Path to Oscar: How Industry and Guild Awards Shape the Best Picture Race

With the Golden Globes now behind us and three more guilds announcing nominations today (plus five more this week), it’s time to start looking at how a film will earn its path to a Best Picture Oscar nomination.

Since everyone in the Academy is eligible to vote on the nominations for Best Picture (unlike each category, which is voted on by branch), looking at a film’s collective support across multiple branches via their guilds give us the best way possible to figure out exactly what films will be announced on January 22nd.

Today, the American Cinema Editors (ACE), Art Directors Guild (ADG) and Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced their nominees. As of today only A Star Is Born has hit all guilds plus earned Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice Best Picture nominations. It did not, however, win the Golden Globe for Best Picture last night; Bohemian Rhapsody won Drama and Green Book won Musical or Comedy. Each of those films is missing two of the current guild/industry components for a perfect score. ROMA was not eligible for the Drama Globe but did win the Foreign Language Film prize from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Four other films also sit just outside in terms of nominations: Black Panther is only missing one, the ACE Eddie; Crazy Rich Asians, which is missing Critics Choice, WGA; Vice, which is missing SAG and ADG; and The Favourite, missing SAG and WGA. It should be noted that The Favourite was ineligible for WGA.

This week will also bring us BAFTA nominations (9th) and on the 10th we’ll hear from the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), Costume Designers Guild (CDG) and Makeup and Hairstyling Guild (MUAH).

Here is The Path to Oscar as of January 7, 2019.

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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.

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