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: Bafta night 2016

It was a Valentine's theme for this year's Baftas, as the British Academy Film Awards fell on February 14th. The ceremony was eerily subdued, with host Stephen Fry engaging in the same witty erudition he has used in 10 previous ceremonies. There were no musical performances this year to break the monotony, and only a few memorable moments (Rebel Wilson's speech was the comedy highlight). Valentine's touches included an opening Kiss Cam, which yielded the unexpected sight of Leonardo DiCaprio locking lips with Maggie Smith. And Leo reunited with his Titanic costar Kate Winslet - both were winners (above).

Speaking of which, awards themselves took a fairly predictable route, with only a few mild surprises. The Revenant nabbed five (film, director, actor, cinematography, sound); Mad Max: Fury Road won four (costumes, editing, production design, makeup/hair); and Star Wars: The Force Awakens won two (visual effects and rising star for John Boyega, below). The other prizes were scattered between Room, Steve Jobs, Bridge of Spies, Spotlight, The Big Short, Brooklyn, The Hateful Eight, Amy, Inside Out, Theeb and Wild Tales.

Frankly, the Bafta ceremony needs a shake-up. First, find a new host who can bring some fresh attitude and a spin on the usual format. Second, broadcast the entire ceremony live rather than on a tape delay with a third of the categories left out. In the Instagram age, the winners are all public knowledge before the show airs, so this archaic approach from the BBC is simply absurd, and it belittles Bafta's impact.


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C R I T I C A L   W E E K

As for films I saw this past week, the biggest was Zoolander 2, a sequel just as silly as the original, which means that it feels like a disappointment. But I laughed. The best of the week was Sing Street, the latest hugely involving music-infused drama from the brilliant John Carney (Once, Begin Again), this time set in mid-80s Dublin. Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups is an evocative, kaleidoscopic exploration of the emptiness of fame. Strikingly photographed and played (by Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, among others), it feels oddly lacking in insight. Richard Gere is a mopey homeless man in Oren Moverman's beautifully observed but painfully slow Time Out of Mind. And the inventively stylised Belgian drama The Brand New Testament takes a witty premise (God is alive and living in Brussels) and spins it into something involving and thought-provoking.

This coming week we get to catch up with the Coen brothers' all-star Hollywood comedy Hail, Caesar, Robin Williams' final drama Boulevard and the British heist movie Golden Years, among others.

Critical Week: A time for reflection

Press screenings always go slightly bonkers at this time of year as critics try desperately to catch up with everything before casting votes in year-end awards. I vote in three awards - the Online Film Critics Society released its nominees this week (the nominations deadline was last Saturday), the London Critics' Circle Film Awards (of which I'm the chair again) has its nominations deadline this Friday, and Galeca's Dorian Awards nominations are due next month. Anyway, in this flurry of screenings, I've seen what just might end up as my favourite film of the year, Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa, an inventively animated and staggeringly personal exploration of self-image and human interaction.

Other awards screenings included The Revenant, Alejandro Inarritu's bravura and thoroughly harrowing survival tale starring Leonardo Di Caprio; Joy, the nutty and rather wonderful biopic reuniting Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro and writer-director David O Russell; and The Danish Girl, a rather too-pretty biopic but strongly pointed starring the excellent Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander.

Regular releases screened this week included Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's goofy comedy Sisters, Brad and Angelina Jolie Pitt's handsome but stilted drama By the Sea, Jackie Chan and John Cusack's splintered Chinese action epic Dragon Blade, the charming British holiday romance Sparks and Embers, the rightly acclaimed Everest doc Sherpa,  the introspective American indie drama The Surface, and the offbeat Italian micro-budget drama Water Boys. I also took the time to delight in the starry joys of Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray's holiday extravaganza A Very Murray Christmas.

This coming week, the only movie anyone is talking about is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I'll get to see on Tuesday the 15th, a couple of days before it opens. Also screening: Ron Howard's seafaring epic In the Heart of the Sea, the British Winter Olympics biopic Eddie the Eagle, Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell squaring off in Daddy's Home, and Stephen Dorff in American Hero.