On Tuesday, the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) honored “Mad Max: Fury Road” with their annual Grand Prix award. Eligible titles were feature films premiering since July 2014, and “Fury Road” beat out “The Assassin,” “Son of Saul” and “Taxi” — all of which have already taken home major prizes from international film festivals this year.
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Recent winners of the award have gone on to Oscar success: “Boyhood” (2014), “Amour” (2012) and “The Tree of Life” (2011) all won the Grand Prix before earning their Best Picture nominations. Does this give “Fury Road” the “street cred” among critics it needs to truly break into the Best Picture race? Five of our Experts have already placed it in their early predictions for a nomination, and it currently holds 50/1 overall odds when the Experts are combined with the collective picks of our Editors, Users and Top 24 Users (those two dozen folks who did the best predicting last year’s nominations).
“Mad Max” would be an uncommon choice for the Oscars, which usually eschews action, sci-fi and fantasy films, but the academy has made exceptions in recent years for films with a strong enough critical and cultural impact, like “District 9,” “Inception” and “Avatar.” “The Dark Knight” missed out on Best Picture bid in 2008, but it probably would have made the cut if that lineup had been expanded to 10 nominees as in subsequent years. And don’t forget the historic sweep by “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” in 2003.
What do you think of “Fury Road’s” chances? Is there a strong enough mandate for it to override the academy’s usual biases?
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Make your Oscar predictions and you could earn a place of honor on our leaderboard and a starring role in next year’s Top 24 Users (the two dozen folks who do the best predicting this year’s Oscar nominations).
Meet the guy who topped our leaderboard predicting the Oscar nominations last year — and learn how he did it and how you can be our next Gold Derby superstar.
Last year, our Top 24 Users led the way with an accuracy rate of 76.67% when it came to predicting the Oscar nominations. Next up were Gold Derby’s Editors with 74.44%, followed by the Experts with 71.11% and all Users with 68.09%. (Click on any of these groups to see what they got right and wrong last year.)
Which group will be victorious this year?
As some of our Users turn out to be our smartest prognosticators, it’s important that you give us your predictions. Your picks influence our Users racetrack odds, which also factor into our official combined odds.
Photo: Tom Hardy in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Credit: Moviestore/REX
