By Saturday night, we’ll have a much better idea of what film is really on top in the Oscars’ wildly confusing Best Picture race.
Maybe.
Or we might know nothing at all, thanks to the recent uproar over “Emilia Pérez” star Karla Sofía Gascón’s past racist and anti-Muslim tweets.
Coming into the final month of Oscar campaigning, a remarkable six different films seemed to have a chance to win Best Picture: “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “A Complete Unknown,” “Conclave,” “Emilia Pérez” and “Wicked.” And ordinarily, a weekend like the one coming up would help to clear up the muddiest of awards pictures.
Friday will bring the twice-delayed Critics Choice Awards, which has predicted the Oscar winner for the last two years in a row and for nine of the last 15 years. And Saturday will have simultaneous ceremonies for the Directors Guild Awards, which has matched the Oscar for Best Director 22 times in the last 25 years and matched Best Picture 18 times in that stretch, and the Producers Guild Awards, the most reliable Oscar predictor because it’s the only other awards body to use the same ranked-choice voting system as the Academy in the Best Picture category.
For weeks, I’ve had the same answers to people who ask me what’s going to win Best Picture: “Ask me on Feb. 9.” Or alternately: “Whatever wins the Producers Guild.”
But the furor over Gascón’s old tweets essentially wrecked her Best Actress campaign and threatens to seriously harm the chances for “Emilia Pérez” to win Best Picture, where it was considered something of a narrow favorite a week ago.
And that’s the problem with this weekend’s awards shows, because none of the damaging information about Gascón was known when the majority of votes for the upcoming shows were cast.
Critics Choice voting ended on Jan. 10 for what was originally set to be a Jan. 12 ceremony, before the show was postponed because of the Los Angeles wildfires. Producers Guild voting ended on Jan. 30, the day the tweets hit the fan. Directors Guild voting continued for a week after the revelations, but it had already been going for three weeks by them.
So if “Emilia Pérez” has big wins at any of those shows, it’ll be due to votes that were cast before the film and its star became a big story. And that won’t tell us much at all about how it’ll do when Oscar voters begin casting their votes on Wednesday, Feb. 11. Clearly, some people who would have voted for the film in mid-January will stay away now, but how many will remain a big question mark.
Maybe the 20% of the Academy that is based overseas could rally behind the French film that threatened to be torpedoed by its star’s social media history. But at a divisive time when the Academy wants to send a message about its values with its choice of Best Picture, a vote for “Emilia Pérez” will no longer feel like a progressive option – even if it felt that way to critics, directors or producers last week or last month.
On the other hand, if “Emilia” is shut out at the DGA and PGA and only wins, say, Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song at the Critics Choice Awards, that may well seal its fate at the Oscars.
And if that happens, the Producers Guild winner will indeed become a legitimate frontrunner – particularly if it’s an indie title like “The Brutalist” or “Anora,” which wouldn’t necessarily be expected to be the favorite of producers. (When “CODA” won the Producers Guild Award three years ago, it was pretty much game over for bigger-budget rivals like “The Power of the Dog,” “Dune” and “West Side Story.”)
But in a strange year that has been getting stranger as Oscar voting approaches, a phrase like legitimate frontrunner simply doesn’t mean as much as it might have under different circumstances. A hard-to-figure-out batch of films has seen to that, and Karla Sofía Gascón’s social-media account has put an exclamation point on it.
