Sabin wrote: Forgive me, but wasn't Mark Harris one of those loyal The King's Speech Rex Reeds types who refused to let go of it throughout the Oscar season and it looked embarrassing...until he was 100% right? I could be totally wrong, but I think that was him.
I'd about bet the house you have him confused with Dave Karger, also formerly of EW. Though Harris writes about the Oscars regularly, he isn't a "new list every week" predictor: he predicts nominations and winners one time each, right before the announcements. So it's very unlikely he'd have done such a thing.
While it may be too soon to assume Imitation Game's Metacritic will stay as low as it is today (a dreary 67), it's more a stretch to say subsequent reviews are going to rocket it to King's Speech territory. Because we think of King's Speech as the film that knocked out critics' pet The Social Network (which got a stellar 95), we tend to think of it as some mediocrity -- but, in fact, it scored extremely well with critics, getting a would-have-looked-great-any-other-year 88 on Metacritic. What strikes me, looking at Imitation Game's page as it stands now, is the lack of enthusiasm -- its highest score is an 80. There may well be some higher scores to come, but you'd think someone from that initial group of responders would have put it in the 90s. King's Speech got 16 100's, some of them early on; it's hard to see Imitation Game matching that after such a slow start. I take Harris' point to be that we're lumping the film in with King's Speech because it seems the same TYPE movie, and overlooking the fact that Hooper's movie had a genuine base of excited viewers that hasn't as yet shown up for Imitation (or Theory of Everything -- and I do agree with Harris that the surface similarity between those two films suggests they could be one another's worst enemies during the awards run).
Because I was over at Metacritic, I decided to check on the recent run of best picture winners and found -- contrary to expectation -- almost all have been critics' favorites to a greater extent than I recalled (or than I'd have co-signed). Crash was the last sub-par choice (69 on Metacritic -- but would we agree that, for many, Crash was more a "No" vote on Brokeback than a huge endorsement?). Since then, the numbers read: The Departed 86, No Country for Old Men 91, Slumdog Millionaire 86, The Hurt Locker 94, The King's Speech 88, The Artist 89, Argo 86, 12 Years a Slave 97. All those films also finished within the top three at the NY Critics' voting (exception: The King's Speech -- I never found runners-up for 2010, so I can't say if it placed. But Firth did win best actor, so it may well have been in the running). All of which to say, the myth promoted on many of the Oscar sites -- that critics mean nothing, and anonymous rapturous responses at Academy screenings can negate them -- seems to be horse-pucky. The Academy votes for films it likes, but generally they're films critics like, too.
I do, though, BJ, agree with you that Cumberbatch -- very clearly loved in many industry quarters (see: Emmys) -- could take the best actor prize without his film running the table. Right this moment, I can imagine a pitched three-way battle for best actor among Cumberbatch, Redmayne and Keaton (with Cooper perhaps to join them). I only hope the televised awards don't take the juice out of the race the way they did last year.
And my take on Whiplash is exactly yours: I hear enormous enthusiasm for it in certain quarters (enthusiasm that baffles me), and would be on the lookout for it to aggress into major categories...but at the same time can't imagine it doing that while performing as poorly commercially as it has. It's already down to about $5000 per screen at under 50 theatres (Birdman, by comparison, is averaging $28,000 in the same), and isn't even close to a million in earnings. Beasts of the Southern Wild -- the most recent precedent for Sundance/best picture contender -- had nearly $13 million in grosses; I don't see how Whiplash approaches that. None of this is fatal to Simmons' supporting actor campaign -- Christopher Plummer and Jim Broadbent have shown you can win that category with miniscule earnings -- but the screenplay/director/film nominations people have been murmuring about would seem to require more broad popularity.