Oscars 2023: Passion Drives Nominees, Not Winners

As we head into the final act of this year’s awards race, we’re waiting for two big movies to drop. One is James Cameron’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to Avatar. The other is Will Smith’s Emancipation. Every other movie has been seen, and many have been reviewed. The Best Picture race is starting to come into tighter focus.

Because of the ranked-choice (preferential) ballot used for Best Picture, passion drives nominees. When it comes to choosing a winner, however, passion only drives it sometimes. What tends to drive a Best Picture win more is general likability. Voters have to love the movie, like the movie, want the movie to do well. They just can’t hate the movie.

Love it/hate it movies don’t win Best Picture anymore. They used to back when there were five nominees. In that case, the win is driven entirely by passion. Whatever movie gets the most votes wins. Movies that are divisive could win with five nominees. Now, though, it’s not as possible. They have to be agreeable and not polarizing.

Probably the most somewhat divisive film to win was Parasite, but even that wasn’t really divisive. Almost everyone loved it ever since it debuted at Cannes in 2019. Bong Joon Ho had arrived in the awards race second only to Jeff Bridges as the guy who was everywhere. He was at every awards show and every festival, and he was delightful, all the way through. Many watched him excitedly film Quentin Tarantino at the Directors Guild, for instance.

Parasite also received a surprise standing ovation at the SAG Awards. Now, when I discuss Best Picture with Clarence or anyone else, I will always ask: what is going to get the standing ovation at SAG and will that once again drive a Best Picture win as it did last year with CODA?

Parasite was also the year after the Green Book vs. Roma catastrophe. I’m glad that era of mass hysteria is over — although maybe it isn’t over. Maybe we just think it’s over, but the second something goes wrong for Film Twitter the monster will rise once again. Imagine a world where which film won Best Picture could matter THAT much. Because Roma, an international feature, lost to Green Book, which was the Trump stand-in for Film Twitter (no, I am not kidding). The aftermath resulted in more of a push to award Parasite, which became the first International Feature to win Best Picture.

Regardless, Parasite is truly a great movie — I’ll go as far as saying it’s one of the best films to ever win Best Picture, so no harm done there. It also happened to be up against several great films just on the eve of COVID wiping out the industry for the next few years. It was up against Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 1917, The Irishman, Joker. That was just a great year for movies.

Parasite had lost nearly every Hollywood industry award to 1917. But the Oscars are driven by actors. They comprise the largest voting bloc by far. No matter how many awards 1917 won, at the end of the day it was a film driven by its director, in one long shot that followed a singular actor. If patterns of history held, Sam Mendes would have won Best Director. But since Bong Joon Ho had been such a superstar on the circuit, there was no way he wasn’t going to win, along with Best Picture. Parasite was a movie driven by actors.

Last year, though, CODA benefited from the preferential ballot. The Power of the Dog might have pulled out a win in a field of five nominees, but not a year with ten nominees.

The same will go this year. Unless it’s Parasite or Birdman, movies that are big winners with actors, we have to negotiate the reasonable winner, rather than find the winner that wins in a passionate surge. That makes the top prize kind of an afterthought. You probably can’t talk to anyone in the public that would remember any movie that’s won in the last ten years. Probably not even last year. When there were five and the public actually watched these movies, they remembered the winners. People even remember Chariots of Fire winning way back when.

What you want to do is figure out what is going to win the various big guilds. What will make the SAG crowd leap to its feet? What will bedazzle the directors to anoint a winner?

The Producers Guild decides their winner using a preferential ballot, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the Oscars will agree.

The order used to be something like this:

Golden Globes
PGA
DGA
SAG

Now, however, and last year, the Producers Guild goes last. Now, the order is:

DGA
PGA
SAG

That has resulted in the PGA and Oscar matching, at least last year. Now, let’s look at what had won the guilds in the era of the expanded ballot.

2009: The Hurt Locker — PGA/DGA + Picture/Director/Screenplay
2010: The King’s Speech — PGA/DGA/SAG Ensemble + Picture/Director/Screenplay
2011: The Artist — PGA/DGA + Picture/Director
2012: Argo — PGA/DGA/SAG + Picture/Screenplay (Life of Pi wins Director)
2013: 12 Years a Slave — PGA (with Gravity) + Picture/Screenplay (Gravity wins Director)
2014: Birdman — PGA/DGA/SAG + Picture/Director/Screenplay
2015: Spotlight — SAG + Picture/Screenplay (The Revenant wins Director)
2016: Moonlight — Picture/Screenplay (La La Land wins Director)
2017: The Shape of Water — PGA/DGA + Picture/Director
2018: Green Book — PGA + Picture/Screenplay
2019: Parasite — SAG + Picture/Director/Screenplay
2020: Nomadland — PGA/DGA + Picture/Director
2021: CODA — PGA/SAG + Picture/Screenplay

Producers Guild matched 10/13
Directors Guild matched 7/13
SAG ensemble matched 6/13

Which films do you think might get a standing ovation at the SAG Awards? There has to be a reason why they leap to their feet. That happened with both CODA and Parasite. Here are my potential standing ovation movies:

Women Talking
The Banshees of Inisherin
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans

That doesn’t mean those are the frontrunners to win. It just means that they would, I think, inspire the actors to leap to their feet. They would do this for different reasons, inspired by different things. And some of that has to do with the movie itself.

This year also feels more director-driven. Whatever win the DGA has a pretty good shot at winning Best Picture. Those right now I think have the best shot of winning the DGA (leaving out Avatar and Emancipation for now):

Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans
Martin McDonagh, Banshees of Inisherin
Sarah Polley, Women Talking
The Daniels, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Damien Chazelle, Babylon
Jim Cameron, Avatar

Finally, the Producers Guild picks ten. These are the ones, at least for now, I think they might choose:

Top Gun: Maverick
The Fabelmans
Banshees of Inisherin
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Women Talking
Avatar: The Way of Water
TAR
Elvis
Babylon
Glass Onion

There are many factors at play this year when it comes to Best Picture, including box office, social justice issues, and a desire (I think) to pull Hollywood back from the brink and bring back large canvas films. Maybe that’s right. Who knows.

Passion will drive the films to earn a spot on the nominations list. A movie needs roughly 100-300 number one votes to land a spot. Nominations rely on top of the ballot picks. When it comes to picking a winner, however, preferences in general matters. The movie most vote for as number one may not count as their vote by the end.

That’s why no film can sweep anymore. The voting mechanisms that drive a passionate movie can sometimes derail by the end when it comes to the top prize, like La La Land vs. Moonlight.

Which films do you think will be nominated for each of the guilds?