This Sunday, RISD alum Seth MacFarlane will take the mic to host the 85th Academy Awards (7 p.m., ABC). It’s been a solid year for film, with nine incredibly diverse Best Picture nominees vying for a place in the Oscar pantheon.
Before we get into our predictions, we’d be remiss not to mention just how surprising the nominations were. There were audible gasps from the journalists at the live-streamed announcement ceremony in January when both Best Director frontrunners (Argo‘s Ben Affleck and Zero Dark Thirty‘s Kathryn Bigelow) were passed over for nominations, leaving us to wonder: Can Argo pull off the win everyone expects without Affleck on the roster? The Director category is a historical determining factor for Best Picture, given:
- About three-fourths of all Picture winners also win Director, and
- A mere three films ever have scored Picture without a nom for Director. And it’s only happened once (1989’s Driving Miss Daisy) in the last eighty years. Good luck defying those odds, Argo.