Oscar Index: Now With 100% Less Burlesque!

What a week for Movieline's Oscar Index, which spent hours upon hours parsing all the riffs, renouncements, meditations, hyptotheses, 140-character Burlesque dismissals, projections and whatever else the punditocracy managed to summon in a frame overwhelmed with year-end awards frenzies. How does it all apply to the Oscars? There is only one way to find out. To the Index!

[Click the graphs for larger images]

The Leading 10:

1. The Social Network

2. The King's Speech

3. Black Swan

4. The Fighter

5. Inception

6. True Grit

7. The Kids Are All Right

8. 127 Hours

9. Winter's Bone

10. Toy Story 3

Outsiders: Blue Valentine; The Town; Rabbit Hole; Shutter Island; Another Year

Notes: Basically this week's movements came down to two principal factors: critics awards (where The Social Network has cleaned up) and Golden Globe Award nominations (where The King's Speech reasserted its authority). Some will tell you both distinctions are irrelevant, and yet others will assert that the more prestige conferred before Jan. 1, the better (wherever it comes from). "People get upset with me at this time of year when I dismiss The Precursors because, they scream, it's not all about Oscar," wrote David Poland on the one hand. "Bullshit. It's all about Oscar. It's all about Oscar for every person who believes they can win that prize, until they don't. And then, the precursors they won become much more valued." Jeffrey Wells disagreed: "[I]f The King's Speech doesn't win a Best Picture award with any critics groups at all (which it may not), then at the very least Academy members will be facing the fact that if they vote for it and not The Social Network and/or The Fighter, the world will regard them as tired, backward-gazing traditionalists and quality-deniers."

The reality, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Last year, the critics' approval hardly hurt The Hurt Locker, while Harvey Weinstein -- a dyed-in-the-wool Oscar-favoritist -- wrung whatever momentum he could from their plaudits for Inglourious Basterds. Meanwhile, Avatar coasted into the home-stretch on box office alone, playing the awards-circuit game but never bothering to pretend it was anything less than wholly focused on Oscar night. That class disparity won't likely exist this year -- not with a hit David Fincher film (about <a href="Time's Person of the Year, no less) also leading the world in early-season critical accolades and contenders like King's Speech, Black Swan and The Fighter_ roaring out of the theatrical gate as well. These are films people are seeing and will continue to see. That they're critical darlings -- and now have the Golden Globes imprimatur to further market their wares to moviegoers -- levels the playing field even more, thus entitling Academy members to vote for the film they actually like as opposed to David, Goliath, or the slingshot that always comes between them.

And despite what we've seen from The Social Network in the last week, it's difficult to know which of this year's frontrunners belongs to each of those roles. I mean, Black Swan set a record with 12 Critics Choice nominations (whose founding body, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, openly considers itself the most accurate Oscar predictor out there), while every pundit and his/her mother seemed to size The Fighter up as the scrappy, audience-friendly underdog of 2010. The Weinsteins reinforced The King's Speech's creds by leading the Golden Globe noms and keeping Colin Firth in front of the actor race.

Then there's Inception -- lurking quietly, waiting to make a lunge at Picture starting with the Globes. Focus Features, too, notched a kudos lift for Kids with its showings from the NYFCC to the Globes. True Grit and 127 Hours are fading fast -- and may continue to do so as Paramount and Fox Searchlight push Fighter and Black Swan to the finish line. I still like Social Network FTW, but bet conservatively (if you must bet at all).

The Leading 5:

1. David Fincher, The Social Network

2. Tom Hooper, The King's Speech

3. Christopher Nolan, Inception

4. Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan

5. David O. Russell, The Fighter

Outsiders: Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit; Danny Boyle, 127 Hours; Lisa Cholodenko, The Kids Are All Right; Mike Leigh, Another Year

Notes: Let's see... Uh... Quantify every factor I listed for the films above, divide it by the number of total crew behind the camera on each film, and whatever you're left with is the ranking of their directors in this race. It's as reasonable as any other method of sorting through this, right? Anyway, consensus among most observers is that Fincher's still the guy to beat, Russell is on his best behavior to make the cut, and look out for Lisa Cholodenko. More calculus to come next week...

Pages: 1 2 3