The first awards results are in. At last night's Gotham Awards, Beasts of the Southern Wild won two prizes. Both were for director Benh Zeitlin, who won both the Breakthrough Director award and the Bingham Ray award, which comes with a check for $25,000. However, the top prize for Best Feature went to Moonrise Kingdom.
Both films have the potential to grab a Best Picture nomination in the Oscar race. On GoldDerby, Beasts of the Southern Wild appears more frequently than Moonrise Kingdom in the critics' top ten picks for the Best Picture nod. Both pictures generally appear in the last few spots, below heavyweight frontrunners like Silver Linings Playbook, Argo, Lincoln and Les Miserables. Last year's co-winner for Best Feature at the Gotham Awards, The Tree of Life, earned a Best Picture nomination, so Gotham Awards can predict what happens at the Oscars. The question is if Beasts and Moonrise will end up with a spot on the Best Picture list, or if just one will prevail.
From a story standpoint, both Anderson and Zeitlin have a narrative that fits with a nomination. Moonrise director Wes Anderson has been nominated twice before, once for "Best Animated
Feature" for Fantastic Mr. Fox and a decade ago for his screenplay for The Royal Tenenbaums. His latest was a summer hit, earning $45 million and reinvigorating his reputation. What better time for the Academy to reward him? In contrast, Zeitlin made his debut feature completely outside the Hollywood system, and the result astonished critics and audiences. For Zeitlin and Beasts, a nomination would be a feel-good story about a rise to fame. But will the Academy want to embrace something done on such a shoestring budget, with no guilds or Hollywood professionals involved? For both the movie and the outside story, my money's on Beasts of the Southern Wild, not Moonrise Kingdom. But enough people disagree with me that this year's Best Picture picks will be a nail-biting surprise.
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