Premature Oscar Predictions: The 2016 Best Picture Contenders

The good news: last year’s Oscar season is over. The bad news? This year’s Oscar season has begun. Obviously, this doesn’t mean you have weeks of Q&As and gaudy pull-quote ads to process, but by this time last year, “Whiplash,” “Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Boyhood,” three of this year's big winners, had already premiered. And you can bet that publicists and executives have already started planning their campaigns for the next season, even when the films are only just entering production.

And as we’ve done for the past few years, we’re exorcising our demons and spending the week running down some of the premature possibilities for films that have been released so far that seem at a distance like they could have the right stuff for Oscar gold. And first up is Best Picture.

Last year, we did horribly, partly because some seemingly sure things didn’t materialize (“Unbroken,” “Interstellar”), or because we put a little more faith in some auteurist pictures like “Inherent Vice” or...