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If you believe the best picture leaderboard over at our Prestige Junkie Pundits page, there are a whopping seven films with a greater than 80 percent chance of being nominated: Frankenstein, Hamnet, It Was Just An Accident, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value and Sinners. But I think if you asked each of those pundits individually, they’d tell you nothing’s ever really that certain. Confident as we all may feel in our Oscar predictions with just two days to go before they’re announced, anyone who loves watching awards season can tell you that it’s not a matter of if there will be surprises, but how many.
So on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, my colleague Christopher Rosen and I do our best to predict the frontrunners and anticipate the unexpected in the 21 feature film categories represented on our pundits page. (Yes, that includes the brand-new casting Oscar, which will be awarded for the first time this year; no, it doesn’t include the three short film categories, which we’ll cover during Phase 2.) As you’ll hear, Chris and I feel certain there are some surprises in store, whether it’s an overperformance from the Spanish film Sirāt (which landed five Oscar shortlist mentions) or an even bigger collapse of support for the sequel Wicked: For Good (Ariana Grande fans, cover your ears). Even our best picture picks vary: Chris swerved away from the pundits’ consensus by dropping It Was Just An Accident in favor of F1; meanwhile, I left Bugonia off my list of 10, with Blue Moon landing among the nominees instead. (To readers from Brazil, don’t worry: We both have The Secret Agent making the cut.)
Listen to the podcast for the full rundown of our predictions, and feel free to join us as we watch the nominations on Thursday morning to remind us of just how many we got wrong. (Chris already has adjusted his “final” picks, so make sure to bookmark the Prestige Junkie pundits page for the most updated predictions before Thursday!) Chris and I will be going LIVE bright and early, at 5:15 a.m. PT, watching Danielle Brooks and Lewis Pullman announce the nominees and sharing our reactions. That conversation won’t be on the Prestige Junkie podcast feed, so you’ll have to join us on Substack or on The Ankler’s YouTube page to catch it.
If you’re a paid subscriber to our Prestige Junkie After Party, the conversation continues Friday with another live recording — and this time we want to hear from you! Call in with your hottest takes on the nominations, and we might just put you on the air. Paid Prestige Junkie After Party subscribers will receive a link to join the conversation on Thursday afternoon.
No matter what happens on Thursday — or how badly my predictions age — this remains one of the most entertaining moments of the year for anyone who loves the drama and unintended comedy of awards season (Dick Poop, you will always be famous). And if, somehow, KPop Demon Hunters’ “Golden” misses its best original song nomination, I’ll be leading the protest march down Wilshire.
