how come the majority of this year's Best Editing nominees (Into the Wild, Diving Bell, and The Bourne Ultimatum) are nowhere to be found among this year's five Best Picture nominees?

Last key point: I believe to this day that Little Miss Sunshine would have won Best Picture last year had Martin Scorsese not been in the Best Director race. The win for The Departed was less an endorsement of that film (which was also outside of the historical mold of Best Picture winners) than of its director—voters knew first and foremost that they had to seize the opportunity to honor Scorsese to make up for past oversights, and then not enough of them could bring themselves to split their votes for Best Director and Best Picture in a close race, leading to the win for The Departed. Try as they might, No Country backers will not be able to elicit the same sense of obligation among Oscar voters to seize this opportunity to honor the Coens, and so there will be no coattail effect this year—in fact, I think we probably will see a Picture-Director split.

Look, it's still early in the race, and we'll see how things progress, but at this point I have little doubt that Juno has the stuff to win Best Picture. Keep in mind that almost nobody thought it had the stuff to get to this point until relatively recently, but I did from the start, so I would submit that I have read its support pretty well, thus far. We'll see!