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By Sandra Olmstead

As I make my predictions for who with win and who won’t in office pools, in social media forums, at the party, and privately during the Oscars’ telecast, I am always conscious of three factors in Oscar prediction that make it more a game of chance than an intellectual pursuit. The first challenge is that I have my favored and loathed among the nominations, which influences my guesses. Second, although the actual quality of one film above the other requires comparing apples to oranges, the nominees and the winners reflect only the majority opinion of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences members. The third challenge to predicting the winners is more complicated. The personal and business politics of who wins and the studios’ massive advertising campaigns both influence, or not, the voting of the Academy.

The acting awards look fairly straight forward this year. The Best Actor Oscar should go to Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything because Redmayne taps into every kind acting skill to get Stephen Hawking on screen. Julianne Moore as Alzheimer’s patient Alice Howland’s in Still Alice should win Best Actress although Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed in Wild is a worthy performance, but what if the Academy sees the nom of Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne as its nod to Gone Girl?

There were ten great performances in the Supporting Actor and Actress category. The award for actor should go to J.K. Simmons for Whiplash, giving the Academy a place to honor this Best Picture nom without giving it that award. Even though Patricia Arquette in Boyhood is the odds on favorite, I think that the award will go elsewhere, perhaps Laura Dern for Wild; she’s a daughter of Hollywood, she’s been nominated once before, and Wild only has two noms.

The so-called craft awards are often a place where the Academy bestows honor on a film without handing it a big award. Original Screenplay should go to Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness for The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Adapted Screenplay could easily go to any of the nominees, but the odds seem to indicate Graham Moore for The Imitation Game. Cinematography rightly belongs to Dick Pope for the images in Mr. Turner, but Birdman’s Emmanuel Lubezki or The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Robert Yeoman will probably win. Editing, which is what I would have nominated Birdman for, seems to be a race that Tom Cross for Whiplash will lose to Sandra Adair for Boyhood because 12 years is a long time and the transitions between the years are nicely done.

Other notes: Director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida should take Best Foreign Language Feature for Poland, and Citizenfour will likely get a Best Documentary Oscar. On the Best Animated Feature, any of the nominees deserve the award, but How to Train Your Dragon 2 probably wins, so please stop whining about The Lego Movie being overlooked. First, it has substantial amounts of live action in it, and second, I loathe Will Ferrell’s so-called acting. If there’s whining to be done, it should be over writer/director Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance being overlooked.

The Best Picture race seems to be narrowed down to Birdman and Boyhood. Birdman has a showbiz storyline which often appeals to Academy members, but it is more experimental than may be popular with those voters. Boyhood was uniquely made by filming it over 12 years, but is a rather lackluster coming-of-age story about a mopey teenage boy. Oops, that’s a personal bias of mine. If these two front runners split the vote, a third film might emerge as the winner. I’d like to see the comedy The Grand Budapest Hotel win; however, comedies generally don’t win Best Picture; it came out early in the year, so it’s old news, and frankly, it’s probably a little too quirky for some Academy voters. Since Selma’s campaign failed to get the film in front of many Academy members before the nominations were due, its filmmakers might reap a political windfall. Giving American Sniper a Best Picture Oscar evokes the patriotism of an aging, more conservative Academy. Votes could, however, be siphoned in another direction by either of the two smashing Brit films, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. Also a coming of ager, but more complex and enjoyable, Whiplash is also about artistic performance. All these films deserve nominations, so in a clichéd sense they’ve already won. Until the envelope is opened, it’s hard to tell who’s going home with Best Picture Oscar this year.

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