THB #645: 8.5 Weeks To Oscar... Popular!

Voting for nominations is less than a week away. (Next Wednesday, the 8th, 9am, to be exact.) And everything feels very settled…and very unsettled.

This is still the Season of the Freak™.

And by “freak,” I don’t mean to point to or poke at any group of any kind so much as the idea that the season is loaded with movies that have elements to turn on or turn off every Academy voter. The question that we guessers have to wrestle with is how many people are on each side of that equation for each movie.

More than ever, Oscar guessers are blind. We don’t know what people are watching on their Academy screening platforms. The Academy knows. And it really, really matters. The platform has marginalized the read one could get off of theatrical screenings and box office. If 70% of Academy members have watched Anora and only 40% have watched Babygirl and 25% have watched September 5, that means A LOT. And those numbers could be completely different than that hypothetical. My point is, voters seeing…