We should have a handle on the Academy Awards race now, right? The new year is upon us, the Golden Globes have already happened, the critics groups have chimed in and Oscar voting begins on Wednesday and runs through Sunday evening, ending sometime in the middle of the Critics Choice Awards.
But in an awards season that was supposed to be the one that got back to normal – no pandemic, no strikes! – plenty of things are still unsettled. So here are a few things worth keeping in mind about this season as it marches toward the Jan. 17 announcement of Oscar nominations and, eventually, the Academy Awards on March 2.
Yes, the Golden Globes can have an effect … of sorts
It’s silly to proclaim films Oscar frontrunners on the basis of Globes wins. The voting bodies are dramatically different: 300 or so critics and journalists, the vast majority of them based outside the U.S., in the case of the Globes, versus almost 10,000 film professionals, most of them living in the U.S., who vote for the Oscars.
More than half the time, the two Globe winners – one for a drama film and one for a musical or comedy – do not include the eventual Best Picture winner, which means that “The Brutalist” and “Emilia Pérez” shouldn’t start clearing space in the trophy room quite yet. (Netflix, currently riding high with “Emilia Pérez,” can attest to that: The company won the top drama Globe for “The Power of the Dog” but has yet to win its first Best Picture Oscar despite nine nominations.)
But the Globes can put movies and people on the radar of voters. On Sunday night, for example, Demi Moore got exactly the kind of boost that the Globes can occasionally provide. I’ve long figured that the biggest problem with “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s wildly transgressive and bloody body horror film in which Moore stars, is that a hefty chunk of voters will either not want to watch it or they’ll start watching on the Academy Screening Room platform and turn it off at some point in the first hour when faced with its glorious excess.
But voters who were watching the Globes will probably have gotten a big nudge to put on the movie and to stick with it – partly because her win was so popular in the room, but also because she did the best thing you can do when you win a Globe and have Oscar ambitions: give a speech that will make people want to see you on their stage, too.
She did that. To a lesser extent, so did Adrien Brody and Zoe Saldaña. (And who are we to say to Saldaña that you shouldn’t cry that much at the Golden Globes, all my fellow Globe cynics?) No Oscar voter needs a couple hundred international journalists to tell them what movies they should vote for – but in some cases, they might influence the order of films on a watchlist.
Granted, there’s no real excuse for a voter to not have watched “The Substance,” “The Brutalist,” “Emilia Pérez,” “Conclave,” “Anora,” “Nickel Boys,” “Sing Sing” and others by this point in the game. But every reminder helps.
The Best Actress race is very difficult
In one of the wins that was most surprising to many Globes viewers, Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) beat the formidable lineup of Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”), Angelina Jolie (“Maria”), Tilda Swinton (“The Room Next Door”), Kate Winslet (“Lee”) and Pamela Anderson (“The Last Showgirl”), all of whom have seemed to be either locks or strong contenders for Best Actress nominations. Torres absolutely deserved her nomination, as did the other five – but if you think it’s too bad that Oscar voters will have to leave one of them out because they only have five slots rather than six, that’s not the half of it.
The other Globes best-actress category, Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, contained Demi Moore and also Mikey Madison from “Anora,” Cynthia Erivo from “Wicked” and Karla Sofía Gascón from “Emilia Pérez,” all of whom seemingly belong on any list of the year’s best performances. And then there’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who is astoundingly great in “Hard Truths” and simply must be nominated. By my count that’s 11 actresses who would feel like snubs if Oscar voters can’t find room for them – and plenty of others who ought to be in the conversation as well.
It’s too bad there’s not a leading actress contender in “The Brutalist,” because this year’s Best Actress race is the brutal-est.
This week’s tea leaves are the ones to really study
It’s important to note that the people who have voted so far are not the people who make movies. Those people – the voting bodies that have some actual overlap with Academy membership – are speaking out this week in an alphabet soup of guild and professional group nominations: MPSE, CAS, ADG, ASC …
And then there are the Big 4 — the guilds that tell us more about the Oscar race than the Golden Globes ever will. Those are the Screen Actors Guild nominations, which will be announced on Wednesday morning; the Directors Guild nominations a little later that same day; the Writers Guild nominations on Thursday, though WGA eligibility rules lessen their reliability as Oscar predictors; and the Producers Guild nominations on Friday morning.
If “Anora” and “Wicked” didn’t do as well as their supporters would have liked at the Globes – the former was shut out completely, the latter won only in the silly box-office-achievement category – they have plenty of opportunity this week to pick up ground courtesy of the groups that mean more. A little love from SAG, the DGA and especially the PGA will go a long way toward restoring the luster on their campaigns – though that love can and likely will help “The Brutalist” and “Emilia Pérez” as well.
So what’s going to happen?
At the moment, heading into the three days that should teach us a lot, I think the Best Picture nominees will be, in vague order of likelihood, “The Brutalist,” “Emilia Pérez,” “Anora,” “Conclave,” “Wicked,” “A Complete Unknown,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Nickel Boys” and, in the hard-to-figure out last two spots, “Sing Sing” and “The Substance.”
I think the directing nominees will be Jacques Audiard, Brady Corbet, Sean Baker, Edward Berger and Coralie Fargeat, which will annoy the heck out of all those “Wicked” stans and prove that the Academy’s Directors Branch goes its own (very international) way.
I think the nominated actors will be Adrien Brody, Timothée Chalamet, Colman Domingo, Ralph Fiennes and Daniel Craig in lead and Kieran Culkin, Edward Norton, Guy Pearce, Denzel Washington and Yura Borisov in supporting. And the actresses will be Mikey Madison, Demi Moore, Karla Sofía Gascón, Cynthia Erivo and Marianne Jean-Baptiste in lead and Zoe Saldaña, Ariana Grande, Isabella Rossellini, Margaret Qualley and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in supporting.
And I believe that by Friday I will have changed my mind about at least a few of these predictions. Check back next week for the new, improved, post-guilds predictions.
