Oscar’s 11th Hour Showdowns, Decoded
Several categories remain wide open — and contenders will have to fight tooth and nail
Greetings from the snowy East Coast — where, if you’re feeling chilly or experiencing flight delays out there on the West Coast… well, you might be better off keeping it to yourself.
Last Thursday’s Oscar nominations brought a flurry of attention, quick interviews and ecstatic social media posts, and now a lot of people are hoping they’ll get to do it all over again. Tomorrow morning, bright and early for everyone in the United States, will bring the BAFTA Award nominations, which will be fairly similar to the Oscars if their longlists are any indication, but will surely contain their own surprises as well. Is Sinners as strong with international voters as with the more American-leaning Academy? Can It Was Just an Accident or even Wicked: For Good perform better with BAFTA than with the Oscars? I’ll be eager to find out right alongside you.
Regardless of how the BAFTA results turn out, though, I do think we already have a pretty good picture of which Oscar races will remain the most competitive between now and when final voting closes on March 5. Yes, in theory, every race is competitive, and it’s worth continuing to campaign even if your competition seems formidable — I personally cannot wait to see Kate Hudson’s phase 2 efforts now that she’s a nominee for Song Sung Blue.
But some presumed frontrunners, like Paul Thomas Anderson in best director and Jessie Buckley in best actress, really haven’t budged since the fall, and though I haven’t bet my house on KPop Demon Hunters winning both best animated feature and best original song, I might consider it! (Matthew Frank, I’ll hit you up on Slack to discuss.) So, among the 21 feature film categories that will be awarded at the 98th Oscars ceremony on March 15, I think there are still 10 that are solidly competitive.
Today I’ll bring you the first five of those categories, with the next five revealed in Thursday’s newsletter. Between now and then, I’ll also get a dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival on tomorrow’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, and I’ll use that episode to check in with my colleague Christopher Rosen about the latest developments in the race. Plus: As always, I want to hear what’s on your mind! Chris and I loved hearing listener voicemails for last week’s special call-in episode of the Prestige Junkie After Party, so please keep them coming: e-mail me at katey@theankler.com and let’s talk about the final weeks of the Oscar race together.
1. Best Picture
The nominees:
Bugonia
F1
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
The Secret Agent
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Train Dreams
I still mostly think this is One Battle After Another’s award to lose, much as I have since it first opened back in September. But the astonishing, record-setting nomination total for Sinners (16) makes it a much stronger runner-up than I expected, and far stronger than Hamnet would have been were it still our de facto second-place contender. (With eight nominations, Hamnet did very well for itself, but missing out on Paul Mescal in supporting actor and in editing and cinematography suggests it may not have broad enough support to go all the way.)
The first test of how tight this race really is will come with tomorrow’s BAFTA Award nominations. One Battle was the leader on the longlists released a few weeks ago, with 16 mentions compared to the 14 for Hamnet and Sinners. There’s reason to believe all three will dominate the nominations, but it will be interesting to see who comes out as the nomination leader and how the major acting contenders from all three films find their way in, or not.
The DGA Awards on Feb. 7 seem likely to go for Paul Thomas Anderson, and the PGA Awards on Feb. 28 may very well go for One Battle as well. But if the producers surprise us and give their top prize to Sinners (recall that the PGA Awards, like the Oscars’ best picture result, uses a preferential ballot to decide its winner), and then Ryan Coogler’s film dominates at the Screen Actors Guild’s Actor Awards the very next night, as many already expect? We might have suspense about the best picture winner right up until the envelope is opened.
2. Best Supporting Actor
The nominees:
Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another
Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein
Delroy Lindo, Sinners
Sean Penn, One Battle after Another
Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value
A month ago, I would have told you that Benicio del Toro was on a glide path to a second Oscar win, following a persistent recent trend in best supporting actor in which an early frontrunner simply never stops winning. Then Jacob Elordi won at the year’s first televised awards show, the Critics Choice awards, followed by Stellan Skarsgård at the Golden Globes a week later. Then the Oscar nominations brought the surprise inclusion of Delroy Lindo, a revered veteran who, like Skarsgård, is finally getting long-overdue Oscar recognition, but, unlike Skarsgård, stars in the nomination-leading Sinners. With two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn rounding out the category, supporting actor may truly be anybody’s game.
Tuesday’s BAFTA nominations may be revealing here as well, though I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Mescal shows up there — especially because BAFTA has six slots in the category instead of five. Whoever wins at the Actor Awards will get a strong boost, particularly if there’s a great speech to go with it. Still, it probably won’t be enough to make anyone a strong frontrunner, mainly because both Skarsgård and Lindo were snubbed by the Screen Actors Guild. Even though he was the surprise nominee, I do wonder if Lindo has a surge on the way, as likely the best chance Sinners has at an acting win. Then again, that’s true for all of these nominees! Truly a puzzle we are not going to figure out any time soon.
3. Best Supporting Actress
The nominees:
Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value
Amy Madigan, Weapons
Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another
At the very least, it was relatively clear for weeks who the major best supporting actor contenders were going to be. For supporting actresses, on the other hand, the buzz has been all over the place. Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another) won the Globe, and Amy Madigan (Weapons) won at Critics Choice, which seemed to make them frontrunners by default. But given the incredibly strong affection for Sentimental Value, which landed both Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas here, as well as the Sinners’ surge behind Wunmi Mosaku, this is another category where you could make the argument for just about anyone to win.
Conventional wisdom seems to believe that Taylor — the sole female nominee from One Battle After Another, now that Chase Infiniti didn’t make it in for best actress — could represent the film and pull off a win here. But after all that talk about Lindo and Skarsgård’s veteran narratives in supporting actor, we really can’t ignore the same power behind Madigan, whose only previous Oscar nomination came 40 whole years ago. Sure, as the lone nominee for her film, Madigan doesn’t have much of an engine behind her. But the Academy includes many people who know how hard it is to build a long career like Madigan’s, much less have a breakout role this far into it. I wouldn’t count her out at all.
4. Original Screenplay
The nominees:
Blue Moon, Robert Kaplow
It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi
Marty Supreme, Ronald Bronstein & Josh Safdie
Sentimental Value, Eskil Vogt & Joachim Trier
Sinners, Ryan Coogler
The question for so many categories is going to be whether Sinners is so beloved that it simply sweeps through all of them. It does seem like a very strong player for its screenplay, particularly since it would be a chance to hand a statue to writer-director Ryan Coogler even if One Battle After Another takes home best picture and best director, as is still widely expected.
But Sinners is up against several other films with their own impressive nomination totals, particularly Sentimental Value, whose director, Joachim Trier (co-writer of the screenplay with Eskil Vogt), is also likely to lose to One Battle’s Paul Thomas Anderson. Again, if voters are looking for a place to hand a victory to a film they love, this could be a place to do it.
5. Adapted Screenplay
The nominees:
Bugonia, Will Tracy
Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro
Hamnet, Chloé Zhao & Maggie O’Farrell
One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson
Train Dreams, Clint Bentley & Greg Kwedar
This category is where the real drama has been all season, and is now filled entirely with best picture nominees, with only one of the scripts (Bugonia by Will Tracy) not written or co-written by the director. One Battle After Another, with its 13 nominations, is the obvious frontrunner. But even if Hamnet wound up missing nominations in key categories like editing and supporting actor, there’s still a clear depth of support for Chloé Zhao’s film. And if you’re voting in a category about writing, what’s more obvious about writing than a movie about actual Shakespeare?
I felt more confident that Hamnet could beat One Battle in this category before the nominations came out, I admit. Anderson’s win at the USC Scripter Awards over the weekend, beating Hamnet, might have put it out of reach. (The last three winners at the Scripter Awards later won at the Oscars.) But imagine being an Oscar voter who has already picked One Battle for best picture and director; could that mental image of Paul Thomas Anderson with an armful of statues maybe inspire you to pick something else here? Or will it be like last year, when Anora’s Sean Baker kept winning, armful of statues be damned? I’ll still hold out hope for a potential twist; after all, even when Oppenheimer swept, Christopher Nolan didn’t win a screenplay Oscar.