Best Original Score:

Four of the five nominees have multiple previous nominations for Best Original Score. Five-time Academy Award winner John Williams receives his fifty-second nomination for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, forty-two years after he won his third statuette for the original film. Two-time winner Alexandre Desplat receives his eleventh for Little Women, and another two-time Oscar winner Randy Newman receives another nomination with his work on Marriage Story. Thomas Newman also has previous nominations receiving his fifteenth here but never having won. His score for 1917 might finally see him take home a long-awaited and deserved statuette. However, first-time Icelandic nominee Hildur Guðnadóttir impressed audiences with a haunting score in Joker and could beat out the competition.

Prediction: Joker

Best Original Song:

The Best Original Song category has never felt like a natural fit in either the art of film or the Academy Awards, since the short pop-oriented songs that get nominated are often not integral to the structure of the films they appear in. That is why this category almost always feels like it was picked by people who 1) did not watch a lot of movies and 2) went for obvious, well-known choices. Elton John (“I’m Gonna Love Me (Again)”), Randy Newman (“I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away”), Diane Warren (“I’m Standing With You”) and Bobby and Kristin Lopez (“Into the Unknown”) are all previous nominees and winners. Perhaps the most interesting nominee is Diane Warren, who has written so many recognizable songs that play on Top 40 radio all the time (“Nothing’s Going to Stop Us Now”, “How Do I Live”, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”) and has never won. Perhaps the Academy would feel some pressure to honor her long career, but it does not seem likely.

“Stand Up” from Harriet is perhaps the standout among these songs. It was written by Joshuah Campbell, a young, talented songwriter who found success in “Sing Out/March On,” a successful homage to the long tradition of Black spirituals and could have easily been sung during the civil rights movement. With Cynthia Erivo‘s powerful vocals, “Stand Up” is a powerful continuation in the same vein. However, the voters tend to vote for the obvious frontrunners in this category. The Lopezes are undeniable even though “Into the Unknown” didn’t have half of the cultural impact that “Let It Go” did.

Prediction: I’m Gonna Love Me Again

Best Film Editing:

Editing is one of those Oscar categories where more is better. Editing tends to be underappreciated because, if done well, a casual viewer will rarely notice the editing. It is either when it is disastrous (Bohemian Rhapsody, which actually won last year in this category) or flashy (Mad Max: Fury Road, Slumdog Millionaire) that anyone really takes notice. Movies like Ford v Ferrari (Michael McCusker and Andrew Buckland) or Parasite (Yang Jinmo) seem to fit this bill. Also, films of great scope (such as war films) or length tend to win this award (Dunkirk, Gravity, Hacksaw Ridge). Jojo Rabbit (Tom Eagles) is basically a war film; The Irishman (Thelma Schoonmaker) is definitely a long film; Joker (Jeff Groth) is great in scope in that it is a film of grand judgments painted by sweeping brushstrokes.

The Irishman has the benefit of being edited by the great Thelma Schoonmaker, who famously declared that Martin Scorsese‘s films aren’t violent until she gets her hands on them. Her ability to balance lengthy conversations with scenes of shocking violence shows just how versatile and precise an editor she is. Yet Schoonmaker has won several times, and the film of this season is Parasite. It’s hard to imagine this film working without the well-timed visual jokes of vertical movement that Yang Jinmo brought to this dazzling film. If Bong Joon-ho is the auteur of the film, he has the solid foundation of Yang’s editing to thank for the film’s success.

Prediction: Parasite