Best Adapted Screenplay:

In what could be an indicator for the biggest prizes of the night, the screenplay awards can throw an occasional curveball. Though The Father took home an award for Best Adapted Screenplay, it lost Best Picture to another screenplay nominee in Nomadland.

This year has a strong mixture of contenders from various categories, and only one is not nominated for Best Picture, Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s brilliant debut feature, The Lost Daughter. Adaptation of such rich source material can be a difficult task, and Dune, nominated here with Denis Villeneuve, has previously defeated two giants of auteur cinema, David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Villeneuve’s science-fiction epic take on Frank Herbert‘s novel is grand in scope and sleek in design, telling the story in the most concise screen adaptation to date. The potential curveball mentioned here could be the omission of Best Picture nominee Nightmare Alley. Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan‘s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham‘s novel is robustly reimagined in Del Toro’s signature world-building skill and detail. 

Drive My Car is well placed here for Ryusuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe‘s adaption of Haruki Murakami‘s short of the same name. Sian Heder‘s CODA features as a potential Best Picture winner also. Favorite for Best Adapted Screenplay is Jane Campion‘s western drama The Power of the Dog, adapted from Thomas Savage‘s 1967 novel. A bout of melancholy, solitude and resentment played out in a psychological western, Campion brings torment to the fore in a slow-building tension that excavates the source material poignantly.

Prediction: The Power of the Dog

Best Animated Feature Film:

As is so often the case, Disney leads the group in nominations this year, though this time, in a small break from tradition, the Pixar offering doesn’t seem to be the frontrunner. Encanto, a film about a Colombian family with magical gifts featuring a soundtrack written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, seems like Disney’s best bet at winning the category this year with songs from its soundtrack outpacing ‘Let It Go’ on the charts and a later release than the rest of the nominees keeping it fresh in voters’ minds. Also from Disney is Raya and the Last Dragon, an adventure film inspired by Southeast Asian culture from veteran Disney director Don Hall, who previously won the award for Big Hero 6, and Carlos Lopez Estrada, making his animated directorial debut following his acclaimed live action feature Blindspotting.

Pixar’s entry, Luca, continues the international inspiration for the Disney distributed fare this year with a fantasy coming of age film set in Italy that aimed to marry Fellini and Miyazaki‘s sensibilities. Lord and Miller, the duo behind Into the Spider-Verse, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and The LEGO Movie, have also returned to the field of nominees this year having written The Mitchells vs. The Machines, a road trip comedy wherein an offbeat family has to fend off a robotic apocalypse.

Finally, in perhaps the most surprising departure from the usual, Flee, a Danish documentary also nominated for Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature, has become the first documentary and one of only a handful of foreign language films nominated in the category, further pushing animated films to acclaim beyond their single category and possibly signaling the Academy is taking them more seriously, and that another animated Best Picture nominee or winner could be just around the corner.

Prediction: Encanto

Best Animated Short Film:

In the Best Animated Short Film category this year, we see a nomination for Affairs of the Art, a film that follows the character of Beryl decades after Beryl’s debut in the 1987 short film Girls Night Out. In Affairs of the Art we meet Beryl’s family and fall in love with their hijinks as Beryl pursues a career as an artist. Affairs of the Art is a 2D-animated film consisting of ~24,000 hand drawn frames. 

In the realm of the philosophical, we have the films BoxBallet and The Windshield Wiper, the former exploring the commonalities between the artistry of a ballerina and a boxer while the latter sees a man chainsmoking a pack of cigarettes and asking the age-old question: “what is love?”. Also on a more serious note is the film Bestia, a film revolving around a character inspired by Íngrid Olderöck, a police major who during the Chilean military dictatorship committed many atrocities. The film delves into her personal life and her relationship with her dog while showing the trauma faced by her and her country twofold.

And last but not least is the adorable Robin Robin. In the film, a robin is raised by a family of mice. The differences between her and the mice grow evermore apparent when they sneak into Who-Man’s homes. Nonetheless, the robin is determined to prove her worth and that she, despite the obvious, truly belongs within the family of mice.

Prediction: Robin Robin