We wait all year for it—making predictions, having online arguments about worthy contenders, setting up awards-watching parties—but that exciting winter milestone in honoring great cinema is finally here once again. Yes, today Fangoria announces the 2016 Chainsaw Award nominees, which means you can finally get your office betting pool started, and Brent in Accounts Payable can finally put his money where his mouth is about how great Wojciech Golczewski’s score for We Are Still Here is. (God, Brent, could you pick a more obvious horse to back? All of America won’t shut up about Golczewski.)
The best wide-release film category is a mix of expected names and a couple surprises, with David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows leading a group that includes Crimson Peak, The Gift, The Visit, and Krampus. The limited-release category is tougher to call, with the aforementioned We Are Still Here going up against horror-comedies What We Do In The Shadows and The Final Girls, along with chillers Anguish and Some Kind Of Hate.
Perhaps anticipating the inevitable McDonald’s Happy Meal promotional tie-in, Kurt Russell received a Best Actor nod for the enormous four-quandrant cannibal-Western blockbuster Bone Tomahawk, where he goes up against Mark Duplass (Creep), Lou Taylor Pucci (Spring), Tom Hiddleston (Crimson Peak), and tweener fave Henry Rollins (He Never Died). But the awards viewing parties at T.G.I. Friday’s will almost surely be dominated by the hotly contested Best Actress competition, where esteemed veteran Barbara Crampton will take on popular newcomer Maika Monroe, with dark-horse challengers Abigail Breslin, Ryan Simkins, and Susanne Wuest threatening to upset. Who does Chainsaw favor?
The complete list is available online, including the awards for television programming, finally giving us the chance to utter “award” and “Salem” in the same breath. The deadline for ballots is March 13, and write-ins are permitted, so if there’s any category with an omission that outrages you, now is your chance to right that wrong. Winners will be announced later on in the month, so try not to get exhausted by the no-doubt endless media coverage on America’s favorite film awards.