Fun with The Oscars

I never cared to watch award shows when I was single, and I still don't – with one exception: The Oscars. Since my husband and I like watching movies together, seeing which ones scoop up awards is a fun game for me. My husband may grumble that he doesn't care about the Oscars, but we always have a good time watching and comparing notes.

With the help of printable ballots offered by various websites, we make it into a no-stakes sporting event. If you want to play at home, grab a ballot and mark your votes in advance. PureWow offers a great printable ballot. You can also peruse the Oscar Nominees laid out with nice thumbnails to jog your memory of a given movie or role. That site also offers a printable ballot. (Several sites have ballots; I like to look over a few and find one without a lot of unnecessary extra graphics and a layout I like for printing.)

You can make your own voting rules to spice things up. My rules are we get two votes in each category: one for what we think *should* win, and another for what we think *will* win. This year I'm adding a twist for the Best Picture category: we get to select a No. 1 and a No. 2 choice for what should win. This seems fair enough, since Academy voters actually number their Best Picture choices from 1 to 5. That's why sometimes the film with the most No. 1 votes doesn't win; it's all explained here.

The Oscars 2020 (aka the 92nd Academy Awards) air Sunday, Feb. 9, at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on ABC in the U.S. You can also follow The Academy's Twitter feed for results, though I'll be avoiding this since we tend to start viewing 15-30 minutes after the broadcast begins in order to fast forward through commercials. I don't want Twitter telling me the winner minutes before I see it in the ceremony!

Also, it's getting close to the wire, but if you want to view another movie or so before the ceremony, here's a list of where to watch everything. Your best bet at this point will be movies you can rent on digital or that are available via a streaming service like Netflix. The best return on time invested when you're already running out of time is to pick titles from the Best Picture category, as many of them are nominated in multiple categories.

Best Picture nominees you can rent right now without leaving your living room are Parasite, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Joker (available with Google Play and other online services), while Marriage Story and The Irishman are on Netflix. If you want to see 'em badly enough to buy 'em, you can purchase JoJo Rabbit or Ford v Ferrari on digital now (but they're not available to rent before The Oscars). If you haven't seen them already, you'll have to make it to the theater if you want to view Little Women or 1917 before awards are handed out.

If you can manage to see even four or five from the Best Picture category, I think you'll have fun playing the "pick the winners" game. You'll end up with quite a few best director, best actor/supporting actor, best whatever categories by default since so many Best Picture candidates will feature in those other categories as well.

Happy voting, and happy viewing!