Trying to determine how a group of 10,500 filmmakers, actors, craftspeople, and beyond will fill out their Oscar ballots is a particular form of madness that, every year, has its moments of fun. With the 96th Academy Awards, there’s little science to making predictions, beyond looking at all the gossip and months worth of theorizing to come up with our best guesses as to how Sunday’s ceremony will progress.
Spoiler alert: The below predictions add up to a blow-out night for Oppenheimer, to the point where writing this has largely become a plea to pay attention to movies from this awards cycle that aren’t Oppenheimer. Yes, Christopher Nolan’s opus is a true achievement, yet there are many other movies that achieved greatness in specific categories that voters might sadly overlook. Winning isn’t everything, of course — it’s the work that ultimately matters, in the end. But given the choice… Well, it’s always nice when the right winner wins.
Best Picture
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Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple TV+)
Should Win: Killers of the Flower Moon
Will Win: Oppenheimer
This year really did feature some stunning films — not a Green Book among them, and with Barbie and Past Lives in particular proving resonant and beautiful. However, it’s really a showdown between these two masterworks by master filmmakers, and even if Killers of the Flower Moon’s not the best Martin Scorsese movie ever made, that’s because, well, it’s Martin Scorsese. (Who, by the way, has only ever won one Oscar. One! That’s just weird.) Oppenheimer, category by category, feels like the film to beat this year. In this specific case, let’s give the edge to the movie with slightly more to say about us all.
Directing
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Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan behind the scenes of Oppenheimer (courtesy of Universal)
Should Win: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Will Win: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
We constantly battle these days with the question of the auteur theory and its relative merit in a modern world, but there is no question that Oppenheimer is a movie made by Christopher Nolan, at the very height of his powers as a filmmaker. It is a film that only someone like him, with his proven track record both creatively and at the box office, could pull off, and it is a success because of his work. As noted above, Martin Scorsese has only one Oscar for directing, but Nolan has zero. For now, that is.
Actor in a Leading Role
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The Holdovers (Focus Features)
Should Win: Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Will Win: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
A month ago, this race was much more of a coin flip, but Cillian Murphy winning at the SAG Awards pushed him over the edge. Both he and Paul Giamatti, though, are more similar in this race than you might think: two character actors with impressive careers behind them and a range of well-crafted work, playing roles in films that are so perfectly calibrated for their talents and experiences that success would feel inevitable, were the difficultly level not so high. Either of them winning will be a victor for film fans, and neither of them will be diminished by losing to such fine work on the other side.
