OSCAR VOTING CLOSES! Pete Hammond's Absolute, Final, Complete Winner Predictions

The polls for voting in the 88th annual Academy Awards have now just officially closed. The campaign that started in earnest at the three fall film festivals in early September is over. The answers will soon be in those envelopes to be opened on the Dolby Theatre stage on Sunday night. So now my final predictions of what those names will be can be officially revealed.

RELATED Undecided In Your Oscar Best Picture Ballot? Deadline Is Here To Help In what has been one of the tightest races in many years, the normal soothsayers we look to for guidance—the critics and guild awards—have been split all over the place. The guilds showed love to The Revenant (DGA), Spotlight (SAG, WGA) and The Big Short (PGA, WGA) with their top awards, and BAFTA added a late-inning win for The Revenant.

Pete Hammond badgeBut you can’t discount a movie like Mad Max: Fury Road, with its 10 nominations and a lot of below-the-line guild love. This might be a four-way race; one that could even stand to be spoiled by another film coming in from left field if all of the front-runners truly split. My final picks indicate Mad Max could run up a bigger final total of wins than any other movie going into the opening of the Best Picture envelope.

And wouldn’t it be fascinating to see something like Room, with only four nominations—though all of them key—sneak in like a little British film called Chariots Of Fire did in 1981, unseating all the favorites and pulling off one of the greatest Best Picture upsets in Oscar history? It could happen.

In fact, anything could happen in this highly unpredictable year. Remember that the Academy, unlike BAFTA, DGA or SAG, 88thOscarsKeyStatuette-556x815use a preferential ballot for the Best Picture category. I have found that many Oscar voters still don’t know what that means, and I have given up trying to explain it, but if you only voted for one movie in Best Picture and left the rest of the order blank, odds are good you might have disqualified any real influence you might have had on the outcome. Sometimes, and especially this year, a voter’s No. 2 or No. 3 choice just might turn out to be even more important than their first choice.read more