In a sense, the Best Picture race started in January 2021, when CODA won the audience and jury prizes at the Sundance Film Festival. It stopped off in Cannes to grab a ride with Drive My Car, then heated up at the fall festivals, when The Power of the Dog, Dune, King Richard and Belfast premiered. And it continued into the winter with Licorice Pizza, Don’t Look Up, Nightmare Alley and West Side Story. Some films that looked promising never quite caught on with industry voters—we’re looking at you, Spencer—while others survived middling reviews to pile up nominations. And as the Best Picture category expanded back to a guaranteed 10 nominees, voters still left out gems like The Tragedy of Macbeth, C’mon C’mon, Cyrano and Parallel Mothers.
Belfast
During the early days of the COVID pandemic, Kenneth Branagh’s thoughts turned to the summer of 1969, when violence erupted in his hometown of Belfast and his quiet street ended up barricaded. “We were in the middle of our lockdown and those images of that other lockdown started to come back and pour out,” the writer-director said. He turned those memories into a heartfelt film that was an instant Oscar favorite from the moment it premiered to a rapturous audience in the Toronto Film Festival’s Roy Thomson Hall.
CODA
Siân Heder’s Sundance sensation is based on a 2014 French film, La Famille Bélier, but that version didn’t use deaf actors to tell its story of a hearing teen from a family of deaf adults. CODA, by contrast, worked to embrace and honor that world. “So much of the journey was about my own education,” Heder said. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and yet there was always something magical at the core of it that made the hard work feel so worth it.”
Don’t Look Up
Adam McKay’s all-star end-of-the-world comedy clearly leads every other contender in the number of previous Oscar nominations for its cast, 42. (Although that title would probably go to any movie with Meryl Streep in it, since 21 of those are hers.) The film that looks at climate change and science deniers through the lens of an approaching comet is also the race’s most divisive entry, prompting the director to respond on Twitter: “Loving all the heated debate about our movie. But if you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the climate collapsing (or the US teetering) I’m not sure Don’t Look Up makes any sense.”
Drive My Car
The biggest surprise among the nominees was this three-hour Japanese drama that didn’t even win one of the top five film awards in Cannes, but which got a rare boost from best-picture awards from the New York, Los Angeles and national film critics. As the title suggests, much of the dialogue takes place in a car, but that didn’t faze director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. “The moving car is a limited space, but because it’s moving, it actually allows for the expansion of space,” he said. “If a scene were to be set in a room, there’s a limit to how much the space can expand—but if you’re in a moving vehicle as opposed to being closed off, it can expand.”
Dune
Denis Villeneuve’s last film was a sequel to Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner; his new one is an adaptation of the massive Frank Herbert sci-fi epic that flummoxed previous filmmakers like David Lynch (whose version was a creative and commercial disappointment) and Alejandro Jodorowsky (who worked for years but could never get his off the ground). “Maybe there’s a self-preservation chip I don’t have,” said the Canadian director, who turned his passion for the novel into a film that swept the below-the-line categories to rack up 10 nominations.
King Richard
As a junior tennis player, Tim White was fascinated by Richard Williams, the outspoken father of Venus and Serena Williams. As movie producers, White and his brother Trevor turned that into a film starring Will Smith, who loved the script and said he’d sign on if the project had the family’s blessing. “It took seven or eight months of sitting down with them, talking about it, hearing their concerns and gaining their trust,” White said. “We wouldn’t have done it without that.”
Licorice Pizza
The National Board of Review’s choice as 2021’s best film is one of the most meandering and casual of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, a romp through the San Fernando Valley in the early 1970s. “It felt lighter and freer and more innocent and liberated than a lot of the stuff he’s done,” producer Sara Murphy said. “I keep going back to joy, and maybe that’s because it came out of a time that felt heavy to a lot of people.” They shot during the pandemic—and because of Bradley Cooper’s schedule, they started by dropping neophyte actors Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim into the fiery scenes in which Cooper plays an unhinged Jon Peters. “Paul purposely did not introduce them to Bradley or give them rehearsal time,” Murphy said. “It immediately bonded Alana and Cooper, who were thinking, ‘Holy crap, what have we gotten ourselves into?’”
Nightmare Alley
Guillermo del Toro adapted William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel about a carnival con man who conjures up ghosts, but this is a rare del Toro film that doesn’t include true supernatural creatures. “The last few years, the horrors in real life have come at a really fast pace,” the director and co-writer said. “Film noir is like a time capsule, and this is a movie permeated by the anxieties, the uncertainties and the dissolution of truth in 2021.”
The Power of the Dog
Set in the mountains and on the plains of Montana and shot in New Zealand, Jane Campion’s first feature film in more than a decade is a haunting study of masculinity (toxic and otherwise) in the waning days of the American West early in the 20th century—and a film whose final scenes pack an unsettling punch. “One of the joys of this film has been sneaking into theaters for the last 10 minutes, and watching people poke each other with that sense of, ‘Did that just happen?’” producer Iain Canning said.
West Side Story
Steven Spielberg’s new adaptation of the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim/Arthur Laurents musical sticks to the late 1950s New York setting but gets a timeliness and energy from Tony Kushner’s updated screenplay. “I thought it was a crazy idea, but there was something thrilling about it when I picked myself up off the floor,” producer Kristie Macosko Krieger said. One highlight: When original WSS star Rita Moreno, in a newly written role, sang a gentle version of the musical’s classic song “Somewhere.” “Everybody could not believe that we were sitting in this time, in this place, listening to this woman sing this song on this day.”
Steve’s Perspective
Judging by the usual benchmarks, The Power of the Dog seized control of this race by landing a field-leading 12 nominations and becoming the only film with noms in the key directing, writing, acting and editing categories, and then solidified its lead by winning at the Directors Guild, BAFTA and Critics Choice. Still, the last few years have suggested that those usual benchmarks don’t mean as much as they used to, and the ranked-choice voting system used in this category could work to the benefit of potential consensus builders like Belfast or CODA.
