The State of the Race: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Shortened Season

The 2019-2020 Oscar year has been the most condensed it’s ever been. Pushing the Oscars up another month (as they did back in 2004) has completely altered the race to the point where the public has been mostly shut out of the process. Oscar contenders are grown like hot house flowers on the festival circuit and have their place in line long before Oscar voters even have ballots in hand — we call that the general consensus. Some films land because of their popularity with the public. Last year’s winner, Green Book, was beloved outside the insular bubble of Oscar and Film Twitter, for instance. This year’s Joker is clearly in the race because of its broad popularity. But others are in because of some combination of having a great marketing team and having the support of bloggers and critics; they secured a spot in the race because they won awards or they were championed by enough people.

That’s usually the way it goes every year since they changed the date. What it used to be like, when the Oscars were held in late March, was that films played for the public FIRST and then were evaluated after the public had their say. Back then, critics only released their reviews the day before the film opened. Oscar coverage really only started after ballots were turned in, just before the Oscar ceremony. There wasn’t direct involvement in how the Oscar race turned out as there is now.

They call us the “tastemakers,” and we attend festivals, along with publicists and talent, “scouting” for Oscar contenders, or being convinced to push Oscar contenders. Sometimes it works (Marriage Story), sometimes it doesn’t (Waves), because at the end of the day you can really only lead voters to the water — you can’t make them drink. If they don’t like the movie, or don’t WATCH the movie, they aren’t going to vote for it.

So how did it work out for the Oscar race this year, this shortened season? Well, let’s go through it.

The Good

Less time for voting means less time for shitstorms to bubble up. Film Twitter could not rally at the same breakneck pace since there is competition for news out of Sundance and the impeachment trial in the Senate. There wasn’t much of a time lag between 1917 winning the PGA and the DGA — fairly unexpectedly it must be said, even though it also won the Globe. Had La La Land’s run been held under the same time frame, who knows how that would have turned out.

We still don’t know how this is going to end yet, because we still don’t know what is going to win Best Picture. It feels like it’s down to four possible movies:

1917 — would give the Academy, finally, an epic to win Best Picture. It’s been a while, right? With the preferential ballot, the big bold movies do not win. They can win Best Director but they don’t get Best Picture. Because to be great and big and bold, they have to be at least a little polarizing. And the preferential ballot can’t tolerate polarization in a competitive year. But this win would firmly establish the Oscars as what they used to do: reward the BIG epics rather than the more intimate indies that they’ve been fond of lately because they do so much better on the preferential ballot.

Parasite — it has its own category to win in, which might give voters two choices for different movies. But without that, it does seem to have the right ingredients that a preferential ballot likes. Is it polarizing? It’s hard to say because the support for it online is not only deafening but doesn’t allow for dissent. That means getting a read on what people think of it is hard. We know it won the Eddue and it won SAG. It is liked and loved, but mostly loved.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — strong because of the major contenders it’s the only one with not just an acting frontrunner — Brad Pitt — but a really really likable acting frontrunner. Will the actors branch vote for that movie and push it to the top? Maybe.

Jojo Rabbit — it’s still in this thing because it keeps winning. It won the Eddie and a Costume Design Guild award from last night. It is also the one tried and true “feel good” movie that the preferential ballot is going to love. It should have no problem with getting number one votes and support down ballot with each voting round. It is a stealthy threat, but a threat all the same.

We assume that 1917 has this. We have no reason to expect it won’t, with the possible exception of no acting nominations — which can be explained away that Best Actor was unusually packed this year. It was packed back in September and it never let up. But still, stats are stats.

The Bad

It all happens too quickly anyway, but this year there really was not enough time for voters to not only see all of the movies, but see movies that weren’t part of the small pile handed to them by previous awards, which were shaped by people like me, the “tastemakers.” We make it easy to weed out films we don’t think “they” will go for, “they” meaning Academy members. Some of us know they won’t go for it, but we push anyway, as I did with Dolemite Is My Name. Some of us know they won’t go for it and so we don’t even bother trying to push a film in: rather, we pretend we are merely predicting. In fact, all of it, even the predicting at Gold Derby or anywhere else, is a form of pushing films into a consensus.

That whole thing was intensified this year because there was even LESS time for voters to see the movies and build their own consensus organically. They relied on the small pile, as most of the other voting bodies did as they rushed through the too-short season.

We can tell by how few films are nominated overall at the Oscars and how many of those Best Picture contenders made it into the various categories. Joker has 11, Once Upon a Time and The Irishman have 10 each. It’s rare in the era of the preferential ballot to have so much power in so few hands.

Look at the categories: how nominations ended up being distributed this year tells me that voters mostly voted for a small handful of films and was very Best Picture-friendly. When films that weren’t nominated for Best Picture push through, you can see even there a limited scope of a few movies, not a variety of films representative of the year in film:

BEST ACTOR
Joaquin Phoenix, Joker
Adam Driver, Marriage Story
Leonardo DiCaprio, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Jonathan Pryce, The Two Popes
Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory

BEST ACTRESS
Renee Zellweger, Judy
Charlize Theron, Bombshell
Scarlett Johansson, Marriage Story
Cynthia Erivo, Harriet
Saoirse Ronan, Little Women

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Joe Pesci, The Irishman
Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Al Pacino, The Irishman
Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Laura Dern, Marriage Story
Margot Robbie, Bombshell
Scarlett Johansson, Jojo Rabbit
Florence Pugh, Little Women
Kathy Bates, Richard Jewell

BEST DIRECTOR
Sam Mendes, 1917
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Bong Joon-Ho, Parasite
Martin Scorsese, The Irishman
Todd Phillips, Joker

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino
Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach
Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho, Jin Won Han
1917, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Sam Mendes
Knives Out, Rian Johnson

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Little Women, Greta Gerwig
The Irishman, Steve Zaillian
Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi
Joker, Todd Phillips, Scott Silver
The Two Popes, Anthony McCarten

CINEMATOGRAPHY
1917
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Joker
The Irishman
The Lighthouse

EDITING
Parasite
Jojo Rabbit
Ford v Ferarri
The Irishman
Joker

PRODUCTION DESIGN
1917
The Irishman
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Parasite
Jojo Rabbit

SOUND MIXING
Ford v Ferrari
1917
Joker
Ad Astra
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

SOUND EDITING
Ford v Ferarri
1917
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Joker
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

COSTUME DESIGN
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Little Women
The Irishman
Jojo Rabbit
Joker

VISUAL EFFECTS
1917
The Irishman
Avengers: Endgame
The Lion King
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

ORIGINAL SCORE
Joker
1917
Marriage Story
Little Women
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
1917
Bombshell
Joker
Judy
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

Not counting the Original Song category, there are only 20 or so nominations from films that are not Best Picture nominees, compared with 30 or so from the year before. The race became narrowed to a handful of films and no other movies could really break through.

The Ugly

Unfortunately, the shortened season rushed all of the voting through where multiple awards shows were happening concurrently on the same days, awards given out so quickly no one had time to contemplate the wins. It will always matter, I think, what the public thinks of a movie. It isn’t everything, but it makes the awards more relevant, I think.

Would anything have changed if there were two more weeks left? Not sure. Ballots are about to be sent out and voters will have just a few days to decide, with only WGA and BAFTA in between.

But what do YOU think, Oscarwatchers? Do you like it this short?