Two Tickets For..'s Oscar Nominations Predictions - Best Director, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay

Sarah: Hello readers! It's been a big day here at Two Tickets For... with our Golden Katz Award! So we're going to continue the awards season predictions with the Academy Award for Best Director. 

I'm going to have to go with the number one spot and that will go to Ben Affleck. His directing in Argo was amazing. He was able to bring enough intrigue ad suspense to a movie that most of the world already knew the ending of. Being able to manipulate the audience to feel real fear for the characters on screen is a feat that few directors have been able to accomplish. I don't typically like Affleck but I do hope that he wins this category this year.


A: The directing category has a few shoo-ins, and Affleck is one of those, so good call.

Another one of those shoo-ins is going to be Steven Spielberg for Lincoln. That movie has it all for Academy voters - it's a period piece, it's about Abe Lincoln, it deals with a touchy subject, Spielberg's fingerprints are all over it and he ably directs the many big stars he cast in the many roles. Spielberg, even in years he might not necessarily deserve it (like last year, in our opinion), is about as close to a sure bet as you can make.

S: Another one that fits that description to a T is Ang Lee for Life of Pi. Between the script and the beautiful way in which this movie was shot, Lee will certainly be on this short list. While I think that what Lee did was admirable, considering most people said this was a movie that would never translate to the big screen, I wonder if he should be there for basically directing an animated movie? Nevertheless, we think that he will be another shoe-in for the Best Director nominees.

A: There's one more shoo-in for Best Director and that would be the first woman to ever win the award, Kathryn Bigelow. She won three years ago for The Hurt Locker, and she's a front-runner up there with Spielberg and Affleck for her epic CIA manhunt film, Zero Dark Thirty. Much like she did with The Hurt Locker, Bigelow has shown once again how deftly she can handle creating tension, specifically in regards to America's presence in the Middle East following 9/11. She got great performances out of all her actors, and along with her screenwriter Mark Boal, she did the best imaginable job in giving the general public an inside peek into what the hunt for Osama bin Laden was like (even if it has created an internal investigation into the CIA possibly giving too much info).

So those are the four directors that we're 99.9% certain will get nominated on Thursday, leaving one more spot. Ostensibly the last spot is up for grabs between three directors - Michael Hanake for Amour, Tom Hooper for Les Miserables, and Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained. I'm going to give the nod to Tarantino and it's for this reason:

In four out of the last five years, the Directors Guild nominees and the Academy Award nominees have matched with the exception of one nominee. Last year the DGA nominated David Fincher, the Academy nominated Terrence Malick. In 2011 the DGA nominated Christopher Nolan, the Academy nominated the Coen Bros., and so on. (Thanks to Entertainment Weekly for pointing that out today. Credit where credit's due.) I knew that was the case the last few years, and now that I see the DGA has nominated Tom Hooper for Les Mis and all their others match what we have so far, I'm going to say Hooper is out and Tarantino is in.

S: Okay, so that wraps up our discussion on who we think will be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. To recap, we have:

Ben Affleck, Argo

Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Ang Lee, Life of Pi

Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty

Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

A: Next and ever so briefly, we're going to cover our predictions for who will be nominated in the two screenplay categories. We won't discuss them in depth, but here's who we think will represent the Best Original Screenplay category:

Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
Rian Johnson, Looper
Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom
Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

S: And here are our predictions for the nominees in the Best Adapted Screenplay category:

Chris Terrio, Argo
Tony Kushner, Lincoln
Stephen Chbosky, Perks of Being a Wildflower
David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
David Magee, Life of Pi

A: Sorry that we posted this one so late. We'll be shooting to post our final predictions tomorrow, which will include our guesses for the Best Picture nominees as well as a full recap of all our picks (minus the short film categories) for the Oscar Nominations Predictions contest being hosted at filmactually.blogspot.com. As always, thanks for reading!