My Oscar Picks 2013

In November last year, Kathryn Bigelows "Zero Dark Thirty" still seemed to be the prime contender for "Best Picture". Almost every (American) critic loved it. But when the nominees were announced things changed by almost 180 degrees. Bigelow wasn't even nominated in the director's category and all the controversy surrounding her film weakened its chances. Lincoln then seemed to be the most obvious choice. But the last couple of weeks showed another unexpected trend. Ben Affleck's tense thriller "Argo" was sweeping most of the important awards including DGA, PGA, SAG and Critics Choice Award. However, Affleck is also not nominated as best director which is really odd since he got the appreciation by the Directors Guild. So if "Argo" wins best picture after all the recent buzz it would be only the fourth time that the corresponding director would not recieve a trophy. It's gonna be an interesting night this time.

So here are my guesses in all 24 categories:

Director's Diary - Part 4: All that remains

Hell, we thought this was gonna be fast and easy. Basically what we had to do were some detailshots, a couple of shots of the monitor while being in a chatroom and getting a call, and two tracking shots through the hallway. The one thing that we hadn't have a solution for so far, the thing we thought was the most difficult to do today, was then brillantly solved by our cameraman in a couple of minutes.

Director's Diary - Part 3: Lucky Number Three

On day three we had to film the most difficult scene in the film. It was a short tracking shot that was really hard to do for the cameraman as he had to go from a static position for some short lines of dialog to a free walk through the room following the protagonist out the door and around the corner with the camera in hand, all whilst regulating the focus at certain moments. It certainly wasn't looking "professional" in the end but for our purposes I thought it was fantastic. I was surprised of how good we got it.

Director's Diary - Part 2: Surprises of each kind

New day, new room, new angles. We needed some time to accomodate and set everything up again.
we then kept shooting a lot of takes for the dialogue counterpart to what we did the day before, this time with our protagonist. While recording his parts and reactions we ran a take from the day before for him over the computer screen. I was surprised of how great it worked. Also, to hear those takes in context made them sound a lot better and a lot more convincing which was also a positive surprise. It was a little more relaxed than yesterday, too since we got another two days time.