Tony Uncertainty

As I keep thinking about the upcoming awards season, I keep going back and forth about a few categories in which I updated my predictions a few days ago.  The first one is for Best Play.  After reviews came out for Geoffrey Nauffts' play Next Fall, I quickly updated my predictions to include it in the best play category at the expense of Superior Donuts.  While I still think Next Fall is a contender, and a strong one at that, I am no longer certain I took out the right play to include it.  Of the five major contenders for the four best play spots, the only one that I think will definitely be nominated right now is A Behanding in Spokane by Martin McDonagh.  As for Race, Time Stands Still, Next Fall, and Superior Donuts, I keep going back and forth about which three will get the nomination.  I think that Race received the weakest reviews of the bunch with Superior Donuts not far behind, while Next Fall and Time Stands Sill are more likely for nominations.  However, the fact that Superior Donuts has already closed and Time Stands Still will end its limited run at the end of next week, long before the Tony nominations come out, makes me wonder about the chances of either play.  For the moment, I will leave my predictions as they are in this category until I've settled on a better decision than what I currently have, but I am thinking about this issue.

The other category that is giving me trouble is the Best Director of a Play category.  While I think I was pretty right in giving a prediction to the director of Present Laughter at the expense of Tina Landau for Superior Donuts, I am less certain about taking away Brighton Beach Memoirs' nomination in favor of Next Fall.  Both productions were well praised and well put together, but I'm just not sure about this switch anymore.  The two things that Next Fall has going for it over Brighton Beach Memoirs right now are that it will still be playing come nomination time (unless it doesn't make enough money to keep going much longer) and that it has a female director -- a fact which becomes even more important with the removal of Tina Landau and Superior Donuts from the list.