What’s gonna win Best Picture?

It’s that time of the year again. Awards season. The time where the crème de la crème of last year’s films get honored by the Academy of Arts and Motion Picture. It is truly the best time of the year for anyone who loves film or just enjoys seeing famous people dressing up in tuxedos and dresses in order to possibly receive an award. The one thing that this time always leads to is speculation is what or who is going to win which category, the most important always being Best Picture.

The nominees for Best Picture this year have all received critical acclaim and very vastly in story and content, from the melancholy Manchester by the Sea to the coming-of-age tale of Moonlight to the new-western Hell or High Water to the biopic Hidden Figures to the dramatic musical La La Land to the brutal war film Hacksaw Ridge. This year’s nominees highlight so many different stories from the uplifting to the depressing, but for me, and many other award shows, there is one clear winner this year.

I may be a bit biased on this, but many other people and award shows feel the same way that I do, La La Land is the clear Best Picture winner for this year. It is a beautiful film on both a technical and emotional level, with some great performances and some great music as well.

First off, while I don’t think very highly of these awards, La La Land won several categories at this year’s Golden Globes, including Best Picture – Comedy or Musical.

More recently though, La La Land won Best Picture at the BAFTAs, which are essentially the British version of the Oscars. It has also won Best Picture at the Critic’s Choice Awards, the Director’s Guild of America, and the Producer’s Guild of America awards. In addition to this, the American Film Institute named it one of the top 10 films of the year, along with several of the other nominees for Best Picture at the Oscars.

You may be thinking, “So what if it won those awards, they can’t predict the Oscars.” And in that thinking you would be wrong. The Academy is made up of members of the filmmaking industry that are currently working or have worked for a long time and, often times, the voters for the Academy also belong to their respective Guilds, such as the Director’s, Producer’s, and Screen Actor’s Guilds. There is a lot of crossover between the voters of each respective Guild and the Academy because of this and the way that these Guilds vote, often predicts who is going to win the Oscar, especially for Best Picture. There have been discrepancies in the past, such as in 2013 when Ben Affleck won Best Directing for Argo at the Director’s Guild Awards and wasn’t even nominated in the category for the Oscars. These are few and far between though.

As far I can say though, my speculation that La La Land is going to win Best Picture at the Oscars is just that, speculation. We won’t know who will until Sunday night, but in the meantime, you should go out and watch all of the Best Picture nominees.