Out on a limb: Oscar picks & predictions

Here we go again: my annual list of hopes and fears about Sunday night's 88th Academy Awards ceremony. I'll be watching the show live in central London all night (it starts at 1.30am London time and finishes as the sun comes up) with the smartly dressed Oscar crowd! As always, I will be hoping for upsets, political statements and surprises. If Iñárritu's The Revenant wins everything this year, as Iñárritu's Birdman did last year, it will just be boring. Here's how I think it'll go, and what I want to happen. Obviously, this is just guesswork...

Best Picture
Will win: The Revenant
Should win: Spotlight
Dark horse: Mad Max: Fury Road

Foreign Language Film
Will / should win: Son of Saul (Hungary)
Could win: Mustang (France)
Dark horse: Theeb (Jordan)

Animated Feature
Will win: Inside Out
Should win: Anomalisa

Documentary Feature
Will win: Amy
Should win: The Look of Silence

Director
Will win: Alejandro G Iñárritu, The Revenant
Should win: Lenny Abrahamson, Room
Deserving upset: George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road

Actress
Will win: Brie Larson, Room
Should win: Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Dark horse: Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

Actor
Will win: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Should win: Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
Dark horse: Bryan Cranston, Trumbo

Supporting Actress
Will win: Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
Should win: Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs
Could win: Rooney Mara, Carol
Dark horse: Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight

Supporting Actor
Will win: Sylvester Stallone, Creed
Should win: Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies

Adapted Screenplay
Will win: The Big Short, Charles Randolph and Adam McKay
Should win: Carol, Phyllis Nagy
Could win: Brooklyn, Nick Hornby

Original Screenplay
Will / should win: Spotlight, Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy

Cinematography
Will win: The Revenant, Emmanuel Lubezki
Should win: Carol, Edward Lachman
Dark horse: Sicario, Roger Deakins

Original Score
Will win: The Hateful Eight, Ennio Morricone
Should win: Sicario, Jóhann Jóhannsson

Original Song
Will win: Til It Happens to You, The Hunting Ground
Should win: Manta Ray, Racing Extinction

Film Editing
Will win: The Revenant, Stephen Mirrione
Should win: Mad Max: Fury Road, Margaret Sixel

Production Design
Will / should win: Mad Max: Fury Road
Could win: The Revenant

Costume Design
Will win: Carol, Sandy Powell
Should win: Mad Max: Fury Road, Jenny Beaven

Makeup & Hairstyling
Will / should win: Mad Max: Fury Road

Sound Editing
Will win: The Revenant
Should win: Sicario
Could win: Mad Max: Fury Road

Sound Mixing
Will win: Mad Max: Fury Road
Should win: The Martian
Could win: The Revenant

Visual Effects
Will win: Mad Max: Fury Road
Should win: Ex Machina

Critical Week: What's up, Tiger Lily?

Several big movies have been screened to London critics this week, including Joe Wright's Peter Pan prequel Pan, a flashy, big-scale adventure starring Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard, Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily (above), Garrett Hedlund as Hook and newcomer Levi Miller as Peter. It's a lot of fun, but aimed squarely at young children.

Of three just as generically titled blockbusters, the best is Ridley Scott's The Martian, a thrilling space adventure with a terrific central role for Matt Damon, plus a weighty supporting cast who breathe some life into the film's edges. A lack of this is the only problem with Robert Zemeckis' The Walk, a whizzy, visually impressive dramatisation of the amazing story of Philippe Petit, which was documented memorably in the Oscar-winning Man on Wire. Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings cheeky mischief to the title role, but everyone else fades into the spectacular digital backdrops. And Anne Hathaway and Robert DeNiro are likeable in Nancy Meyers' warm, sentimentally manipulative comedy The Intern.

As for films from the upcoming London Film Festival, I caught up with the outrageously entertaining Bone Tomahawk, a Western starring Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson and a fantastic Richard Jenkins that shifts from comedy to horror. Terence Davies' Sunset Song is a gorgeous period epic with a lovely sense of the time and place (WWI Scotland) and the connection between people and the land. Pablo Larrain's The Club is a riveting, strikingly inventive drama taking on the Catholic Church's inability to tackle its paedophile problem. And Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room is another typically manic, stylistically sumptuous pastiche, this time telling stories within stories within stories.

Most screenings this coming week are films that will also be showing at the London Film Festival, including Carey Mulligan in the opening movie Suffragette, Lily Tomlin in Grandma, Mads Mikkelsen in Men & Chicken, and the Indo-Canadian crime thriller Beeba Boys. There's also the American comedy This Is Happening, the British comedy Convenience, and the multistrand holiday offering A Christmas Horror Story.