2024 Oscar Predictions: Are the Oscars in Trouble?

I drove six days to spend Thanksgiving with my daughter and her new family. By that, I mean her boyfriend’s family. There are many of them all living in the Ohio area. While at dinner, the patriarch of the family, who calls himself a “history buff” and a “movie buff,” talked about the Oscars. “What happened!?” he said. “Why are all of these terrible movies winning Best Picture?” He said he no longer trusted the Oscars or the critics. They had all been burned too many times. All of the raves and awards, and then they go see the movie and it’s awful, they said.

“Did you see Maverick,” they asked me. They meant Top Gun: Maverick from last year. “Of course,” I said. “We watched that one a few times in the movie theater. It was great.”

These aren’t rubes or uneducated people. They’re sophisticated but exist outside the bubble that the film community and the Oscars have become. Readers of this site know I’ve been talking about this for a long time. I know I helped break it. I just don’t know how to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

I know people reading this don’t want to hear that things have become so dire. They’re not dire if you’re in the bubble and you’re perfectly happy with things the way they are. It’s just that when the broader public notices to this degree, it’s probably worth examining what purpose the Oscars serve.

The great thing about this year is that we did have the Barbenheimer phenomenon. That at least proved, like Top Gun: Maverick did, that there are people still excited about going to the movies. Unfortunately, not too long after that, the Writers and Actors strikes hit, grinding Hollywood to a standstill. The question now will be whether the Oscars will reward those two movies only or whether they will opt out of both and choose something else.

Right now, the only movie I think could threaten either of those two is Cord Jefferson’s timely and biting American Fiction. I know that Scott Feinberg is currently predicting it to win Best Picture. It also won in Toronto and at the Middleburg Film Festival. Like a few other films this year, American Fiction is a crowdpleaser. It’s funny, zeitgeisty, and most importantly, it punctures the delusion of the White Woke Left.

There are always two questions to ask about every potential Best Picture winner. The first: what does it say about the film industry in 2023? The second: how does it make voters feel in 2023? The image-conscious actors will always be signaling their virtue, which is essentially what American Fiction is about. Is the industry ready for the reckoning the film is about to deliver? Or will they sidestep the hard lesson and think, “I’m not like that”?

American Fiction is about how invested the people who run almost everything have become in the victim/redemption ritual. It makes them feel good to bestow accolades upon the downtrodden. In American Fiction, the main character of Monk exploits this dynamic for profit, then feels disgusted by the whole ugly game. It’s so rare to have anyone in Hollywood speak such hard truths.

The film comes at a time when almost all movies are obviously and self-consciously DEI-centric. They have to be. When you’re watching most movies now, you’re always counting heads. You’re looking for where they patched the potentially problematic parts. What would GLAAD be upset by that must be changed, for instance. How big of a fit will Twitter throw if all of the main characters are white?

If the Academy embraces American Fiction, which essentially calls out their primary demographic for being the exact kind of people who would have been all-in on the book, is that a self-own on their part? Or are they, like Monk in the movie, just tired of the pretense and ready to move on?

There is no doubt that the war in Gaza has fractured Hollywood. This was apparent at my Thanksgiving dinner in Shaker Heights, one of Ohio’s largest Jewish areas in Cleveland. Israel and Palestine are on the minds of everyone in Hollywood, though for different reasons. The actress Melissa Berrera ignorantly referred to the war as a “genocide” and an “ethnic cleansing.” She also accused the media of covering up the deaths in Gaza. She was dropped from the Scream franchise for her remarks, which caused an uproar online by the same people who remained silent when Gina Carano was fired from Disney for a tweet.

Outspoken political activists like Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo are out in force, beating the drum against Israel, although perhaps that’s died down a bit with the cease fire and the release of some hostages. It has, however, woken people up on the Left to what looks like rising antisemitism in ways no one could have ever predicted. I would not have fired Berrera for saying what she said on Instagram. I might have fired her for being that stupid, however, to call it “ethnic cleansing,” when the exact opposite is true.

Speeding toward the Oscar race is more of this kind of conflict, as in:

Oppenheimer is only about genocide in so much as the Allies took to the skies and the beaches of Normandy to stop the “final solution,” which was a genocide of the Jewish people. That is what Hamas and much of the Arab world wants too. Dropping the nukes on Japan was not “genocide.” It was not intended to wipe out an entire population of people, even if it did kill hundreds of thousands.

Oppenheimer felt enormous guilt about having helped bring such death and destruction to Japan as a way to end World War II, but there is no comparison to what is happening now in Israel and Gaza. To see it that way is pure stupidity and ignorance. So many people online seem to believe this insanity, which is why that tweet has 62K likes, probably more by now.

The Zone of Interest deals with the genocide of the Jews during the Holocaust. Killers of the Flower Moon is about a near-genocide of the Osage. But again, comparing that to Israel launching a ground invasion to eliminate Hamas terrorists (which has resulted in too many civilian casualties) is the height of stupidity. Sorry, but it’s just true. And it’s okay, in my book, to fire stupid people or to not want them in your employ.

If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they could have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza. This is not genocide. You can’t confuse warfare and the casualties that result with deliberate genocide or ethnic cleansing. It is immoral to do so. Even Robert Oppenheimer would not have accused the United States of crimes on that level. War is hell. We should do everything we can to avoid them, but it seems that humans are hellbent on fighting them for our entire history and probably we’re heading straight into WWIII.

All of this to say that voters will have complicated feelings about films like Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon because they do ask us to contemplate our past and what went on in our past. On the one hand, there was a near-genocide of the Osage people in Oklahoma. On the other hand, it was the first case that formed the FBI. Good guys and bad guys. Forty years later or so, the FBI became the bad guys, aggressively pursuing Oppenheimer as though he were a traitor just for questioning the war machine and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Good guys and bad guys.

Oppenheimer is not just about dropping the bombs on Japan. It is also about the war against Hitler, and eventually about the Cold War that feared a Communist takeover after Stalin’s Soviet Union killed as many, if not more, than the Nazis. That was the last “Fourth Turning,” that era. We’re supposedly in another one now. How does it end? I don’t know. But it’s not a good sign that there are so many out there who don’t know the difference between terrorism and war.

I am not sure where all of this takes us except to say that it’s possible this year snaps the Academy and the industry out of its insular, meditative stupor. The naval-gazing has gone on long enough. Perhaps it’s time to start making movies for the many, not the few.

Does a movie like Barbie still feel “important” enough in a time like this? Does American Fiction feel like just the right reckoning delivered at just the right time? Or will voters tip their hat to the exceptional success of a film like Oppenheimer, which feels more timely than ever? The book, American Prometheus, goes into detail about how difficult of a life Oppie had growing up as a Jew in a country replete with antisemitism. It doesn’t come through as much in the film, but if you know, you know — and I’m guessing a lot of Academy voters will know.

Erik Anderson finally updated his predictions for Best Picture:

1. Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures)
2. Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures)
3. Barbie (Warner Bros)
4. Maestro (Netflix)
5. Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films)
6. American Fiction (Amazon MGM/Orion)
7. The Holdovers (Focus Features)
8. The Zone of Interest (A24)
9. Past Lives (A24)
10.  The Color Purple (Warner Bros)
11. Anatomy of a Fall (NEON)
12. All of Us Strangers (Searchlight Pictures)
13. May December (Netflix)
14. The Iron Claw (A24)
15. Rustin (Netflix)
16. Air (Amazon Studios)
17. NYAD (Netflix)
18. Saltburn (Amazon Studios)
19. Napoleon (Apple Original Films/Sony Pictures)
20. The Boy and the Heron (GKIDS)

And Best Director:

1. Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures)
2. Martin Scorsese – Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films)
3. Yorgos Lanthimos – Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures)
4. Greta Gerwig – Barbie (Warner Bros)
5. Jonathan Glazer – The Zone of Interest (A24)
6. Bradley Cooper – Maestro (Netflix)
7. Alexander Payne – The Holdovers (Focus Features)
8. Cord Jefferson – American Fiction (Amazon MGM/Orion)
9. Celine Song – Past Lives (A24)
10. Justine Triet – Anatomy of a Fall (NEON)
11. Blitz Bazawule – The Color Purple (Warner Bros)
12. Todd Haynes – May December (Netflix)
13. Andrew Haigh – All of Us Strangers (Searchlight Pictures)
14. Ben Affleck – Air (Amazon Studios)
15. Ridley Scott – Napoleon (Apple Original Films/Sony Pictures)
16. Hayao Miyazaki – The Boy and the Heron (GKIDS)
17. Emerald Fennell – Saltburn (Amazon Studios)
18. Sofia Coppola – Priscilla (A24)
19. Sean Durkin – The Iron Claw (A24)
20. Michael Mann – Ferrari (NEON)

David Fincher’s The Killer is nowhere on his list — I still would not be so sure about that. I mean, they’re all probably right, it isn’t “Oscar-y” enough. But it’s hard for me to imagine a year where a film that good by a director that revered is ignored outright. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Here are my predictions for this week, for what it’s worth. Not much has changed:

Best Picture
Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Barbie
American Fiction
The Holdovers
Maestro
Poor Things
The Color Purple
The Killer
The Zone of Interest
Alt: Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall,  All of Us Strangers, Rustin, Nyad, The Boys in the Boat, The Color Purple

Best Director
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Greta Gerwig, Barbie
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things
David Fincher, The Killer

Alt: Alexander Payne, The Holdovers’ Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall; Bradley Cooper, Maestro; Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest; George Clooney, The Boys in the Boat; Celine Song, Past Lives; Cord Jefferson, American Fiction

Best Actor
Bradley Cooper, Maestro
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction
Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon
Alt: Colman Domingo, Rustin; Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers; Michael Fassbender, The Killer; Joaquin Phoenix, Napoleon

Best Actress
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Carey Mulligan, Maestro
Emma Stone, Poor Things
Annette Bening, Nyad
Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall
Alt: Margot Robbie, Barbie; Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Origin; Fantasia Barrino, The Color Purple; Natalie Portman, May December; Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla

Supporting Actor
Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Ryan Gosling, Barbie
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things
Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon
Dominic Sessa, The Holdovers
Alt: Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers; Willem Dafoe, Poor Things; Matt Damon, Oppenheimer

Supporting Actress
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple
Jodie Foster, Nyad
America Ferrara, Barbie
Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer
Alt: Tilda Swinton, The Killer, Juliette Binoche, The Taste of Things; Julianne Moore, May December; Sandra Huller, The Zone of Interest; Taraji P. Henson, The Color Purple; Vanessa Kirby, Napoleon

Adapted Screenplay
American Fiction
Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Poor Things
The Killer
Alt: All of Us Strangers, The Color Purple, The Zone of Interest

Original Screenplay
Barbie
The Holdovers
Past Lives
Anatomy of a Fall
Maestro

Editing
Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Killer
Poor Things
The Holdovers

Cinematography
Oppenheimer
Poor Things
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Killer
Maestro

Costumes
Poor Things
Barbie
The Color Purple
Napoleon
Killers of the Flower Moon

Production Design
Barbie
Poor Things
Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Napoleon

Animated Feature
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Boy and the Heron
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Elemental
Wish

Score
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
The Killer
Poor Things
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse