What will win Best Picture?
It appears it'll be a two-horse race for best picture at this year's Oscars, but who will take the win?
- Calum Baker
In recent years, with an entire industry of obsessives and prognosticators calculating every single outcome at every step of the six-to-nine-month awards season, the Oscars best-picture race has often suffered from fatigue long before its finale in February/March. Some years, thankfully, a late surprise pops in to reverse a seeming foregone conclusion: Anora, CODA and Parasite are all recent examples of films whose wins were set in stone almost overnight, during sudden groundswells with just weeks of voting to go. And nine years ago, Moonlight famously mounted its grand upset on the night itself. But this year, One Battle After Another has – surely to the irritation of even its most ardent fans – found itself comfortably in the position previously held by Oppenheimer, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Nomadland and The Shape of Water: a nigh-on unstoppable steamroller. Until now.
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Two weeks before the biggest night on America’s film calendar, Sinners pulled a couple of last-minute surprises at the Actor (formerly SAG) Awards and finally forced a little drag onto One Battle After Another’s runaway campaign – and that could be enough for a full-on overtake.
Michael B Jordan accepts the award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture for Sinners during the 32nd Annual Actor Awards. Photo by VALERIE MACON / AFP via Getty Images
The critical reception to One Battle After Another upon its September premiere was rapturous – and has remained so, even weathering what might, for lesser films, have become insurmountable online squabbles about its political outlook and its representation of black women. But in addition to being very good, the $130m+ production marks the biggest film yet from respected auteur Paul Thomas Anderson, whose 11 other nominations for writing, directing and producing have spanned modern classics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, as well as Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza. (He missed out on a personal nomination for 2012’s The Master, which still scored three acting nods.) Having never won, Anderson is now in a position recently occupied by Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan: a popular titan of the medium simply awaiting his crown.
Both Sinners and One Battle are timely and explore their themes in accessible styles, making them appealing for voters looking to show the vitality of their industry.
But One Battle’s 13 nominations – which would be headline news in a different year –were overshadowed on Oscar nominations morning by Sinners, which broke records with its 16 nods. The two films, both produced by Warner Bros, share some similarities: these are fleet-footed but serious-minded blockbusters that switch between deft, blood-pumping action sequences and quieter, more affecting dramatic scenes, all in service of something charged with both political meaning and personal feeling, not least around race and Blackness in America, and the insidious, often violent maintenance of a white-supremacist status quo. So, the films are both accomplished, but more to the point they are timely – and they explore their themes in popular, accessible styles, which certainly make them appealing for Academy voters looking to show the vitality of their industry.
Jessie Buckley in Hamnet. Universal
It’s these vital qualities, and the overdue narratives that attend both Anderson – as a beloved veteran – and Coogler – who could become, 98 years in, the first African-American person to win an Oscar for directing – that have kept both films at the top of the pile where early favourites Hamnet (eight nominations, including best picture and director) and Frankenstein (nine, including best picture) have stumbled in the face of relative apathy. And despite an impressive nine nominations apiece for fellow best picture/director nominees Sentimental Value and Marty Supreme, neither film has felt “big” enough to touch the duelling frontrunners; the Academy awarded an indie last year, with Anora – perhaps it’s time to go big again.
Of these two robust multiplex pictures, One Battle has enjoyed dominance all season and still sits as the likely statistical frontrunner following its steady sweep of so-called “precursor” awards. Its wins at Hollywood’s Directors and Producers guilds show its popularity among the US industry, while its strong showing at the Baftas (where it even beat homegrown favourite Hamnet to best film) indicate broad support among the American Academy’s international voters. But actors make up more than one-eighth of Oscar voters, and many of those are also in the Screen Actors Guild, which awarded Sinners its top prize (best cast, beating One Battle’s ensemble) and, possibly more tellingly, gave Michael B Jordan a surprise best-actor win over category favourite Timothée Chalamet.
Timotheé Chalamet as Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme A24
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This might not all translate to Oscar victory – just ask previous best-cast winners Hidden Figures and The Trial of the Chicago 7 – but on the other hand, the Bafta and Producers Guild awards have themselves proved patchy indicators of Oscar’s eventual best picture. Meanwhile, four out of the last ten years have shown eventual splits between picture and director – including the infamous Moonlight/La La Land ceremony, early in President Trump’s last term of office. Though Sinners still looks unfortunately likely to notch up an historical number of losses (it needs to win six Oscars to avoid that fate), its hopes of taking best picture glory even while Anderson enjoys his directing gong suddenly look stronger than ever.
Authors
Calum Baker
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