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As we close the book on one of the most predictable best-picture Oscar races in recent memory, it’s worth highlighting just how anomalous Oppenheimer remains as a modern-day front-runner. The last movie to go all the way with the Academy and approximate its global box office gross of nearly $1 billion bowed a full 20 years ago, in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The last movie to truly, fully sweep the major televised precursor awards—that is, SAG, BAFTA, the Golden Globes, and the Critics Choice Awards—was Ben Affleck’s Argo, more than a decade ago. Or here’s one: When was the last time a three-hour-long movie won best picture? For that, once again, we must go back to that triumphant final entrant in the LOTR trilogy.
Depending on how quickly you keyed into Oppenheimer’s potent combination of qualities—its grave subject matter, its critical acclaim, its box office explosion, its filmmaker’s overdue narrative—this thing has been over for maybe eight months, when Barbenheimer first took over American moviegoing. By that point, already, the Cannes Film Festival had premiered three movies that’d go on to receive best-picture nods of their own: Anatomy of a Fall, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Zone of Interest. Past Lives had already wowed Sundance and enjoyed a successful run in platform theatrical release. Telluride, Toronto, and Venice were around the corner, and they’d go on to field the likes of The Holdovers, American Fiction, and Poor Things and Maestro, respectively. That’s your best-picture race. Some of us tried to spot a spoiler along the way—Barbie as the cultural phenomenon, The Holdovers as the feel-good throwback, American Fiction as the savvy modern satire. But these movies were never really ahead. Along with the others, they’ve been playing for second place to Oppenheimer.
The sheer dominance of Oppenheimer may be rarer than you think, but you’re not imagining it: It’s been fairly easy to predict the best-picture winner for the last three years. For those in the know, Everything Everywhere All at Once, CODA, and Nomadland were essentially guaranteed winners by the big night. By design, the Oscars come at the end of a long campaigning slog, putting their authoritative stamp on the season. It can feel less like ending with a bang than a whimper, though, when their choices so closely mirror those of various industry guilds and journalist organizations. For the last two years, the Academy’s four acting winners have been the exact same as those chosen by the Screen Actors Guild. And, with the exception of Bong Joon-ho’s thrilling Parasite upset in 2019, the Academy’s pick for best director has also won the directors guild award every time across the last decade.
Part of this has to do with the power of consensus. You’re talking about groups of thousands of voters left to agree on a single performance (maybe more accurately, a single narrative). No matter where you look, the majority has been behind Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Robert Downey Jr. The town fell in love with their stories between panel conversations and fancy luncheons and glitzy festival stops, and that simply never changed from acceptance speech to acceptance speech. (Not even in London.) The Oscars have faced criticism for airing so late in the game—and there’s a point to be made about better sustaining interest, when things get so predictable, by striking in the heat of the season. But as Academy president Janet Yang told me last month, the show airs in March for a reason: This voting body of more than 10,000 people needs to be given every possible opportunity to watch the nominees, especially those that are smaller or less accessible.
I tend to agree. Many precursor groups exist, really, to help predict and shape the Oscar race; their survival is predicated on laying out an exciting path toward the big night. But you don’t really see the Critics Choice Awards, for example, thinking outside the box; they snubbed non-English-language movies in several categories, despite them winding up a huge part of the awards race this year. With time, meanwhile, the Academy delivered historic embraces to both Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, not to mention a landmark visual-effects nomination for Japan’s Godzilla Minus One. In part because of the longer Runway to make their case, the movies now have a good chance for a major moment on the Oscar stage. If film is a bit less mass-media than it used to be, it’s appropriate—gratifying, even—for the Oscars’ point of difference to be platforming riskier, bolder, less familiar movies that can find a real audience here.
Going into Sunday’s Oscars, several races still feel too close to call—only one of which, admittedly, is of broad, palpable interest to the general public (best actress). The rest of the acting races can be considered—in this reporter’s opinion—signed, sealed, and delivered. Same for best picture and director. Does that make for a boring show? Perhaps. But it’ll make for a fitting celebration of a year defined by the comeback of theatrical moviegoing, of big-scale original storytelling, of the art house model. (Did you know The Zone of Interest, a German-language Nazi family drama without any stars, has made more money in the US than the heavily pushed and highly acclaimed Cate Blanchett vehicle Tár?) It’ll push the Academy forward in its ambition to turn toward the rest of the world, to lead the way in recognizing a future of film and TV not limited by language. And just maybe, it’ll shake things up. The shocks of Moonlight over La La Land, Olivia Colman over Glenn Close, and Anthony Hopkins over the late Chadwick Boseman were not so long ago. And even if there’s no big surprise on Sunday, that possibility keeps the spark alive. The Oscars are nothing if not predictable—until they’re not.
Join us on the Vanity Fair Oscar Party red carpet.
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