This Year’s Oscar Race Is Wide Open—and Waiting for a Big Surprise

All this combined contributes to a feeling of profound uncertainty. Most awards strategists I’ve spoken with seem comfortable placing bets on only five locks for the best-picture race, at most—a low number for this point in the season. (For reference, many were already guessing the final 10 by this time last year.) Even those seemingly safe bets hardly take the shape of obvious awards heavyweights. The Cannes Film Festival’s big winners, Anora (Neon) and Emilia Pérez (Netflix), are most strongly positioned for big showings with the Academy, screening to ecstatic reactions in Telluride before placing for the TIFF People’s Choice as runner-ups. But the former is another gritty Sean Baker movie that frankly explores the world of sex workers, and the latter is a Spanish-language musical exploring trans identity and cartel violence. Neither is exactly “Oscar bait.”

That these films both feel as assured as they do speaks to a changing Academy. But there are also top contenders of a more obvious profile. We’ve got a new American epic in The Brutalist, which crosses three hours in runtime and spotlights a mammoth Adrien Brody performance; a gorgeous blockbuster in Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros.), in a class of its own as long as it’s surrounded by smaller art house hits; and a slick thriller in Conclave (Focus), which unfurls a power struggle between a bunch of Oscar nominees including Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow—and is spiked with a show-stopping Isabella Rossellini monologue. They’ve all got the goods for a bunch of nominations, with wins remaining a big question mark.

Beyond this core group, virtually every studio is hoping to double up and sneak additional movies in. Last year, only A24 managed multiple best-picture nominations, for The Zone of Interest and Past Lives. It will try that trick again this year as Sing Sing—riding great reviews and audience scores—will come back around for a final push. Netflix has Maria, the favorably reviewed The Piano Lesson, and the crowd-pleasing doc Will & Harper all in mind as potential category spoilers. Neon, which is right up there with the best in its international focus (they backed Anatomy of a Fall last cycle), has the polemical The Seed of the Sacred Fig from Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof in mind as a movie that could resonate with the modern Academy. (It’s being submitted by Germany for international-feature consideration.)

Telluride launched two divisive world premieres of very different stripes in Nickel Boys and Saturday Night. The former, an audacious take on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by director RaMell Ross, will be campaigned in the vein of last year’s The Zone of Interest—a formally rigorous film about a painfully timely historical chapter. It’s one of the best-reviewed films out of the fall festivals, and is also about the furthest thing from mainstream, challenging its audience to dig deeper—which, again, may actually meet this more daring Academy where it’s at. Saturday Night, by contrast, plays great in a crowded room but has not received glowing reviews—and despite seeming like a slam dunk to place at TIFF, it was not short-listed for the People’s Choice Award. It’ll need to open strongly at the box office to prove it’s got the awards juice, and even then may not play to these voters.

As for other contenders to keep in mind? You’ve got an animated smash in Inside Out 2 and another potential hit in The Wild Robot. Sony Classics has Venice’s top award winner, The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovar’s English-language feature debut. Challengers could turn memes into noms. But talk to people around town, and the hottest possibilities concern the biggest remaining mysteries. Sure, Saoirse Ronan is brilliant in The Outrun, but her other contender Blitz (premiering next month at the London Film Festival) has the ingredients—from an Oscar-winning filmmaker in Steve McQueen to an Academy-friendly WWII storyline—to emerge as a larger overall awards vehicle. Sure, Paramount’s got September 5—an underdog Telluride hit set to face a greater test as it screens more widely—but it’s also got Gladiator II landing in November, and the hype around the Ridley Scott sequel is getting deafening. And sure, Searchlight’s charming Sundance pickup A Real Pain has steadily gained steam, but the Academy still loves a good musical biopic—and the same studio will release James Mangold’s quick-turnaround Bob Dylan drama A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet, at Christmas.

Or what about, as my colleague Rebecca Ford posits on the podcast, another Christmas release: Nosferatu? Its auteur, Robert Eggers, has been about as far from the Oscar conversation as one can get thus far, and horror is always a tough sell with the Academy. But Focus’s careful teases of gorgeous crafts and rich performances are getting noticed—and based on the front-runners that have been identified so far, it’d be foolish to count out anything with such creative and commercial promise. This Oscar season, the twists and turns have only just begun. Let’s try to have some fun.

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