AwardsWatch - 2015 Oscar Predictions: Best Actress – Julianne Moore Steals the Race, is New Frontrunner

2015 Oscar Predictions: Best Actress – Julianne Moore Steals the Race, is New Frontrunner

**From left; Julianne Moore, Rosamund Pike, Reese Witherspoon, Amy Adams, Felicity Jones**

What would Oscar predicting be without a crazy race in Best Actress? Julianne Moore in Still Alice makes the biggest jump of any person or film on the charts to go from a single point charted last month (from Kenneth) to the #1 slot. After a nail-biting week after its Toronto debut, Sony Pictures Classics picked up the film and the Best Actress race turned on its head.

The lockstep twosome of Reese and Rosamund shattered and Moore is now the major frontrunner in the category. Witherspoon, Pike, Adams and Streep all took some pretty big hits with the entrance of Moore in the race. Strangely, David the only Gold Rush Gang member to omit Moore from his predictions, opting instead for Streep and Jessica Chastain in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, her only vote. Maybe someone didn’t change his predictions in time?

Felicity Jones enters the top five with an 11-point volley as a part of the Theory train that came in post-Toronto. She receives low-level vote rankings from all Gold Rush Gang members except David and Kenneth. It’s almost enough to push her ahead of Amy Adams, who continues to plummet, despite being the frontrunner here for the first half of 2014. With two very mixed screenings, very little in the way of production photos and advertising and no festival presence, it’s been a bad year for Big Eyes and Adams’ hope for Oscar attention this year.

The Streep drop though is largely due to the news that she might be going Supporting for Into the Woods but we don’t have official word yet. David, Evan and Kenneth are still aboard the Streep in Lead train until something official comes down the pipeline.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.