How strange and unpredictable has this awards race been? Consider this: At this time last year, the most burning question wasn’t whether Oppenheimer would win a bunch of awards but whether there were any awards Christopher Nolan’s biopic wouldn’t win. (There were, as it turned out, but taking home seven trophies out of a possible 13 is still a pretty good haul, especially when they include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor.) This year is different. Between a high-profile controversy, constantly shifting races, and the presence of a first-time host, the 97th Academy Awards promises to be an intriguing evening.
So what should you know going in? There’s really only one place to start: Emilia Pérez, the film whose troubled journey to Oscar night has dominated headlines and continues to be the most prominent story heading into Sunday. But Netflix’s musical melodrama about a Mexican cartel boss’s reinvention and gender transition isn’t the only narrative of note. Here’s a guide to what to keep an eye on as the Oscars approach.
Emilia Pérez: What happened, and what will happen next?
It would be easy to fill pages and pages with the strange saga of Emilia Peréz. Here’s a condensed version: French director Jacques Audiard’s past movies have included everything from an intense prison drama (A Prophet) to an offbeat Western (The Sisters Brothers) to a low-key adaptation of stories by American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine (Paris, 13th District). Audiard has never made the same sort of film twice, and many have been excellent. So a crime movie with songs centered on a protagonist who undergoes surgery both to affirm her gender and to leave behind a life of crime? Sure. Why not?
The “why-nots” took a while to surface. Well received at Cannes, Emilia Peréz divided critics when it reached a wider audience last fall. Its Netflix debut prompted GLAAD to issue a statement calling it “retrograde” and a “step backward for trans representation.” Around the same time, another line of criticism opened up concerning the film’s depiction of Mexico. Largely shot on French soundstages and performed by a non-Mexican cast (with the notable exceptions of Adriana Paz and Selena Gomez, an American with paternal lineage in Mexico), the film received criticism for playing up stereotypes. Audiard’s admission that he didn’t feel the need to do much research didn’t help matters, and neither did his description of Spanish as being “a language of developing countries, humble countries, of the poor, of migrants.”
That’s a lot of controversy for one film to attract. But Emilia Peréz’s biggest problem would surface in January, when Canadian journalist Sarah Hagi dug through Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón’s social media posts and discovered a plethora of offensive tweets about Islam, George Floyd, China, and other topics. This changed everything. To put things in perspective, Emilia Pérez had emerged from the Golden Globes looking like a healthy contender thanks to wins in four categories: Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), Non-English Language Motion Picture, Supporting Actress (for Zoe Saldaña), and Best Original Song. (Gascón lost the Best Actress prize to Demi Moore for The Substance.) The film then went on to be nominated for a whopping 13 Oscars, including Best Picture—tied for the second most in Academy history. Within a week of the Oscar nominations, Gascón came under fire.
After the tweets surfaced, Audiard and Netflix essentially did their best to distance themselves from Gascón in the hopes that the film’s Oscar chances could still be salvaged. After she was celebrated as the first openly trans actress to receive a nomination, Gascón’s prospects are most likely shot. As for the film? Who knows. Saldaña still appears likely to win, particularly after picking up the Supporting Actress prize at the BAFTAs earlier this month, but she might be the only member of Emilia Pérez spared the far-reaching aftereffects of the Gascón scandal.
What’s the Best Picture front-runner today?
To call the Best Picture race fluid is to put it mildly. It’s not even that there’s no obvious winner this year; it’s that half of the nominees seem to be taking turns as the favorite. Emilia Pérez seemed like a real contender until its troubles began. Wicked’s combination of acclaim and popular success made it seem like a possibility, but this deep into awards season, that’s looking increasingly unlikely. The Brutalist is a big, daring, widely acclaimed film about American history, a fictional counterpart to Oppenheimer.
Variety’s Clayton Davis made a pretty good case that A Complete Unknown quietly checks all the boxes needed to emerge as a surprise winner. (Boomer Bob Dylan fans + Timothée Chalamet = statuettes?) In The New York Times, Kyle Buchanan laid out why the Academy’s preferential ballot could help a movie that most people liked but may not have selected as the year’s best. That sound you hear is Conclave’s producers preparing speeches, particularly after its win in the Best Film category at the BAFTAs. It’s worth remembering, however, that Conclave director Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front also won the top prize at the BAFTAs, only for Everything Everywhere All at Once to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Conclave did take the award for Best Ensemble at this past weekend’s SAG Awards, on the other hand, which might suggest that the love for the film extends across the Atlantic.
Recently, the attention has shifted back to Sean Baker’s Anora, a roller-coaster ride of a movie in which a stripper named Ani (Mikey Madison) marries Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch. Though Anora’s awards push seemed like it was losing momentum for a stretch, the film fared remarkably well in both the Producers Guild Awards and Directors Guild Awards and took the top prize at the Critics Choice Awards.
For the past decade, the Best Picture winners have swung between films broadly in the traditional prestige mold (Oppenheimer, CODA, Green Book, and Spotlight) and more daring fare like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Parasite, The Shape of Water, and Moonlight. (Sometimes it’s good to remind yourself that a film in which a woman falls passionately in love with a fish-man won an Oscar.) Anora would fall into the latter category, but it’s also a well-loved movie from a director who’s been turning out one great film after another. A win wouldn’t be shocking at all. Still, who knows? It’s that kind of year.
Possible upset no. 1: Will Timothée Chalamet spoil Adrien Brody’s chances to win a second Oscar?
Since The Brutalist’s debut, one thing has been clear: Adrien Brody would win his second Best Actor Oscar for his intense, haunted lead performance. This would make him only the 11th actor to repeat in this category, putting him in the company of Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, and Marlon Brando. But will Brody join them? Timothée Chalamet’s name has never really left the conversation. Chalamet has genially made the press rounds and even took his Dylan act to SNL to perform three unexpected selections. (Even in a catalog like Dylan’s, where virtually every song has been covered dozens of times, “Three Angels” counts as a deep cut.) Then came the SAG Awards, where Chalamet won the Lead Actor prize and delivered a speech declaring that he wanted to be “one of the greats,” name-checking, among others, Michael Jordan, Viola Davis, and Michael Phelps as points of comparison. Hubris? Maybe, but Chalamet’s both liked and respected, and he’s racked up a pretty impressive résumé before turning 30. What’s more, playing an iconic public figure like Dylan is a good way to humiliate yourself, yet Chalamet pulled it off. Brody could still win (as could Ralph Fiennes for Conclave, if that film ends up outperforming expectations), but Chalamet continues to keep the race exciting.
Possible upset no. 2: Is Demi Moore a lock to win Best Actress?
There’s a very good chance that Demi Moore will win Best Actress this year, and her triumph at this past weekend’s SAG Awards provides further evidence. Apart from honoring an excellent performance in a boundary-pushing film, a Moore win would cap a Hollywood veteran’s comeback story—and everyone loves a comeback. But this thing is not a lock. Gascón is almost certainly out of the picture. Cynthia Erivo will undoubtedly win an Oscar at some point, but it most likely won’t be for Wicked (or at least not this installment of Wicked). That leaves Mikey Madison (who took the equivalent prize at the BAFTAs) and I’m Still Here’s Fernanda Torres. A big night for Anora could easily benefit Madison, and Torres has rightly won a lot of acclaim for her understated work (including a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture—Drama). It’s hard to think of a year that’s put such wildly contrasting performances in such strikingly different projects up against one another. Will voters who have a hard time stomaching The Substance gravitate to Madison? Will the more traditionally minded choose Torres? This is one to keep an eye on.
Is there a Best Director front-runner?
Similarly, the two Best Director front-runners—Baker and The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet—made sharply contrasting films. Voters will have to choose between Corbet’s grandly scaled (and frugally budgeted) achievement and Baker’s controlled chaos. Currently, the odds favor Baker, and voters deciding to check Anora in box after box will boost his chances, like Madison’s. The film is up for six awards total, and Baker also has a shot at winning Best Original Screenplay. But The Brutalist has even more nominations—10 in total—and Corbet, who’s also nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category alongside his wife and writing partner, Mona Fastvold, is hardly out of the race.
Pixar (and by extension, Disney) seems unlikely to reclaim the Best Animated Feature crown.
For much of its existence, the Best Animated Feature category has been dominated by films released by Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, corporate bedfellows who took turns winning the Oscar. That’s started to shift in recent years. Since Encanto in 2021, Disney has released a pair of features that barely registered with moviegoers (Strange World and Wish) and a third that performed well at the box office but didn’t earn critical respect (Moana 2). Moana 2 was eligible for an Oscar this year but didn’t pick up a nomination. Pixar’s Inside Out 2 received a nod but lacks the sort of genuine audience enthusiasm to suggest it will win. In the past two years, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron took the prize. A win for DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot would return the award to the hands of a big Hollywood studio, but even that would feel like a break with tradition. The Chris Sanders–directed film isn’t in the usual DreamWorks mold, visually or tonally, thanks to characters rendered outside the house design style and a more complex narrative than a standard triumph-over-adversity tale. While it may be business as usual at Disney and Pixar, recent Oscar results suggest animation is moving forward without them.
What does Conan O’Brien bring as an Oscar host?
This is O’Brien’s first time hosting the Oscars, though you could be forgiven for thinking he’s done it before. O’Brien has extensive awards show experience, having hosted the Emmys twice and the MTV Movie Awards once. If all goes well—and his past hosting gigs suggest it will—O’Brien will make his trademark mix of self-deprecation and absurdity play on the biggest possible stage. O’Brien retired as a late-night host in 2021, but, rather than slow down, he’s segued into building a podcast empire and hosting the travel series Conan O’Brien Must Go, projects that have confirmed he’s as skilled at talking to presidents and celebrities as he is talking to random passersby. The only note of caution: David Letterman, whose comedic sensibility overlaps with O’Brien’s in many ways, had a difficult time when he hosted 30 years ago.
How political will this year’s ceremony be?
Even in less chaotic times, it’s been hard for those with strong opinions to resist using one of the loudest microphones on the planet to make a statement. An undercurrent of defiance could be felt at the recent Grammys, and a lot has happened since then, including a fiery, well-received speech by Jane Fonda at the SAGs. Fonda is, of course, no stranger to the intersection of show business and politics, and it would not be surprising to see others follow her example. The political nature of one likely winner, the Best Documentary nominee No Other Land, which depicts the attempted removal of Palestinian villagers from the West Bank, will make ongoing world events impossible to ignore. The Academy may not want the event to turn political, but art and politics can’t be untangled, and the long history of winners using the Oscar podium as a soapbox seems unlikely to end in this political climate.