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Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name; Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth; Robert Pattinson in Good Time; Garance Marillier in Raw; Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out.
Centre: Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name; clockwise from top left: Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth; Robert Pattinson in Good Time; Garance Marillier in Raw; Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out.
Centre: Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name; clockwise from top left: Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth; Robert Pattinson in Good Time; Garance Marillier in Raw; Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out.

It’s the alternative Oscars…

This article is more than 6 years old

Ahead of the official Academy nominations on Tuesday, Guardian and Observer critics pick their own shortlists

Mark Kermode, Observer film critic

Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)

Raw
Get Out
Lady Bird
The Shape of Water
The Florida Project

Hope Dickson Leach’s brilliant The Levelling (which was ludicrously overlooked in the Bafta nominations) isn’t one of the 341 films eligible for this year’s Oscars. Neither are Maysaloun Hamoud’s In Between and Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch in the running, although both were among my highlights of the year. However, my favourite film of 2017 is a nominal contender, although it has zero chance of earning any nominations: Julia Ducournau’s ravenous French-Belgian masterpiece Raw, which marked the arrival of a major new film-making talent.
Will win: Lady Bird

Best director

Julia Ducournau – Raw
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Jordan Peele – Get Out
Guillermo del ToroThe Shape of Water

Depressingly, both the Baftas and Golden Globes had male-only best director shortlists – a miserable result in a year that boasted such diverse offerings as Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Dee Rees’s Mudbound, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, and Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman. I suspect that on Oscar night Christopher Nolan will triumph for Dunkirk, although I’d be happy to see the award go to Gerwig, or Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water.
Will win: Christopher NolanDunkirk

Best actor

Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats
David Oyelowo – A United Kingdom
Andy Serkis – War for the Planet of the Apes

Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom featured in my best of 2016 Observer roundup, but didn’t open in the US until 2017, so it’s only now that I can nominate David Oyelowo for his brilliant performance as Seretse Khama. Andy Serkis is long overdue recognition for his motion-capture work, particularly in the rebooted Apes series, but the Academy isn’t yet ready to make that technological leap. Harris Dickinson is a star of tomorrow, but my vote goes to British actor Daniel Kaluuya for his utterly engaging central performance in Get Out.
Will win: Gary OldmanDarkest Hour

Best actress

Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Ahn Seo Hyun – Okja
Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Margot Robbie – I, Tonya

An extraordinary central performance by Florence Pugh provided the beating heart of William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth – bold, fearless and commanding. Sally Hawkins is sublime in Guillermo del Toro’s magical fantasy The Shape of Water, while young Ahn Seo Hyun works wonders in Bong Joon Ho’s creature feature Okja. But Frances McDormand will be the one to beat on Oscar night, with Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri providing her best role since Fargo.
Will win: Frances McDormand –
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth. Photograph: Allstar/Sixty Six Pictures

Best supporting actor

Wes Studi – Hostiles
John Boyega – Detroit
Willem DafoeThe Florida Project
Barry Keoghan – The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Will Poulter – Detroit

There has been little awards support for Kathryn Bigelow’s increasingly horrifying “anatomy of an uprising” Detroit, but among the accomplished ensemble cast I found both John Boyega and Will Poulter to be utterly engrossing. Barry Keoghan is convincingly creepy in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Willem Dafoe is on course for Oscar victory in The Florida Project. But it’s Wes Studi’s Chief Yellow Hawk in Hostiles that proved most arresting for me.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project

Best supporting actress

Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Carmen Ejogo – It Comes at Night
Allison Janney – I, Tonya
Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water
Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time

Newcomer Taliah Lennice Webster was extraordinary in her debut role in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time, holding her own against seasoned performer Robert Pattinson. Octavia Spencer won a supporting actress Oscar for The Help and was nominated again for Hidden Figures - her winning role in The Shape of Water confirms her versatility. But my vote goes to Lesley Manville, who provides the perfect foil for a prickly Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf –
Lady Bird

Other categories: best score

Hans Zimmer – Dunkirk
Jonny Greenwood – Phantom Thread
Oneohtrix Point Never (AKA Daniel Lopatin) – Good Time
Tamar-Kali – Mudbound
Alexandre Desplat – The Shape of Water

This was the most difficult category for me – I would love to have been able to find space for such eclectic work as Max Richter’s music for Hostiles, Nitin Sawhney’s score for Breathe, Rachel Portman’s accompaniment to Their Finest, or Mica Levi’s contribution to Marjorie Prime. But I think this is the one category in which the Oscar voters and I may be in tune, with the prize on the night going to Hans Zimmer for his soul-shattering score for Dunkirk.
Will win: Hans Zimmer

Dunkirk

Hans Zimmer, composer of the score for Dunkirk. Photograph: Rob Ball/Redferns

Peter Bradshaw, Guardian film critic

Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)

Call Me By Your Name
The Florida Project
Get Out
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water

Luca Guadagnino’s love story Call Me By Your Name, starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, seduces and overwhelms: the 80s-set story of a young man’s passionate adoration for the older grad student who has come to stay at his parents’ house in Italy. It has an unashamed sensuality which isn’t often available in the cinema, promoting the cultivation of knowledge and pleasure and making them the same thing. Its languorous caress is a marvel.
Will win: The Shape of Water

Best director

Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Michael Haneke – Happy End
Dee Rees – Mudbound
Guillermo Del Toro – The Shape of Water

It’s fashionable to mock the idea of auteurisme, but Greta Gerwig brings a masterly personal control to this autobiographical coming-of-age comedy: her direction gets the very best from two great performers, Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, and her writing is zingingly terrific, both in its line-by-line pleasure and its narrative shape.
Will win: Guillermo Del Toro – The Shape of Water

Greta Gerwig, director of Lady Bird. Photograph: Merie Wallace/AP

Best actor

Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Colin Farrell – The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Jason Mitchell – Mudbound

Daniel Day-Lewis brings a gripping theatricality and self-awareness to this outrageously enjoyable performance, though without anything as obvious as camp. He plays a fictional 50s couturier for whom falling in love represents something he most fears: loss of control. Something to compare with Laurence Olivier in Rebecca or Orson Welles in The Third Man.
Will win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour

Best actress

Kristen Stewart – Personal Shopper
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Jennifer Lawrence – Mother!
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

No fireworks, no grandstanding, but a quietly overwhelming performance of great intelligence and potency: the kind of acting that looks like real life. Stewart plays a fashion assistant — and she is also a medium, making contact with the ghost of her dead twin brother. It becomes a supernatural tale and a stalker nightmare. Stewart, in her superbly unaffected ordinariness, holds it together. Acting like this hardly ever wins prizes. But it should.
Will win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best supporting actor

Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Christopher Plummer – All the Money in the World
Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name
Daniel Craig – Logan Lucky
Fabrice Luchini – Slack Bay

Willem Dafoe is the gold standard for a certain kind of naturalistic acting: intelligent, understated, calmly centred, his face radiating a fierce compression of emotion and integrity. And so it is with his tremendous portrayal of the motel manager in The Florida Project: exasperated about the neglected kids, while looking out for them — and guilty about having neglected his own grownup son.
Will win: Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in The Florida Project. Photograph: AP

Best supporting actress

Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Catherine Keener – Get Out
Lesley ManvillePhantom Thread
Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – Slack Bay

Laurie Metcalf gives the performance of a lifetime as Lady Bird’s mother —passionate, devoted, controlling, a little jealous maybe, caught between the parent’s eternal dilemma of holding on and letting go. Her spasms of temper, sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel — and the counter-rages from her daughter — are compelling.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird

Other categories: best documentary

City of Ghosts
Safari
Cameraperson
Machines
Whitney: Can I Be Me?

Matthew Heinemann’s documentary about the Isis stronghold of Raqqa in Syria is devastating — and absolutely indispensable. He recounts the struggle of the citizen-journalist collective called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, who uploaded video showing the brutality of Isis: beheadings, executions, mock crucifixions and Nazi-style placard shaming. They took on the theocrat-tyrants in the digital media war. An education.
Will win: City of Ghosts

City Of Ghosts. Photograph: Dogwoof films

Wendy Ide, Observer film writer

Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)

Lady Bird
120 Beats Per Minute
Call Me By Your Name
The Florida Project
Get Out

With this year’s wide-open best picture race and establishment-shaking revelations, there could hardly be a better moment for the Academy voters to venture out of their comfort zone. It has been a landmark year for LGBTQ-themed film-making: 120 BPM and Call Me By Your Name are exceptional. The Florida Project and Get Out tackle issues with originality. But my pick is Lady Bird, which, like its teenage central character, is raw, funny, infuriating and completely irresistible.
Will win: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best director

Robin Campillo – 120 BPM
Sean Baker – The Florida Project
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Luca Guadagnino – Call Me By Your Name
Jordan PeeleGet Out

It’s perhaps incongruous to mention auteur cinema when talking about a film that so vibrantly and passionately celebrates collective voices. But Robin Campillo’s vision for 120 BPM, a thrillingly ambitious portrait of Aids activism in 1990s Paris, is present in every frame. Much as I loved the lush intimacy of Call Me By Your Name, and the horrifyingly honed tension of Get Out, it was Campillo’s work on 120 BPM that left me in pieces.
Will win: Christopher Nolan –
Dunkirk

Best actor

Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name
Claes Bang – The Square
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Makis Papadimitriou – Suntan

I’m not sure whether Timothée Chalamet’s assured performance in Call Me By Your Name is all the more remarkable because of his age – he only just turned 22 – or if his youth freed him up to give such a beguiling and uninhibited reading of the character. Either way, it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of acting I have seen this year. Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out is another standout for me.
Will win: Gary Oldman –
Darkest Hour

Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name. Photograph: Allstar/Sony Pictures Classics

Best actress

Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Kristen Stewart – Personal Shopper
Daniela Vega – A Fantastic Woman

I can’t shake my fascination with Kristen Stewart’s mesmerising performance in Personal Shopper, although it’s unlikely to chime with the Academy. Another longshot, is trans actress Daniela Vega who is devastating in the role of a woman fighting for her right to grieve in A Fantastic Woman. The smouldering, almost feral intensity of Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth is a knockout. But Saoirse Ronan is my pick: her mercurial turn in Lady Bird gets more angular and intriguing every time I watch it.
Will win: Frances McDormand –
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best supporting actor

Idris Elba – Molly’s Game
Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Kelvin Harrison Jr – It Comes at Night
Benny Safdie – Good Time
Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name

A great supporting performance might not be the showiest role, but it’s a crucial part of the architecture of a film. Take it away, and the picture will collapse. This is certainly true of Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project – his understated empathy pulls the film together. And Michael Stuhlbarg’s key scene in Call Me By Your Name is a pivotal moment in the movie. But this year, I was smitten by Idris Elba’s cracking, high-wire act of a performance in Molly’s Game.
Will win: Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name

Idris Elba, right, and Jessica Chastain in Molly’s Game. Photograph: Michael Gibson/AP

Best supporting actress

Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Amira Casar – Call Me By Your Name
Betty Gabriel – Get Out
Rebecca Hall – Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird

This year, the supporting actress category is all about the eyes. Betty Gabriel, weeping and smiling, is pure horror in Get Out, while Amira Casar’s searching look in Call Me By Your Name questions both the men in her life. There’s also the moment when Rebecca Hall falls for another woman. But Lesley Manville’s cold, appraising stare in Phantom Thread is like being stabbed with scissors. It’s a performance as immaculate as the tailoring of her dresses.
Will win: Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread

Other categories: best foreign language film

On Body and Soul
A Fantastic Woman
Félicité
Loveless
The Square

The Academy has, in the past, had something of a tricky relationship with the foreign language category. Traditionally, the voters have proved resistant to anything too, well, foreign. So the chances of the top prize going to a magical realist romance set against the backdrop of a Hungarian abattoir are slim. But although I admired the bracing bleakness of Loveless and the crisp satire of The Square, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s gorgeous oddity On Body and Soul gets my vote.
Will win: In the Fade

On Body and Soul.

Steve Rose, Guardian Film Writer

Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)

The Florida Project
Dunkirk
Get Out
Lady Bird
The Shape Of Water

The impoverished, garishly coloured outskirts of Disney World were the perfect setting for a state-of-the-nation movie that combined the incompatible: sunny yet miserable, gritty yet fantastical, optimistic yet despairing. It’ll mostly likely be too unglamorous for the Academy but it was my kind of movie.
Will win: The Shape of Water

Best director

Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Sean Baker – The Florida Project
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Denis Villeneuve – Blade Runner 2049

Dunkirk was so much the director’s film. There was barely any dialogue and individual performances took a back seat to the grand, ambitious storytelling. To find a novel, thrilling, cinematic, almost avant-garde way of telling what could have been a very familiar story is some achievement.
Will Win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water

Christopher Nolan and Kenneth Branagh on the set of Dunkirk. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/AP

Best actor

Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Timothée Chalamet –Call Me By Your Name
Jason Mitchell – Mudbound
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
James McAvoy – Split

Everyone agrees it’s his year, and portraying a recognisable historical figure is basically route one to the award, but at the same time, Oldman really gets his teeth into the role, giving us a believably shaded, complex, nuanced Churchill, despite the layers of prosthetics.
Will Win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour

Best actress

Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water
Brooklynn Prince – The Florida Project
Margot Robbie I, Tonya
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Despite having no lines, Hawkins held the screen with her mischievous allure and dancer’s grace. Mute roles often require an excess of mugging, but Hawkins is such a smart, captivating performer she suggested hidden depths with great subtlety. She’s just got one of those faces, hasn’t she?
Will Win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water. Photograph: Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures

Best supporting actor

Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Ray Romano – The Big Sick
Paul Walter Hauser – I, Tonya
Richard Jenkins – The Shape of Water
Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Such a generous, selfless performance from an actor who often tends to steal the limelight – especially considering he’s surrounded by amateurs and child actors. Dafoe’s motel manager was the father figure anchoring the whole film, grouchy and exasperated but ultimately protective.
Will win: Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best supporting actress

Allison Janney – I, Tonya
Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip
Gemma Jones – God’s Own Country
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Mary J Blige – Mudbound

As Tonya Harding’s permanently sour, chain-smoking, monstrously undermining, mother, Janney is a character – and a fancy-dress outfit – for the ages. She could have been a caricature: but Janney makes her a person – a terrible person. When she’s off screen, you’re just waiting for her to come back.
Will win: Allison Janney - I, Tonya

Best film editing

Baby Driver
Dunkirk
Get Out
The Shape Of Water
Thor Ragnarok

It’s the least glamorous Oscar of the night, but Baby Driver really made you think about how hard good editing must be. Its car chases and gunfights were not only quick, precise and visually coherent, they were also perfectly synched to the soundtrack. That takes some doing.
Will win: Dunkirk

Baby Driver. Photograph: Webb/Sony/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Simran Hans, Observer film writer

Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)

Good Time
Get Out
120 BPM
The Florida Project
Mudbound

Best picture winners tend to reflect the Academy’s mood, so it’s my suspicion that, in a post-Weinstein world, grungy crime thriller Good Time is too weird, too scuzzy and too small to make a real impact. Although the film is certainly of its time, I predict voters will plump for a “political” choice – or at least something with more telegraphed messaging. Get Out has a chance, given this year’s diverse cohort of voters, though Three Billboards seems the safe option.
Will win: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best director

Jordan Peele – Get Out
Dee Rees – Mudbound
Josh and Benny Safdie – Good Time
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Robin Campillo – 120 BPM

I’m looking for displays of authored image-making and economical storytelling in this category. Rees and Campillo wield complicated historical moments (and sprawling ensemble casts), while the Safdies and Gerwig create tightly controlled universes that sing with specificity. For me, Peele is the most agile, moving between genres and using horror, comedy and magic realism – the “sunken place”, a genius concept, articulated visually and with flair – to explore the social issue of racism with confidence.
Will win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water

Best actor

Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Nahuel Pérez Biscayart – 120 BPM
Jamie Bell – Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name
Robert Pattinson – Good Time

The Academy likes to award an actor for a body of work (and almost always the wrong film – I’m looking at you, Gary Oldman). I’d like to see actors recognised for character roles and rewarded for performances that are singular without necessarily being showy for showmanship’s sake. As for Kaluuya – his performance in Get Out is deceptively understated. It’s major: exact, moving, and one of the most carefully wrought I’ve seen in a long time.
Will win: Tom Hanks – The Post

Best actress

Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip
Daniela Vega – A Fantastic Woman
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Brooklynn Kimberly Prince – The Florida Project
Cynthia Nixon – A Quiet Passion

Although comedy acting is considerably trickier to pull off than method seriousness, it’s rare to see comedians acknowledged in performance categories. I worry that Tiffany Haddish’s turn as loud-mouthed grapefruit enthusiast Dina in Girls Trip might be written off as everyday ensemble raunch, but those who have seen the film will be aware of just how dexterous her performance is. Haddish has credibility, ease, screwball physicality and sheer star wattage in spades.
Will win: Frances McDormand - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Tiffany Haddish in Girls Trip. Photograph: Michele K. Short/AP

Best supporting actor

Buddy Duress – Good Time
Lil Rel Howery – Get Out
Daniel Craig – Logan Lucky
O’Shea Jackson Jr – Ingrid Goes West
Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project

Howery, Craig and Jackson might seem like wildcards here, but all three are goofily loose and giddily funny in their small but neatly formed roles. Dafoe, on the other hand, is an awards-y choice, though he wouldn’t be a bad one – the way he modulates himself to suit non-actors Bria Vinaite and Brooklyn Prince requires skill worth celebrating. My pick? Safdie brothers stalwart Buddy Duress, a magnetic and deliciously unpredictable screen presence as a petty criminal in Good Time.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project

Best supporting actress

Betty Gabriel – Get Out
Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time
Mary J Blige – Mudbound
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Michelle Pfeiffer – Mother!

Lady Bird is a two-hander, so it’s annoying to have to shift Laurie Metcalf into the supporting actress category, despite her display of wit and precision as Lady Bird’s frustrated mother. For me, though, Betty Gabriel’s Georgina in Get Out was most memorable. Her portrayal of the house help, whose smiley compliance masks a truly sinister predicament, is a technical achievement that cleverly communicates the idea of assimilation as survival.
Will win: Allison Janney – I, Tonya

Other categories: best cinematography

Hélène Louvart – Beach Rats
Sean Price Williams – Good Time
Hoyte van Hoytema – Dunkirk
Darius Khondji – The Lost City of Z
Dan Laustsen – John Wick: Chapter 2

Laustsen was director of photography for The Shape of Water, but it’s the slick neon world he fashioned in the John Wick sequel that I find more impressive. Although VFX has its own category, digital cinematography is often celebrated as boundary pushing by the Academy. Yet photochemical film is thriving, from the large-format 65mm used in Dunkirk to the grainy 16mm used by Hélène Louvart to tell Eliza Hittman’s intimate story of a queer teenager’s Coney Island summer.
Will win: Dan Laustsen – The Shape of Water

Beach Rats.

Guy Lodge, Observer film writer

Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)

Phantom Thread
The Florida Project
Lady Bird
The Lost City of Z
Mother!

Paul Thomas Anderson’s swoon-worthy story of a toxic male creative ego meeting its match is, for me, the film of the year and one of the pre-eminent American auteur’s most exquisite achievements: sensual, literate, wildly funny, immaculately classical in construction, yet topical in its gender politics. Precursor awards suggest it’s too pristine, too perverse to crack the best picture race; in its absence, Greta Gerwig’s small, perfectly formed Lady Bird will have my heart.
Will win: Get Out

Best director

Darren Aronofsky – Mother!
Kitty Green – Casting JonBenét
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Andrey Zvyagintsev – Loveless
Paul Thomas Anderson – Phantom Thread

Having snagged an all-important nod from the Directors Guild of America, Gerwig looks on track to become only the fifth woman in history to score a best director Oscar nomination. She could even take the prize, though she’ll need to overcome the Academy’s recent bias in this category toward swaggering technical showcases with a plethora of moving parts — a department in which Darren Aronofsky’s exhilaratingly demented, ever-expanding psychodrama deserves more credit than it has received.
Will win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water

Director Darren Aronofsky at the UK premiere of Mother! in London. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

Best actor

Claes Bang – The Square
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Channing Tatum – Logan Lucky

Bar the odd exception like Isabelle Huppert in last year’s Elle, outstanding foreign-language performances routinely struggle to gain traction on the infuriatingly anglocentric awards circuit. This explains why Danish star Bang, a deft, urbane, tragicomic revelation as an inwardly collapsing museum curator in Ruben Östlund’s The Square, hasn’t received an infinitesimal fraction of the attention given to Gary Oldman’s hoary,, latex-swaddled Winston Churchill impression in the unbearable Darkest Hour. Same as it ever was.
Will win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour

Best actress

Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Kirsten Dunst – The Beguiled
Sally HawkinsMaudie
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Vicky Krieps – Phantom Thread

After a year in which women took control of Hollywood through the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, how gratifying that best actress is so richly contested. Of my choices, I expect only Ronan to make the Academy’s Oscar lineup, though Hawkins will be nominated for her heart-soaringly wordless turn in The Shape of Water; that I think she’s even better as the socially isolated, arthritis-crippled folk artist Maud Lewis shows what a career-crowning year she’s had.
Will win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Sally Hawkins, seen here in The Shape of Water. Photograph: Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures

Best supporting actor

Jean-Louis Trintignant – Happy End
Austin Abrams – Brad’s Status
Michael Fassbender – Alien: Covenant
O’Shea Jackson Jr – Ingrid Goes West
Barry Keoghan – The Killing of a Sacred Deer

More often than not, this is a category the Academy uses to recognise strong, long-serving character actors they haven’t yet acknowledged. So it is that this looks like a neck-and-neck race between Sam Rockwell (really a lead in Three Billboards) and Willem Dafoe. The 87-year-old Jean-Louis Trintignant is my pie-in-the-sky candidate for such a win, but I was equally wowed by three bright millennial breakouts: Austin Abrams, Barry Keoghan and O’Shea Jackson Jr will surely have their day soon.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project

Best supporting actress

Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time
Melissa Leo – Novitiate
Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Elisabeth Moss – The Square

If you haven’t heard of Novitiate, that’s because Maggie Betts’s stirring, rigorously nuanced convent drama, pitting a draconian Tennessee nunnery against the Vatican’s mid-1960s church reform, has no scheduled UK release. A hit at Sundance last year, the film made scarcely a ripple in American cinemas: if it had, Melissa Leo’s stunning hellfire turn as a venomous Mother Superior would be reaping as many plaudits as Oscar frontrunners Metcalf and Allison Janney. Keep an eye out for it.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird

Taliah Lennice Webster in Good Time.

Other categories: best original screenplay

120 BPM
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Lady Bird
The Ornithologist
Phantom Thread

While this year’s best adapted screenplay race is so sparse that James Ivory’s statuette for Call Me By Your Name has already been sent to the engravers, its original counterpart is so fiercely competitive it’s almost impossible to call. Lady Bird? Get Out? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri? I’d plump for the sharp, lively rhetorical to-and-fro of 120 BPM, Robin Campillo’s riveting Aids-activist study, though after the film’s surprise omission from the foreign-film shortlist, that looks less likely than ever.
Will win: Get Out

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