A superfact on each of the six leading Academy Awards

Will all the leading BAFTA winners triumph again at the Oscars?

The six winners of the key awards at the BAFTAs - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress - are all clear favourites to win again at the Oscars. Will they all complete the double though? Here’s a key statistic for each category:

BEST PICTURE
Contenders:
Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, The Reader, Frost/Nixon
Superfact:
The BAFTAs Best Film winner has only won at the Oscars in one of the last seven years, which doesn’t bode well for favourite Slumdog Millionaire.

BEST DIRECTOR
Contenders:
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Gus Van Sant (Milk), Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon), Stephen Daldry (The Reader)
Superfact:

Posted: February 20th, 2009 by Michael Lintorn | Add Comment

Slumdog Millionaire is favourite to land Best Picture

Click here to check all the best betting odds for this year’s Oscars

chickendinner has been researching Oscar trends to help you make money on this year’s awards. Every weekday we’ll be passing on information on one of the six main categories, starting today with the Best Picture award:

Slumdog Millionaire
Danny Boyle’s film is the favourite after being victorious at the Golden Globes but only three of the last eight Globes’ winners have triumphed at the Oscars. Slumdog is probably the most violent nominee though and the last five winners have all featured a healthy dose of brutality.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald novella is up for more awards than any other film at this year’s Oscars having received 13 nominations in total. It also made the most money of all the candidates by grossing over $100 million at the box office. However, no movie starring Brad Pitt has ever been victorious in this category.

Milk

Posted: January 27th, 2009 by Michael Lintorn | Add Comment

Who will win Best Picture at the Golden Globes?

chickendinner runs the rule over the five contenders

British director Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire leads the betting for Best Picture at this weekend’s Golden Globes which means there is big money available on some of the other nominees. chickendinner’s Danny Harris has looked at all the contenders to see what their prospects of winning are:

The Reader (Stephen Daldry)

The Reader is a romantic drama set in Germany in the 1950s about a young lawyer - Michael Berg (David Kross) and his affair with an older woman (Kate Winslet) who loves being read too. Their affair ends when Winslet suddenly disappears one day only to resurfaces eight years later as a defendant in a war crimes trial in which Berg is working on.

Daldry won the award in 2002 for The Hours and producers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella who both died before filming was completed have won the award as directors of Out of Africa and The English Patient respectively.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher)

Brad Pitt plays Benjamin Button in this fantasy drama – a man who ages in reverse. The film is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald who came up with the idea after hearing a remark from Mark Twain about the pity of having the best of life when you’re young and the worst of it when you are old.

Posted: January 9th, 2009 by Michael Lintorn | Add Comment