OSCAR-PALOOZA

What will win, what should win, and what shoulda been nominated

Neon

I don’t recall the first Oscars broadcast I watched. But I vividly remember my friend Michelle’s mom taking a bunch of us kids to see Chariots of Fire after it beat On Golden Pond, Reds, Atlantic City, and Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1982. “We need to see what all the fuss is about,” she told us.

Now, 13-year-old me would definitely have given the award to Raiders of the Lost Ark—56-year-old me probably would, too—but I was still quite taken with the glossy British film with the synthy ear-worm. I was mesmerized, of course, by all those pale, hunky boys running on the beach, and glad no one could see my excitement in the dark theater. (Anyone paying attention could have guessed what was going on with me: My lifelong fascination with Katharine Hepburn—who won her fourth Oscar, for On Golden Pond—also began that year.)

Anyhoo—that’s when I first understood that movies could cause a “fuss.” It didn’t mean a lot to me then, but Michelle’s family was an intensely nativist clan. (No lie: When she found my brother at random on social media a decade ago and asked what we’d done with our lives, Michelle expressed sadness that I hadn’t grown up to be a Republican fundraiser like her.) Back in 1982, her mom was disappointed that this foreign movie had beaten out Hepburn and Henry Fonda—God only knows what her reaction would have been if Reds had won!

Of course we bring our tribal leanings and political affiliations into the cineplex, and they can’t help but color our judgment about what is the very best. So if you are going to game the Oscars, if you’re going to put your dollar into the office pool, you better be thinking about the stuff people—specifically Hollywood people—bring with them into the movies and onto their Oscar ballots.

Mostly I’m talking about the politics of the business itself. The voters and nominees are all coworkers, after all—who “deserves” this or that award has always been more important than the quality of the actual work. But over the past decade this has begun to shift. Finally shamed by the endless succession of straight white men hauling off statuettes, the Academy has gone to great lengths to diversify its membership. As a result, Moonlight can now beat La La Land, and Parasite can edge out 1917.

Hollywood was always dominated by Democrats, even when it was run by white bros. But the more global, more female, more diverse membership of today is more left wing than ever. So my first prediction for Sunday night: With the #Resistance finally finding its footing after a month of Trump/Musk’s blitzkrieg, we will see a passionate display of progressive politics, whoever wins. And readers, I for one am here for it.

But you didn’t open this post to read about the bigots in Washington—you want to know who’s gonna get that bling! Here are my predictions.

PICTURE

WILL WIN Anora
SHOULD WIN Anora or I’m Still Here
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED All We Imagine as Light, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World, Challengers

Anora, the latest gem from Sean Baker, cinema’s rough-and-tumble boy, has got this, kids. Conclave is the only serious challenger at this point, but if it ekes out a win it would be a major shocker, ala Moonlight (2024) or Crash (2005).

I’m a bit of a nerd, so I’ve cooked up a handy chart to show you why Anora is a 90% lock. (You used to find versions of this kind of stat-crunching at AwardsDaily.com before the site’s owner/editor drifted into the Magaverse and torched her career.) In short, winning precursor prizes ups your odds to win the biggie, particularly where the guilds are concerned, because their voting pools overlap with the Academy’s. Going back to 2000, the year Gladiator beat Crouching Tiger and Traffic, here’s how the movies in contention did with the seven major precursor awards, the four guilds plus Bafta, the Golden Globes, and the Critics Choice Awards:

(I realize this is painfully small—especially if you’re trying to read it on a phone—but don’t worry, I haven’t done it for every award. I have a life!)

Apart from Bafta, which isn’t all that predictive, the winner of any one of these awards has gone on to get the Oscar at least 50% of the time. And since 2000, the movie that scored the largest number of precursors has taken home the Oscar 75% of the time. Anora has nabbed four out of seven. Films have lost the Oscar despite having similar odds: The aforementioned La La Land, which lost to the much better Moonlight, and the now universally reviled Crash, which won over the infinitely better Brokeback Mountain. I have to imagine the Academy regrets most of these upsets, but not all. For every Green Book there is a Parasite.

Again, the guilds are the most important indicators; and winning more than one of them means your movie is ringing bells for different Academy constituencies. Anora is the top choice of producers, directors, and writers. (It also won the Critics Choice trophy.) Since 2000, this has happened six times, and five of those films—No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker, Argo, and Everything Everywhere All at Once—went on to take the Oscar. (The execrable Crash beat PGA, DGA & DGW winner Brokeback Mountain.) If there is a spoiler, it will be the Bafta-winning Conclave, which took the Screen Actors Guild Award. But what do actors know?

In a mostly fine crop of nominees, Anora is the clear standout, and I’ll be disappointed if it’s beaten by anything except I’m Still Here. Walter Salles’ film is also an unqualified masterpiece, but there’s no way to objectively compare the two. As my algebra teacher, Mrs. Wilmarth, used to say about Xs and Ys, they’re like rutabegas and ice cream. This is an ice cream year: It’s going to be Anora.

DIRECTOR

WILL WIN Sean Baker, Anora
SHOULD WIN Baker
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Payal Kapadia, All We Imagine as Light; Mohammad Rasoulof, The Seed of the Sacred Fig; Radu Jude, Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World; Walter Salles, I’m Still Here

Baker, who wrote, edited, and produced Anora, took home the DGA and WGA already (see the nerdapalooza above), and the winner of the former has also taken the Oscar in 67 of the past 75 years. You might find a detractor or two—I’m thinking of my otherwise brilliant friend Kristin—who thinks the film drags a bit in the middle, but Anora is universally admired, with a sky-high 91 on Metacritic. It’s confident, risk-taking filmmaking, the one American movie this year that manages to be crowd pleasing while making a perfectly coherent artistic statement. It even delivers a timely political message: empowering women, good; sucking up to oligarchs, bad.

I would have a tough time choosing Baker over Jude, Kapadia, Rasoulef, and Salles—who also crafted top-notch films. But considered against his actual competition, it’s no contest. Brady Corbet was the early favorite, serving up ersatz Paul Thomas Anderson in The Brutalist. The movie is beautiful and ambitious, but badly flubs its landing after almost four hours. (And worse, it gets brutalism wrong!) Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is a fun, fun watch, but terribly polarizing. Her direction doesn’t solve any of the glaring logic problems of her screenplay. James Mangold should have been more of contender, probably—A Complete Unknown is an excellent film, one of the better biopics I’ve seen—but it’s not exactly gutsy or innovative. Lastly, there’s Jacques Audiard. His telenovella-narco-musical-trans-empowerment film Emilia Pérez, despite its inexplicable early buzz and 13 nominations, has flopped badly with actual audiences. His star, Karla Sophía Gascon, hasn’t helped the film any with her racist social media posts—but Emilia Pérez is Audiard’s mess, and the blame for it lies with him.

ACTRESS

WILL WIN Demi Moore, The Substance
SHOULD WIN Mikey Madison, Anora, or Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Kani Kusruti, All We Imagine as Light; Soheila Golestani, The Seed of the Sacred Fig; Ilinca Manolache, Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World; Kirsten Dunst, Civil War

This was a great year for women. But the Academy isn’t going to honor one of the year’s great women’s performances. (It didn’t even nominate a bunch of them.) Mikey Madison is perfectly flawless in Anora. As with Emma Stone in last year’s Poor Things, the whole film comes down to her drive, her comic timing, and ultimately her vulnerability. I’m Still Here, similarly, would be nothing without Fernanda Torres’s monumental performance. She’s heart-rending as the legendary Eunice Paiva. (It doesn’t hurt that Paiva, a reluctant resister who stood up to dictators, is just the sort of model progressive folks are searching for today.) Madison and Torres are both great, but if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t pick my favorite. (Ice cream and rutabegas!)

If anything at the Oscars is still a popularity contest, it’s Best Actress. And Demi Moore, that brat-packer done good, is running away with this one. She’s perfectly fine in The Substance, but, to my mind, Elisabeth Sprinkle is a two-dimensional character in a two-dimensional film. There’s just no way the biz won’t reward the popular actress who anchors a film about the sexism and ageism faced by women in said biz.

Searchlight

ACTOR

WILL WIN Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown
SHOULD WIN Chalamet or Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Jesse Plemons, Kinds of Kindness

Brody and Chalamet are two of my favorite actors; they’re both such oddities in the film world, bringing their off-kilter sex appeal to a variety of tricky roles. This year, they were both terrific as intense (and intensely unlikable) artists. Brody’s Laszlo Tóth was the favorite all awards season up until the SAG Award, which fell to Chalamet.

Up until the SAG Awards, I was sure Brody had the Oscar in the bag for the simple reason that his character gets to complete a clearer arc (and suffers more). Chalamet’s Bob Dylan, on the other hand, is interrupted mid-asshole. Still, I’d vote for Timmy. As great as Brody is, Tóth feels like a part he’s already played, an older, less-likable version of Władysław Szpilman, the Holocaust survivor from The Pianist, for which the actor won his first Oscar. Chalamet has amassed a growing body of stellar work (Call Me by Your Name, Ladybird, Little Women, Bones and All, the Dune movies—when is he not amazing?), but with Dylan he takes it to another level. From the prickly egotism to the kooky mannerisms to the grating voice to his shockingly good guitar and harmonica, Chalamet just nails it.

I have another theory. As btilliant as Brody is, he’ll never live down The Kiss. When he won his Oscar in 2003, he took presenter Halle Berry into his arms and gave her a long, not-at-all-welcome smooch. The actress forgave him for his indiscretion, but she never forgot, and neither has Hollywood. For what it’s worth, Chalamet is disconnected from reality in his own way—accepting his SAG Award on Feb. 23, he announced that he fully intended to be “one of the greats” and went on to compare himself to Marlon Brando and Viola Davis. Let’s hope his people help him craft something a bit more humble to say on Sunday night.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

WILL WIN Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez
SHOULD WIN Isabella Rossellini, Conclave, or Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Cailee Spaeny, Civil War

Zoe Saldaña is the best thing in Emilia Pérez—maybe the only good thing in it—and she’s made a lot of people in the industry a lot of money over the years. Hollywood is certainly not going to punish her for the film’s broader failings. My issue with her winning is procedural: Saldaña’s lawyer is actually the lead role in the film, or at least the co-lead. Same goes for Wicked nominee Ariana Grande and Best Supporting Actor nominee Kieran Culkin. Of course these are more complete performances—they’re leading roles with commensurate screen time. Should Isabella Rossellini, who gives a classic supporting performance, have to compete against a lead? (I would give her the prize on the strength of one devastating gesture—a curtsy—she makes in a pivotal scene in Conclave.)

Producers understandably don’t want their stars competing against each other for the same prize, but the work is the work, and a lead is a lead. If it was good enough for Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (both nominated for All About Eve), Liz Taylor and Katharine Hepburn (Suddenly Last Summer), and Spencer Tracy and Maximilian Schell (Judgment at Nuremberg), it ought to be good enough for today’s actors.

SUPPORTING ACTOR

WILL WIN Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
SHOULD WIN Yura Borisov, Anora, or Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown, or Guy Pearce, The Brutalist
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Mark Eydelshtein, Anora; Wagner Moura and Jesse Plemons, Civil War

I didn’t love A Real Pain—felt like a Lifetime movie, a fairly glib take on a serious subject, generational trauma, wrapped into forced situational comedy. Worse, its two leads, Culkin and writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, are basically playing themselves. In Culkin’s case, he was just lauded for playing himself in Succession. Norton does incredible, nuanced work as Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown; Pearce is sometimes terrifying, sometimes hilarious as the villain in The Brutalist; and Borisov, playing a shy heavy with a dry wit and a heart of gold, gives probably the breakout performance of the year. (I can’t tell you how Jeremy Strong is in The Apprentice. Couldn’t bring myself to see a movie about the insurrectionist in the White House.) At least Culkin—who’s going to need a warehouse for all of his trophies—can be counted on to give an amusing, self-effacing speech.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

WILL WIN Sean Baker, Anora
SHOULD WIN Baker
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Payal Kapadia, All We Imagine as Light; Justin Kuritzkes, Challengers

Anora is far and away the finest of the five nominated scripts, and as noted above, Baker already won the Writers Guild Award for it. If there’s an upset, it will come down to politics. Eisenberg’s sweet but not especially deep A Real Pain and Coralie Fargeat’s titillating but borderline-incoherent The Substance have passionate supporters.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

WILL WIN Peter Straughan, Conclave
SHOULD WIN Straughan
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED I’m Still Here, Dune: Part 2

Straughan’s screenplay for Conclave, based Robert Harris’s novel, turns a dusty dogmatic committee meeting into a palpable thriller. Voters will not only be rewarding the writer, but the movie as a whole, especially if (as seems likely) they’ve passed it over for the big banana. Nickel Boys is Conclave’s chief competition: RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes turned Colson Whitehead’s wrenching novel about a brutally racist Florida detention center into something new and equally compelling; and given the country’s recent bigoted turn, they might like an opportunity to condemn white supremacy.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

WILL WIN Lol Crowley, The Brutalist
SHOULD WIN Crowley or Jarin Blaschke, Nosferatu
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED All We Imagine as Light, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World

Lol Crowley’s gorgeous work on The Brutalist is doubly impressive when you consider the whole three-and-a-half-hour film was made for less than $10 million. Here again, voters will be eager to award The Brutalist, because they’re passing it up for Anora elsewere. I have no issue with that—of the other nominees, only Nosferatu matches its grandeur and beauty.

I do wish the people who nominate films for this award would consider other rubrics for difficulty. Pooyan Aghababaei had to film the very handsome Seed of the Scared Fig entirely in secret—and like the rest of the crew, he risked his life and freedom to do it.

EDITING

WILL WIN Nick Emerson, Conclave
SHOULD WIN Sean Baker, Anora
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Marco Costa, Challengers

The movie this year that relied most completely on its flawless edit was the erotic sports thriller Challengers. Naturally it wasn’t nominated. Prognosticators and bettors are positive Conclave will win, but I can’t tell you why. It’s definitely the most Oscary of any of the nominees; it’s beautifully shot, with a gorgeous production design and all those vivid red robes. But the cutting doesn’t seem especially remarkable to me.

Actors will tell you that comedy is often harder to pull off than tragedy; it’s always harder to edit. I’m stating the obvious, but: T I M I N G. Wicked (editor, Myron Kerstein) and Anora both land belly laugh after belly laugh with gleeful dexterity. Anora, cut by writer-director Sean Baker himself, gets the edge, I’d say. It’s just the better movie, delivering a fully realized, perfectly paced emotional journey.

SCORE

WILL WIN Daniel Blumberg, The Brutalist
SHOULD WIN Blumberg
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Challengers

Daniel Blumberg’s score for The Brutalist is glorious. The most successful score of the year, though, was from—there’s a theme here—Challengers. When the dialogue drops away, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross propulsive techno compositions seem to burst out of nowhere, exploding the subtext in tennis and love matches alike. Like the scores of The Third Man or Vertigo, the music itself is an unforgettable character in the film. It’s that good.

Universal

PRODUCTION DESIGN

WILL WIN Nathan Crowely, Wicked
SHOULD WIN Crowley or Conclave or Nosferatu
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED La Chimera

Be honest: You were worried I was going to yammer on endlessly about all 23 awards.

COSTUMES

WILL WIN Paul Tazewell, Wicked
SHOULD WIN Wicked
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Dune: Part Two

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

WILL WIN Pierre-Oliver Persin, Stéphanie Guillon, and Marilyne Scarselli, The Substance
SHOULD WIN The Substance

SOUND

WILL WIN Dune: Part Two
SHOULD WIN Wicked
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Challengers

I’m a broken record, I know, but to my ear, nothing this year topped the charged erotic volley that was Challengers, and a lot of that came down to its intricate sound design.

VISUAL EFFECTS

WILL WIN Dune: Part Two
SHOULD WIN Dune: Part Two

Sony Pictures Classics

INTERNATIONAL FILM

WILL WIN I’m Still Here
SHOULD WIN I’m Still Here or The Seed of the Sacred Fig
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED All We Imagine as Light; Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World

Emilia Pérez had this all sewn up before Karla Sofía Gascón torpedoed the movie’s chances with that clutch of racist tweets. Given that I’m Still Here was also nominated for Best Picture—and that Fernanda Torres is a serious contender for Best Actress, having won a Golden Globe—it ought to win easily. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is also a great movie, if not quite as polished; it will go down in film history at any rate, following the arrest of Mohammad Rasoulof by Iranian authorities and his subsequent flight to Germany.

DOCUMENTARY

WILL WIN No Other Land
SHOULD WIN No Other Land
SHOULDA BEEN NOMINATED Dahomey

You all know how I feel about Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land; it’s a brilliantly made film, chronicling in painful, enraging detail Israel’s stone-by-stone appropriation of Palestinian land in the West Bank. Now that the president of the United States has openly called for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the film’s importance and timeliness has only grown.

I do wish Mati Diop’s Dahomey, about France’s return of artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey to Benin, had been nominated. Although it defies categorization—it’s more a meditative essay than a documentary—it is fascinating, beautiful, and very moving.

ANIMATED FILM

WILL WIN The Wild Robot
SHOULD WIN Flow

No, I do not see a ton of animated films. Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot has the edge, it seems, as the hometown favorite. But if you can see only one of these movies, make it Flow (streaming on Max): Gints Zilbalodis, its Latvian creator, has clearly prayed at Hideo Miyazaki’s altar; this strange and beautiful film, following a little gray cat’s struggle to survive a sudden, catastrophic flood, ventures deep into metaphysical realms. If Bergman or Tarkovsky had made cartoons, they might have looked like this. Oh, one other thing: Flow is voiced entirely by actual animals.

BEST SONG

WILL WIN Diane Warren, “The Journey,” The Six Triple Eight
SHOULD WIN No idea

A lot of folks still believe “El Mal,” from Emilia Pérez, will snag this Oscar, but I suspect Zoe Saldaña will be the only person from the French-Mexican dumpster fire to come away clutching a trophy. First of all, the music in Emilia Pérez is, arguably, awful, something Spanish-speaking viewers, who could understand its clunky lyrics, have known all along. Compared to its other tunes, “El Mal” is relatively catchy—and it’s certainly topical, indicting corruption and greed. And Saldaña certainly sells it, but that’s why the voters are going to reward her.

I suspect the Academy’s voters, will take this opportunity to give the bald guy to Diane Warren for “The Journey.” Full disclosure: I haven’t even heard this song, reader. Is it any good? Fuck if I know. But I do know that Warren—a veritable pop-song factory—has been nominated 16 times and never won. Diane, the Academy is going to finally “un-break your heart,” “turn back time,” and “turn to you.”

BEST ANIMATED, DOCUMENTARY & LIVE-ACTION SHORTS…

I’ve got no opinion about any of these, so I’m going with the Gold Derby consensus: Beautiful Men for Animated Short; I Am Ready, Warren for Documentary Short; and The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent for Live-Action Short. You could also throw darts.

Update: In my stat-crunching frenzy, I overlooked that Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture despite winning the PGA, DGA & WGA. This has now been noted.