Oscar Guessing 2007

While many of the Oscar prognosticators have already written off this year's nominees as a done deal (it's gonna be some combination of Babel, Departed, Dreamgirls, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen), the picks for this year's documentary feature remain a solid mystery.  Even the presumed winner, Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, started to look a little wobbly after being passed over by both the Writers and Directors Guilds (even though it nearly swept the critics prizes).

But if I were forced to guess (and there's something in the blogger's contract of having to talk about the future as if you know what it is and then to trumpet your correct guesses and run from your wild pitches), I'd say that An Inconvenient Truth will still make tomorrow's list of five, and I think that it will most likely be joined by Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil and James Longley's Iraq in Fragments, both of which received nominations from the guilds, the IDA and the Gothams (Iraq in Fragments won the latter two).

I usually argue that the committee that chooses the nominees tends to breakdown their choices as follows:  3 big theatrical films, 1 political film and 1 international film.  If they stick to this pattern, that mean that the 3 theatrical releases will include Truth, Deliver Us (which while sputtering at the box office has been a critical slamdunk) and either Jesus Camp or Shut Up and Sing.  Early on, I was predicting Jesus Camp as the 3rd choice (and at the time it was the 2nd highest grossing nominee behind Truth), but after some of the critics prizes and considering two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple's reputation, I'm going to wager that they give a nod to the Dixie Chicks film instead. 

If Shut Up and Sing were to get nominated, it would be only the second popular music-related doc to be nominated  in more than 30 years.

The problem with my criteria is that I'm not sure whether Iraq in Fragments gets in on the political slot or the international slot.  If it's considered political, then I think the fifth nominee will either be the blind Tibetan teens climbing Everest in Blindsight or Sisters in Law, about two judges in a small town in Cameroon - both films are crowd-pleasing audience award winners.  It could also be Stanley Nelson's Jonestown, a longtime doc veteran making an acclaimed film outside of his traditional subject matter. 

And if Iraq in Fragments is thought to be international, then the fifth nominee could be either the aforementioned Jesus Camp, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? or The Trials of Darryl Hunt, which effectively deals with issues of race and justice wrapped inside a compelling murder case. 

And there's tons of other outliers in this formulation that can't be accounted for.  Although many in the doc community assume only one Iraq film will make the final five, what if it's two?  In that case, many seem to love My Country, My Country (and it was recently nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award).

So although any of the films named above may show up on the list (hell, the final five could be the five films I didn't name), here are my guesses for the films that will be announced in the morning for Best Documentary Feature:

Deliver Us From Evil
An Inconvenient Truth
Iraq in Fragments
Shut Up and Sing
Sisters in Law

It's that fifth slot that's stumping me, and many folks in Park City have told me that I should have gone with my 2nd pick in the fifth slot - Jonestown - but I have a feeling about Sisters in Law and I'm sticking with it.  But if its not Sisters in Law and it's not Jonestown, then I think that it could be any of the following: Blindsight, Mr. Smith, Jesus Camp, My Country, My Country & The Trials of Darryl Hunt.

Tomorrow we'll know.

We also may see one or two songs from the above documentaries make it into the Best Original Song category, as songs from Melissa Etheridge (for An Inconvenient Truth) and Dixie Chicks (for, naturally, Shut Up and Sing) are in the mix.

And on the fiction films, I think most of the prognosticators are correct.  If I could offer any random guesses, I'd say that we might be surprised by the number of nominations for Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth and perhaps surprised that Dreamgirls does less well then expected (for instance Bill Condon not getting nominated for directing).  I say this in part due to the votes in the Edendale Shortlist Nominations unveiled yesterday, however, as I like to say, the Edendale voters are hip and poor and the Oscar voters tend to be old and rich, so there might not be too much of a corollary.  Although, I've never doubted the Edendale voters since, in the first year, they foretold the nominations for City of God.