The 87th Academy Awards: A definitive guide to winning your Oscar pool

last updated 20 February 2015

After months of campaigning and schmoozing — as well as the occasional movie screening — the Academy Awards are nearly upon us. As Hollywood's biggest stars gear up for the industry's biggest night, thousands of Americans are fighting for another, equally distinguished honor: the top prize in an Oscar pool.

Oscar prognosticating is an inexact science, but it's not a shot in the dark, either; everything from the history of the Academy to the winners of other awards can be used to help inform your choices. Below, I've tackled every category, made my best guesses, and explained how I arrived at them. Take a look, then tune in on Sunday to see how I did — and find out whether you get to lord a victory of your own over friends and colleagues for a year. Good luck!

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The year's biggest race is also one of the closest. For months, Boyhood was the presumptive frontrunner, with also-rans like Selma and The Imitation Game fading as the Academy Awards drew closer and closer. But Birdman surprised analysts by snagging the top prize from all three major Hollywood guilds (Producer's Guild, Director's Guild, and Screen Actor's Guild). Those awards are seen as the most reliable predictors for the Academy Awards, since their voting bodies overlap with the Academy. It's been nearly 20 years since a film won all three of those awards without also winning Best Picture, and Birdman — a flashy, navel-gazing movie about the inner workings of a Hollywood actor — is exactly the kind of movie the Academy tends to reward. If you don't want to deviate from the statistical probabilities, you should absolutely bet on Birdman.

So why would anyone bet on Boyhood? The movie's backers are citing a combination of categorical analysis and good old-fashioned "feel." On a basic level, there's simply no precedent for Boyhood, which — as you've undoubtedly heard several dozen times this Oscar season — took 12 years to film. It's no surprise that Birdman's star-studded ensemble cast earned the top SAG award, or even that Alejandro Iñárritu's tricky direction earned the top DGA award — but Boyhood is the type of all-around cinematic feat that the Academy, as a whole, might deem worthy of its top prize.

Also, consider this: the Best Picture category is decided by something called "preferential voting," in which each voter ranks the nominated movies from best to worst, with a commensurate number of points awarded to each. Boyhood fans argue that Birdman, a more polarizing movie, will receive as many last-place votes as first-place, while Boyhood will benefit from a lot of second- and third-place rankings.

Another tight race between the two movies vying for the Academy's top prize. For decades, it was common wisdom that the same movie would win Best Director and Best Picture, but that old saw has been thwarted twice in a row: last year, when Gravity's Alfonso Cuarón won Best Director opposite 12 Years a Slave's Best Picture, and two years ago, when Life of Pi's Ang Lee won Best Director opposite Argo's Best Picture. (Argo director Ben Affleck wasn't even nominated.)

How much does the Academy love Birdman? A massive swell of support for the movie is the only thing that could derail Redmayne's chances for Best Actor at the Oscars. Keaton has been roundly praised for his self-aware performance in Birdman, but Redmayne's channeling of Stephen Hawking for The Theory of Everything — which Hawking described as virtually indistinguishable from his actual self — is a safe bet for the award.

J.K. Simmons' turn as a pitiless music instructor in Whiplash is exactly the kind of supporting performance the Academy tends to award: intense, unforgettable, and hailing from a longtime character actor who finally got a major role with some bite. As in the Best Actor race, an unlikely (but theoretically possible) spoiler would come as part of a groundswell of support for Birdman, with Edward Norton's caustic, self-aware take on a pretentious actor stealing the prize from Simmons.

In recent years, Best Original Screenplay has morphed into a way to honor the year's funkiest Best Picture nominee without giving it the top prize; the past few winners were Her, Django Unchained, and Midnight in Paris, none of which had a chance at Best Picture or Best Director. Expect Wes Anderson's layered, carefully calibrated screenplay for The Grand Budapest Hotel to take the top prize, with the usual caveats about a possible Birdman surge.

A relatively tight race between two very different films: one a classically made, classically told British historical drama, and the other a dark, modern drama set in contemporary America. By any rational standard, Whiplash shouldn't be in this category at all; it was "adapted" from a short film, directed by Damien Chazelle, that was merely a proof-of-concept scene designed to attract financial backers.

One of the evening's true toss-ups, the Best Foreign Film category is a difficult call between three highly acclaimed films. Poland's Ida is a gripping historical drama about the rippling aftereffects of World War II; Russia's Leviathan is a contemporary political riff on the biblical story of Job; Argentina's Wild Tales is a blackly comic anthology film about how quickly social niceties can collapse. I'd give a very slight edge to Ida, but it's entirely possible that Leviathan or Wild Tales takes the Best Foreign Film trophy.

The surprise omission of The LEGO Movie, which many critics (including me) had pegged as the likely winner, has thrown the entire Best Animated Film category into disarray. Though it disappointed at the box office this summer, it's hard to see any of the category's other nominees overtaking the highly acclaimed How to Train Your Dragon sequel. If any film does, it will probably be the similarly pitched Big Hero 6 over arthouse contenders like Song of the Sea and The Tale of Princess Kaguya.

Foxcatcher featured an impressively transformative makeup job on Steve Carell, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony, which means that the race is likely down to the other two nominees. Guardians of the Galaxy features some otherworldly makeup and costuming, but the film's two most memorable characters were crafted using CGI. I suspect The Grand Budapest Hotel's fanciful approach to makeup and hairstyling will eke out a victory.

The Best Animated Short category is often unfairly reduced to "Disney/Pixar vs. everything else" — but this year, that's probably correct. Disney's Feast, which follows an adorable dog (and which screened before Big Hero 6), is easily the biggest and splashiest of the contenders, and it's probably the safest bet. If a spoiler is going to emerge, I'd put my money on the gorgeous and highly acclaimed The Dam Keeper, which draws on more than 8,000 still paintings for its 18-minute narrative.

Full disclosure: I haven't seen a single nominee in the Best Live Action Short category yet, so I'm winging it based on my knowledge of the Academy's tastes and what I've heard from my fellow critics. Most prognosticators are favoring The Phone Call, which tells the story of a crisis hotline worker (Sally Hawkins) and a man who takes an overdose of pills (Jim Broadbent). It's possible that the inclusion of a real-life story about a crisis hotline in the Best Documentary Short category will hurt The Phone Call's chances, but nevertheless, that's what I'll be checking in my personal Oscar pool.

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.

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