Oscars 2023: Best Picture at a Glance Before Major Nominations Drop

In anticipation — and trepidation? — of the Golden Globes tonight, and before the big drop of the Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild and Producers Guild nominations tomorrow and Thursday, let’s take a look at where things now stand.

The year started out as it usually does in the film festival phase, Venice and Telluride specifically. But Cannes and Sundance aren’t out of the game either since two Best Picture winners in recent years came from those festivals (Parasite, the Palme d’Or winner, and CODA seen at Sundance). The bloggerati glommed onto The Fabelmans out of the gate. It didn’t play Telluride but it played Toronto, where it received rapturous applause and the audience award.

That meant it became what we call the “de facto frontrunner.” That is not a place anyone ever wants to be heading out of festival season. It always puts a target on your back, boosts expectations way too high and, worse, sets up a narrative for a scrappy underdog to defeat it. The Best Picture race tends to be a game of perception and expectations. Managing to balance both of those is the hard part. The “scrappy underdog” now folds in identity on top of everything else; you’re not going to see a movie like Argo becoming the scrappy underdog.

Spielberg’s film comes on the heels of several prominent directors deciding this is the moment to tell their personal story of how they came to be who they are as artists, as people. It started with Alfonso Cuaron’s ROMA, then we had Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. Sam Mendes made Empire of Light, James Gray made Armageddon Time, Alejandro G. Inarritu made Bardo and now, Steven Spielberg has made The Fabelmans. Part of the story of these films, with the exceptions of ROMA and Bardo, is that they are also sad laments of the passing of movie theaters from our culture. This goes along with the hope that they aren’t actually dead.

The thing about winning Best Picture, however, is that the movie has to somehow to speak to the moment and to the voters as representative of who they are right now. Who are they? They are people who just awarded a film that hardly anyone saw but was also the first Best Picture winner with a predominantly deaf cast. Who are they? They are the industry committed to boosting marginalized groups in front of and behind the camera. Who are they? In their last best year of strong content from the studios, 2019, they gave their top award to a film made in South Korea.

Who are they? They are the industry that appreciates films directed by women. As you can see, how they are defined isn’t necessarily just the movie. There is always more to it, at least there was. Now, unfortunately, the bottom is dropping out. You won’t hear this on Film Twitter or in the trades. This is a tragedy that no one dare speak its name. But it’s happening and whether they admit it or not everyone knows it.

As the rain hammers Los Angeles, the Golden Globes are attempting to reboot and remount their show. They have an entire faction of Film Twitter cheering for their downfall, hoping for terrible ratings. It’s something they mock endlessly. Somehow it doesn’t occur to them that they are cheering for on destruction of not just the film industry but the film awards industry. I don’t think that matters much, especially when we’re talking about online clout.

The rain seems to reflect the general mood in Hollywood at the moment. There is still a story to be told with these Best Picture contenders however and part of that story will be told tonight when the Golden Globes name their top picks in the various categories. They still have name-recognition influence, regardless, as does the Critics Choice that will announce their winners over the weekend.

Tomorrow, however, a new chapter in the ongoing saga will drop when we hear from the all-important DGA and SAG on their nominees. The next day, Thursday, the PGA will add their voice to the mix. What I will be looking for is how two movies place: Top Gun Maverick and All Quiet on the Western Front. The former is the sleeper success of the entire year and the awards community seems to be slowly waking up to this. The latter was not Netflix’s top choice as a major player but it has emerged as their strongest contender. They were pushing Glass Onion and Bardo for these top awards, so those movies have a better shot, I think, at placement.

All Quiet on the Western Front is potentially an awards monster. Easily one of the best films of the year, though somehow not as bright on the critics’ radar as might be expected. Perhaps many of them figure they’ve been there, done that with WWI movies (1917). Or it just doesn’t excite them, being that it’s not exactly based on identity. It is, however, the kind of talent that comes along very rarely. Personally I believe voters should be advised to watch the film with the British dub and not the subtitles. Usually that’s not the case. This one is actually really good and makes it much more accessible than it otherwise would be. Just saying.

The film that many seem to be counting on and zeroing in on is The Daniels’ Everything, Everywhere All at Once as the scrappy underdog to take on their idea of the “de facto frontrunner,” The Fabelmans. A film that made around $60 million effortlessly, through word of mouth, and involves the passing of a generational torch from traditional ideology to our modern “woke” ideology. It is kind of like the 2021 Stuart Jeffries book on post-modern ideology:

It’s not exactly this book because this book is about Capitalism, ultimately. But it is a similar theme — the new replacing the old, which is kind of what we’re all living through right now as we watch the eternal fade of the Boomers as the Zoomers and Millennials rise. This is a film that has turned on the youth audience, which is saying a lot. It wouldn’t be unusual for it to win, nor would it be necessarily a bad thing for the Academy and the industry. The question is whether enough of the old-guard AMPAS voters can actually get through it. Even my Zoomer daughter had a hard time making it through the first part and didn’t really like it until the storm cleared up and they got down to business with what the film is actually about: a traditional mother accepting her daughter’s identity as a gay woman.

Everything, Everywhere is not Parasite, though. It isn’t CODA. It isn’t a movie that has come from behind. Right now, it is the actual frontrunner. It’s hard to know whether it will inspire the standing ovations that those movies did. Does it inspire the same heart burst that voters experienced when they knew they were making history? Maybe.

Either way, here is what the race looks like right now, before we get more intel. Maybe some of these movies we think will be in, won’t be. Maybe some we aren’t expecting will be. We’ll be posting our predictions later today. And then we’ll be back here tonight covering the Golden Globes.