Black Panther
Best Picture
Best Popular Film

What do these three have in common? The latest changes the Academy has made, with the inclusion of a 25th category: Best Popular Film. What does that mean? Well, to be honest, nobody knows, not even the Academy themselves! They're still working out the details...

Another significant change they made includes condensing the ceremony to a much stricter 3 hour run time, which means the winners of the smaller categories will only be able to have their speeches condensed into a shorter montage run during commercial break, kind of like how the Tony Awards works.

If you've been on social media a lot since yesterday, I'm sure you saw that the response has been overwhelmingly negative. As in, I have not seen even one person who's happy about these changes. At first, I didn't really care much about the Best Popular Film category, but after thinking about it more, and hearing other people's reactions, I do have some things to say.

It's now the midway point of 2018, which for me is so hard to believe!

So now, I would like to take this time to share with you what I've formulated as the movies that right now have the most likely chance of getting nominated at the next Oscars ceremony. This is something I've been working at since January 1st, and I have a very complex system of estimating which films are most likely to be nominated for which categories. Essentially, it starts with breaking down the year into thirds:

January-April (The more forgetful period of film)
May-August (All the summer blockbusters)
September-December (The real Oscar contenders)

From there, I look at the present five-year chunk of nominees that the Academy has recognized each year. In this case, the five-year chunk would be 2014-2018. So for each category, I look at how many movies from each period were nominated for each year, and round up the average. For example, in 2014, the number of Best Picture nominees from the first third of the year is 1. In 2015 and 2016, it's 0, and for 2017, it's 1. I total them up and divide by four, it equals 0.5, which rounds up to 1. From there, I can estimate that 0-2 movies in 2018 from January to April will be nominated for Best Picture. 1 being the most likely number, 0 being second, and 2 being the least likely of the possible number of nominees from early in the year. I do the same also for how many movies total are nominated in that period of the year, as well as how many nominees total.​

Well, that's it. it's all over. All 24 awards last night were given out, and the controversies can be settled. Based off my predictions, in total I got 17 out of 24 correct, which was one more than I got last year. Thankfully, there was no envelope mix up this year, and PricewaterhouseCoopers even made sure we knew that by labeling the category onto the envelope in HUGE letters! Whew! And how nice: Warren and Faye got to redeem themselves from the disaster they bestowed upon us last year! And let me tell you: I am so, so, SO happy that The Shape of Water won the big prize! It is such a beautiful testament to the discriminated that gives us greater insight into ourselves, and truly was the best of the nominees! But of course, there were several winners that I was not necessarily happy with, and plenty of other words I have to say in response to the ceremony as a whole. But first, here are the winners:

I now want to introduce something that is new for both of us: a full complete list of what I believe is the best of the year. Now, I haven't seen everything this year, and that includes several of the films that the Oscars nominated, so based on all 53 releases this year I assessed and graded, here's what I genuinely believe deserves the honors.

But first, a few notes on some of these categories:

I considered the animated films for all the categories except for makeup and costume design, since there are technicians behind the editing, cinematography, and set design that deserve every bit as much recognition as those who work on live action films. So it's virtually free for all in everything.

I also consider all films that feature visual effects shots a chance in Best Visual Effects. I say that it should be the goal of any vfx artists to  make the effects invisible, so that's what I've been judging this year.

I'm not following the same judgment as the Oscars, who like to judge based on technical achievement. While that's important to acknowledge to make sure the artistry of filmmaking continues to grow with its discoveries, my focus is on how the practical elements contribute to the film's unique needs, so you may find nominees in some of these categories you'd never expect to find in any other awards show lineup. I'm not saying I'm better than any of them, but rather this is my two cents on what's important in filmmaking.

So now without further ado, here's my nominees, starting with...

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Okay everyone, just one more week and it will all end! The final stage will quickly come around in the process of rewarding the greatest artistic ambitions of the year. I already made my traditional list of predictions, so now I give to you my predictions to what the Oscars will decide deserves each of their twenty-four honors. Although I've posted before that research and common reasoning has proven to me that the Academy is not so reliable after all in honoring the proper movies. Although these movies here are still great, there are still blaring holes that prevents their choices from being totally accurate. My posthere explains it further. But still, it's good to know what the Academy prioritizes when it comes to art (in this case, it's money) so that we can know what this industry as a whole is truly like. Therefore, I make my predictions. As a bonus, I will also end this post with my ideal ordering of the nine nominees for Best Picture, based on criteria that I have detailed here.

Well, what's done is done. The nominees for all 24 categories just came out this morning, and hate to say it: no Deadpool. But compared to my list of predictions, I got a total of 88/122 (72%) of my predictions correct; the only categories where I got 100% of my picks correct was (to my surprise) the two actress categories. There were plenty of surprises throughout, including other disappointments. While I personally am not too dismayed to see Deadpool lose it here, here are the nominees, along with my score for predicting each one: