Oscar Index: The Pitt and the Pendulum

The Leading 5:

1. Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

2. Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

3. Viola Davis, The Help

4. Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin

5. Charlize Theron, Young Adult

Outsiders: Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn; Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene; Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method; Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Emma Stone, The Help; Felicity Jones, Like Crazy

Here we go again with the unseen films. (Speaking of which, if, like a normal person, you've ever second-guessed the sensibility of reading tea leaves that haven't even sprouted yet, does Awards Daily ever have a roundtable chat for you!) The conventional wisdom hasn't budged much from the Streep/Close/Davis/Swinton hierarchy, though early signs -- including a rogue Gold Derby expert and a very Oscar-friendly career tribute at the forthcoming Gotham Awards -- indicate that Theron might make a legit run in the Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody reunion Young Adult. Olsen also had plenty more momentum than Knightley in early rankings from more than one prognostication pool; don't expect her to go anywhere but up as Martha Marcy May Marlene's Oct. 21 release date approaches.

The Leading 5:

1. George Clooney, The Descendants

2. Brad Pitt, Moneyball

3. Michael Fassbender, Shame

4. Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar

5. Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Outsiders: Jean Dujardin, The Artist; Ryan Gosling, The Ides of March; Woody Harrelson, Rampart; Tom Hanks, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Michael Shannon, Take Shelter; Damian Bechir, A Better Life; Michael Fassbender, A Dangerous Method; Tom Hardy, Warrior

I hate to keep going back to this, but listen: I'm not just pulling this stuff out of my ass. The Index comprises carefully calculated metrics gauged from thoroughly fluid data including hype, word of mouth, conventional wisdom, common sense and a range of intangibles. So it was with some surprise that I regarded the, uh, surprise that regarded last week's rankings for Best Actor. I mean, what the hell kind of awards orthodoxy goes over the moon for a performance like Fassbender's in Shame, watches Fox Searchlight -- a.k.a. the most fearsome Oscar predator not named Weinstein -- snatch it from the height of the Toronto Film Festival market, and then turns around and says, "Oh, he's not in the running"? Don't be daft! Of course he's in the running! You guys put him there! And the current consensus that the Oscar is Clooney's to lose for Searchlight's Descendants just helps confirm the schema sketched out here for you a week ago: The studio bought the competition.

So give each some credit, I guess. In fairness, some observers (Sasha Stone and Kristopher Tapley, for example) already have, while others still yammer on about the three-way race between Clooney, Pitt and DiCaprio. Or maybe, despite Moneyball's great opening, it's not Pitt's year. Let Mark Harris explain:

[T]o me, his road to a win is almost unimaginable; in fact, even his road to a nomination is challenging. The reasons are twofold: (1) This isn't the kind of performance that the actors' branch thinks of as capital-A acting, and (2) Pitt is not the kind of actor voters have recently been especially eager to nominate.

That's not just a gut feeling; it's a quantitative reality! In tribute to the bottomless appetite for statistical analysis that gives Moneyball's protagonist one of his reasons for being -- and also because after four weeks, I figure it's time to justify the "metrics" part of "Oscarmetrics" -- I did a little number-crunching to see if I could back up my hunch that this might not be an Oscar performance. Taking as my sample the past 50 nominees for best actor (from 2001 to 2010), I looked for commonalities in the roles that got them nominated. Six trends stood out [...]

Read the rest at Grantland. Don't let my lab coat and pocket protector fool you: I wasn't so convinced. But you may be!

In other news, the B-movie stalwarts at Millennium paid $2 million for Rampart, meaning that either studio new kid (and awards-campaign veteran) Mark Gill thinks he can turn mogul Avi Lerner's stinky genre ship around or you'll be watching Woody Harrelson's searing work at 2 a.m. next week on Showtime. I wouldn't expect miracles, to be honest, and at this point, neither would roughly 90 percent of the pundits out there. Dujardin went along with the Artist bump, while Oldman is also to be feted at this year's Gotham Awards -- which in itself means nothing but a trophy and some free cocktails, but hints at some worthwhile Oscar portent: "The 'career tribute' portion of their ceremony has included at least one future Oscar nominee every year since 2004," writes Nathaniel Rogers at The Film Experience. "With so little information (i.e. clips or photos) on Charlize's work in Young Adult, we have to assume that Gary Oldman is in the best position currently to continue that trend." Plus Oldman's never been nominated for jack, so while most seem to agree that such a cutthroat year probably isn't his to win, it's almost certainly his to make the cut.

Meanwhile, enduring favorite Gosling hopped into Harrelson's old spot, sublime underdog Michael Shannon caught Take Shelter's release-week wave and the underdoggiest of underdogs, Damian Bechir, creeping in thanks to Summit's aggressive screener campaign on behalf of A Better Life. Oh! And who can forget the least-burning question question of the week: "Is Sean Penn crashing the Best Actor race?" Hint: No.

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