Oscars 2024 – A Solid Consensus Emerges After Golden Globes and Critics Choice

Every year, since 2009, Marshall Flores and I work on charts. So many charts. Probably my favorite of these has always been Best Picture. As of right now, there is a stronger consensus for Best Picture in the four (major) groups that have announced so far — AFI, NBR, Critics Choice, and Golden Globes — than there has been since they expanded the ballot.

Seven films are locked and loaded across all four groups. Of course, movies have landed those spots and still missed Best Picture. Three films have, so far:

Inside Llewyn Davis
If Beale Street Could Talk
Mary Poppins Returns

You can also win without being in this group. Two films have:

The Shape of Water
CODA

But in general, if you’re in the group, the chances are good that you will at least be nominated for Best Picture and could win. In general, six films at most find their way into the race on this list. Now, we have seven:

The remaining names almost always come from one of these four groups, give or take an All Quiet on the Western Front and an Amour. If this is all correct, your job will be trying to find the other three from this list. And I would add one more, American Fiction. So your Best Picture list would look like this (with a fair amount of certainty):

Barbie
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
The Holdovers
Maestro
Past Lives
Poor Things
American Fiction

Now, you have only two slots for the lineup. The question to ask is whether all seven of these films the consensus has singled out will make it to the big guilds. Here, we’re talking about hundreds of members. The Golden Globes and Critics Choice are in the hundreds. AFI is much smaller, as is the NBR. Think of them as tastemakers and influencers, who take their lead from (and it crushes me to say it) Film Twitter and the bubble online that still cares about film awards.

As far as I see it, there are four movies in the running here for the final spots: The Color Purple, May December, Anatomy of a Fall, and The Zone of Interest.

What SHOULD be here and isn’t (and probably won’t be) is David Fincher’s The Killer, coming soon to a thinkpiece near you ten years from now under the headline “The Movies That Should Have bBeen Nominated.” But I know enough than to wrestle with the bear. The heart wants what it wants and this heart lives inside a hive mind that has gathered its support around specific movies for specific reasons.

Best Actor

By some miracle, Paul Giamatti is actually picking up buzz for his work in The Holdovers. It’s shocking enough that he’s never been nominated for Best Actor at all, but to think there is a chance he could actually win is astounding. Character actors like Giamatti rarely get their moment in the sun, well deserved though they may be. He is up against stiff competition with Bradley Cooper‘s bravura performance in Maestro and Cillian Murphy‘s equally bravura performance in Oppenheimer. These are tough calls to make. Likely it comes down to which of these three films voters like more, though Cooper should get extra points for being an actor who also directed a Best Picture contender.

Every year since 2009, the Best Actor winner was also nominated by both of these groups. There are six names here, which means one has got to go. I wouldn’t be totally shocked if Andrew Scott found his way in as well, which would mean two get dropped. This one is a heartbreaker, no matter how you slice it.

Best Actress

Best Actress still is Lily Gladstone’s to lose. She reminds me a bit of Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln wherein the entire movie is an Oscar monster and if it doesn’t win Best Picture it will win Best Actress. This will likely be especially true the first time Gladstone actually wins an award and we see the standing ovation. There will be two winners at the Golden Globes, just like last year when Cate Blanchett went up against Michelle Yeoh. This time, it will be Emma Stone up against Lily Gladstone. Then, it will go down to the SAG Awards. Both Killers of the Flower Moon and Poor Things are formidable Oscar contenders and will be nominated across the board. But keep in mind that Stone, like Blanchett, would not be winning for the first time and would not be making history. So there’s that.

Here again, there are six nominees in each. One will have to go. Which one? That’s the trick.

Supporting Actor

No category matches with Best Picture more than Supporting Actor. That might mean that whoever wins will be tied somehow to the ultimate Best Picture winner:

And just because Willem Dafoe and Sterling K. Brown do not match, that doesn’t mean they won’t get in. But one of them will have to go because the Oscars do not nominate six. It will depend on the popularity of the movie and the popularity of the actor. We know four of them are locked:

Downey, Jr.
De Niro
Gosling
Ruffalo

From there, it becomes a little less certain. Do they love May December as much as the critics? Do they love Poor Things enough to give it two Supporting Actor nominations? Do they love American Fiction and want to honor Sterling K. Brown?

We’ll have to wait and see what happens when SAG announces. That might help clarify things.

Supporting Actress

We have a similar situation here where there are five that match and two that don’t. And we won’t know who gets in until we see what the SAG does. It will also come down to how much voters love the movies as these too will be tied to Best Picture.

Put it this way: if Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks both get in for The Color Purple, there is a pretty good chance the movie makes it in. If Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, AND Natalie Portman make it in, it’s hard to imagine May December also not making it in.

But again, one of these actresses will have to go if there are to be only five nominees. It does look like Da’Vine Joy Randolph is the runaway consensus pick to win, at least for now. We have a long way to go and things can change.

Best Director

And again, the same thing is playing out where five of the contenders are locked together and there are two strays.

So it’s possible these are your Best Director five, or at least your DGA five. The Oscar directing branch might go rogue and go with, say, Jonathan Glazer for The Zone of Interest. But for the most part, that consensus, like the rest of them, feels fairly solid.

Alexander Payne will have to go up against Celine Song, and then they’ll have to dump one of the five above to find a slot. This year looks like it’s shaping up to be a boring consensus across the board, but it’s also possible a big name director is left off the directing list when the far more picky directing branch gets a crack at it. And for this, we’ll have to wait to see what the DGA five will actually be. What will 45,000 directors and assistant directors think?

This is our Oscar race in the main categories for now. If it keeps going this way, it will be one of those years where everyone does well on their predictions.

Thanks once again to Marshall for helping review the charts. More to come. Watch this space.

Here are the Best Picture charts