Nine months ago, Al Pacino opened an envelope. His eyes saw Oppenheimer. What other way could the 96th Academy Awards have ended? By the night of the ceremony, Christopher Nolan’s propulsive biopic felt downright destined to take home Best Picture. Its victory was the inevitable climax of a win streak that could be traced to the previous summer, when the film joined forces with its pastel-pink counterpart, Barbie, to save the industry’s bacon and drive everyone to theaters again. You’d have to go back much further, maybe to Titanic a quarter of a century earlier, to find a bigger no-brainer for the Academy’s top prize.
Only time will tell what Pacino’s eyes will see next March, but one thing seems certain already: It won’t be as perfect a fusion of popularity and acclaim as this year’s winner. Which is to say, there’s no Oppenheimer in contention for the 2025 Oscars. Of course, a phenomenon like Nolan’s shouldn’t be expected often. But less than a year after the platonic ideal of an Oscar movie was recognized, we’re staring down the barrel of a much different, much stranger awards season—one to which the usual notions of “awards bait,” as historically defined, only sporadically apply.
Granted, it’s still early. A lot can happen between now and mid-January, when the Academy announces its nominations. But this past week brought a slew of significant Oscar precursors, including the Gotham Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the nominations for next year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards, and the annual selections of the National Board of Review. Combine this early run of bestowed honors with the predictions offered by bloggers and pundits, including those aggregated at awards-discourse hub Gold Derby, and a picture of a pretty unusual Oscar race (and prospective Best Picture lineup) starts to slip into focus.
Just about everyone seems to agree that Anora is in. Sean Baker’s screwball tragicomedy about a Brighton Beach exotic dancer and the young Russian playboy she marries is a bona fide indie hit that’s earned some of the most glowing reviews of the year. It’s also the most recent recipient of the Palme d’Or, a.k.a. the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival—an award previously won by Best Picture Oscar contenders like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, and, most notably, Parasite. In other words, Anora would be a likely nominee just about any year. But how often does a comedy, especially one as audacious and ultimately downbeat as this one, actually win? That the film is currently enjoying the perception of frontrunner status says a lot about its possible competition.
Take Emilia Pérez, for example. Another prizewinning Cannes alum, this French genre-bender spins a kind of telenovela musical around the exploits of a transgender Mexican cartel boss—an out-there premise that’s provoked comparisons, not all of them admiring, to everything from Pedro Almodóvar to Mrs. Doubtfire. For all the applause it earned on the festival circuit, Emilia Pérez has proven quite critically divisive, and we’re still perched on the edge of the discourse that could erupt as more people catch up with the movie on Netflix. Controversy can drive an awards campaign, but are we really meant to believe that this gonzo, love-it-or-hate-it curiosity is a sure thing for the Academy’s approval? No recent Oscar contender has felt more astroturfed.
Meanwhile, The Brutalist, which just won Best Film from the New York Film Critics Circle, has the basic shape of something traditionally Oscar-friendly; it’s a throwback Great American Movie that evokes the milestones of such New Hollywood legends as Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino, and Terrence Malick. But with the prankish actor-turned-auteur Brady Corbet behind the camera, the film is much more capital-A Art movie than middlebrow monument; it gets weirder and darker and more abrasive as it makes its way across a butt-numbing, intermission-divided 215 minutes. There will surely be walk-outs at Academy screenings leading up to nominations.
If the Academy wants to honor a true studio crowdpleaser, the likeliest is probably Wicked. Jon M. Chu’s runaway Hollywood hit adapted from the runaway Broadway hit cemented its status as an awards-season threat on Wednesday, when the National Board of Review handed it both Best Film and Best Director. In terms of bright appearance and audience elation, Wicked might be the closest we have to a Barbie this year. A Best Picture victory for the movie, as some seem to be anticipating, would break a long streak of Oscar-night losses for musicals; the genre hasn’t taken home the big one since Chicago razzle-dazzled its way to the stage in 2003.
The rare case of Oppenheimer aside, it’s been a while since we’ve seen such a populist winner, either. Those looking for a full repeat of the Barbenheimer phenomenon might struggle to find the ashen yin to Wicked’s colorful yang. The obvious candidate would be Gladiator II, Ridley Scott’s belated sequel to his own Best Picture–winner. Gladiator II and Wicked even share their own contrived, social media–driven portmanteau. But will solid box office success and Denzel Washington acclaim be enough to account for the wide and overwhelming impression that Gladiator II is a pale imitation of its predecessor?
The Oscar prospects look rosier for another sandy, big-budget spectacle: Dune: Part Two, a well-liked box office smash despite its adaptation of a famously bizarre and dense science-fiction epic. The first Dune, an inconclusive part one just like Wicked, was up for Best Picture. But as far as genre bias goes, sci-fi has an even spottier record in the Academy winning circle than comedy. (If Star Wars or Avatar couldn’t parlay a nomination into a little golden statuette…)
Simply put, do any of the movies being tossed around as likely nominees look like the kind you’d expect to win big on Hollywood’s biggest night? Maybe one of them. That would be Conclave, Edward Berger’s hammy Vatican melodrama about the backdoor, back-stabbing process of naming a new pope. It’s the exact sort of Landmark Theatres seat-filler that has gone over well with the Academy for decades. Only the increasingly discerning sensibilities of an increasingly international Academy membership could stand in the way of this straight-down-the-middle prestige picture shoring up its voting bloc. It sticks out among a hipper pool of potential winners like a mitre in a sea of berets.
Beyond the supposed locks, the Oscar soothsayers begin to diverge. If they are to be trusted, there are at least a dozen more movies that could conceivably worm their way into the race. On the opposite end of the Glicked budgetary spectrum are smaller indie hopefuls like Sing Sing, A Real Pain, Nickel Boys, and newly minted Gothams winner A Different Man—all critical favorites that, in a normal year, would probably settle for acting and screenplay nominations. World War II drama Blitz has the right subject matter, classicism, and pedigree (its director, Steve McQueen, made a previous Best Picture winner, 12 Years a Slave), but reactions have been more politely approving than ecstatic. The Wild Robot would have to do what even Pixar hasn’t in recent times and break a 14-year drought for animated movies in the Best Picture lineup. Did the terrific Challengers come out too long ago to make a play? Is the Christmas creeper Nosferatu arriving too late, or is it just unlikely to push beyond the Academy’s historic neglect of horror?
Scott Feinberg at The Hollywood Reporter has suggested September 5 could be a surprise contender. The film is a classic newsroom procedural that dramatizes the on-the-ground media coverage of the terrorist attack at the 1972 Summer Olympics. At this point, September 5’s uncomfortable relationship to the violence in the West Bank could help or hurt it; that it lacks the clearer emotional appeal of something like Spotlight could easily keep it out of the final lineup.
Any 10-deep configuration of the films listed above (plus more still, like the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown) would make for an uncommonly eclectic Best Picture lineup, even compared to last year’st somewhat international slate. What this field of potential nominees most reflects, in all likelihood, is the state of an industry lurching back to life after last year’s guild strikes, which halted production on Hollywood offerings that might have better fit the stereotypical image of an Oscar player. When people talk about 2024 as an “off year” for movies, what they’re really saying is that it was a lighter year for studio releases of consequence.
Maybe what we’re actually seeing in this crop of contenders is a widening chasm between the films earning praise and the increasingly adolescent output of major Hollywood powerhouses. If the Oscars have always purported to celebrate “serious” cinema, it makes sense that the Academy’s net has widened to catch movies it wouldn’t have in the past. The studios are now devoted largely to purely commercial endeavors like Deadpool & Wolverine, while even a perfectly accessible mainstream drama like Juror #2 gets mistreated as presumed box-office poison. A non-embarrassing Best Picture lineup would have to reach far beyond Hollywood, or at least to the campaigns of boutique distributors like A24 and Neon.
Of course, as far as potential winners go, the Academy could easily use its top prize to honor a major moneymaker, à la Oppenheimer. And if that’s the way the chips fall, Wicked would probably be the one. The movie is playing about as well with audiences as the stage show did with tourists shelling out for a seat in the Gershwin mezzanine. And if the padded-out first half of a Wizard of Oz origin story ain’t exactly West Side Story (either Oscar-winning version), it’s at least close enough to the song-and-dance entertainment of yore to serve as a rallying point for the Academy’s most nostalgic voters.
As of this writing, many still seem convinced of Anora’s chances. That would be an outcome worth cheering: More than just a worthy Best Picture winner, Baker’s stress-machine farce would be among the flat-out funniest. But don’t count out Conclave, the kind of catnip for the AARP crowd that never goes entirely out of fashion with the Academy. If nothing else, it could pull a Green Book and unite the traditionalist vote while more adventurous members split theirs between bolder festival premieres. That the film is about an election of sorts, not to mention one in which progressive idealism is pitted against conservative fearmongering, can only help its plight for statuettes in a liberal town post-November 5.
Conclave would be the most normal, business-as-usual pick, which is why it might win. Then again, the very idea of a “normal” Oscar movie has been in flux for a while now. What does such a distinction even mean in the aftermath of Best Picture victories for a South Korean class-warfare thriller, a fairytale about a woman who fucks a merman, and a dimension-hopping tearjerker extravaganza featuring talking rocks, hot-dog fingers, and butt plugs? In some respects, Oppenheimer actually looks like an outlier these days—the kind of sweeping (albeit radically nonlinear) biopic that only used to dominate Hollywood’s annual pageant of self-congratulation. Maybe there’s no such thing as an Oscar movie anymore.
That said, there’s probably still such a thing as a film that decidedly isn’t an Oscar movie. To that end, let’s spare a moment of fingers-crossed attention for a long shot and dark horse, emphasis on the dark. Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood, even when they’re withering. And 2024 offered a truly significant addition to that canon, one that might speak to an aging membership seeing more of themselves than they might care to admit in the career and body-horror anxieties it serves up. A Best Picture nomination for The Substance—now that would make for a strange and memorable year at the Academy Awards! Just try to imagine what clip they’d even show at the ceremony.
A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor based in Chicago. His work has appeared in such publications as The A.V. Club, Vulture, and Rolling Stone. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
