Here Are Some 2017 Oscar Predictions, So You Don't Have to Think About Them
The 88th Annual Academy Awards are done, now what about the 89th?
The 2016 Oscars are over, so you know what that means! Let’s try and guess which movies nobody has seen yet will win all the awards that people intensely care about for one single night. It’s sort of sad that the Oscars are so predictable. Granted, we could be 100 percent wrong on these, but chances are you’ll be seeing people like Martin Scorsese, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Keaton, Lupita Nyong’o, and more strolling to the Dolby Theatre next February. Here’s who and what we have in mind to win the six major categories for the next Academy Awards. The projected winners are in bold.
Best Supporting Actor
- Jared Leto: Suicide Squad
- Steve Martin: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
- Kyle Chandler: Manchester by the Sea
- Nick Offerman: The Founder
- Patrick Stewart: Green Room
The Academy loves to do two things in the supporting categories: prop up future Best Actor or Actress nominees or honor the throwback performers with an award of their own. With the Best Supporting Actor category it’s usually the latter, which is why Steve Martin will probably win for director Ang Lee’s war dramedy, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Not much is known about the movie other than its eclectic cast — which also includes Kristen Stewart, Vin Diesel, Chris Tucker, and Garrett Hedlund — and that it will be shot in 3D in the near unprecedented frame rate of 120 frames per second. But the Academy loves Lee and they love Martin, who has hosted the ceremony three times and received an honorary award in 2013. Now, playing the Jerry Jones-clone Norm Oglesby, he’ll get the real thing.
Best Supporting Actress
- Rooney Mara: Lion
- Julia Roberts: Money Monster
- Lupita Nyong’o: Queen of Katwe
- Rachel Weisz: The Light Between Oceans
- Emily Blunt: The Girl on the Train
The trailer for director Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans was pure Oscar catnip. It’s high drama set in a bygone era, and Rachel Weisz’s turn as the potential mother of a baby that washes ashore on an Australian island following a shipwreck makes for the gut-wrenching role the Oscars love to crown. This award will go nicely with her other Best Supporting Actress award she won in 2005 for The Constant Gardner.
Best Actor
- Michael Keaton: The Founder
- Chris Pratt: Passengers
- Daniel Oyelowo: A United Kingdom
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Snowden
- Nate Parker: The Birth of a Nation
Keaton is on quite a roll as of late. He starred in both the previous Best Picture winners, and missed out on winning the Best Actor award in 2014 for his lead role in Birdman. But his upcoming role as Ray Kroc, the businessman who took control of a burger joint owned by two brothers and grew it into the McDonald’s empire, in The Founder seems tailor-made for the true-life stories the Oscars usually highlight.
Keaton hasn’t had his time to shine and this is his moment. The movie, directed by John Lee Hancock, who previously helmed the multi-Oscar nominee The Blind Side, is being released in the heart of Oscar season in November 2016 so expect this movie to make a hard push for some awards recognition.
Best Actress
- Emma Stone: La La Land
- Alicia Vikander: The Light Between Oceans
- Jessica Chastain: The Zookeeper’s Wife
- Meryl Streep: Florence Foster Jenkins
- Jennifer Lawrence: Passengers
Vikander won this year’s Best Supporting Actress award for The Danish Girl. She’s falling perfectly in the Academy’s mold and choosing all the right roles to guarantee she’ll be walking the red carpet for years to come. Along with Weisz’s supporting performance in The Light Between Oceans, Vikander is a lock for the Actress award as the woman who raises the orphaned baby with her husband as her own.
Best Director
- Damien Chazelle: La La Land
- Martin Scorsese: Silence
- Ang Lee: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
- Nate Parker: The Birth of a Nation
- Derek Cianfrance: The Light Between Oceans
This is a tossup, so we’ll go with the old man himself, Martin Scorsese, who previously scored a consolation statuette for his work on The Departed (and basically for his entire filmography). Scorsese managed to finally get financing for one of his dream projects, an adaptation of the Shūsaku Endō novel Silence about the persecution of Jesuit priests in 17th century Japan. Starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson, and more, this is Scorsese swinging for the fences while covering The Last Temptation of Christ territory. He didn’t win for that movie, but he’ll probably win for this one.
Best Picture
Here’s the thing — the Academy has faced down a serious diversity problem, and they’ve done a fairly solid job of addressing the problems and making immediate changes to help bring in the new and out with the old. The joke that the Oscars are for 70-year-old white dudes has been the joke for far too long, and Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, a woman with a thankless position, has made change happen for the better.
That said, debut director Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, a biopic about the life of Nat Turner and his slave revolt, wowed nearly everyone out of Sundance. Its ascendency from film festival darling to Oscar hopeful is exactly the type of story the Academy loves, and if the reviews are any indication it won’t be a fluke either. Here’s hoping my predictions for the actor and actress categories are wrong as well, and there is a more diverse crowd as early as next year as well.
