Before we post our Golden Globe predictions for this weekend, one more look at the Oscars prior to the ceremony.
In general, the Oscar race for Best Picture is driven by two things: the director and/or the ensemble cast. These days, in the era of the preferential ballot (when they expanded from five to ten) the director matters less. More films have won without the director winning since 2009 than for the many decades prior.
In those cases, with films like Spotlight, Moonlight, Green Book and some others, the actors bring in the wins rather than the singular vision of the director. Sometimes the two go together, as with Oppenheimer or Birdman. But not always. We don’t know what kind of a year this is yet, whether one person (Sean Baker or Brady Corbet, etc) will win Best Director and an ensemble cast will win Best Picture (Wicked, Conclave) or whether these two things will go together.
How I see the films in this year’s Oscar race (at least, so far):
Director-driven:
Anora
The Brutalist
Nickel Boys
Nosferatu
The Substance
Dune Part Two
Emilia Perez
Ensemble driven:
Conclave
Wicked
A Real Pain
A Complete Unknown
Sing Sing
Saturday Night
September 5
The Piano Lesson
To me, the two films that are strongest with both director and ensemble would be:
Anora
Conclave
Emilia Perez
I think Anora is underrated for what a brilliant ensemble it is. I think Conclave is underrated for how much of a director’s movie it is. Emilia Perez is notable because of what the director has done, but many would say the ensemble drives it (I’m not a fan of that film so it’s hard for me to say one way or the other).
We don’t have many awards with nominations for ensemble cast but we do have the Critics Choice and the SAG awards. I wanted to know how these two line up and what I found was that only once since the Critics Choice nominated 5 or 6 in the ensemble category did they match 5/5 with SAG and that was in 2006, before they expanded the Best Picture ballot.
Since then, the most they’ve matched was 4/5.
Of those in the ensemble category by Critics Choice, if history is any indication, two will miss:
Anora
Conclave
Emilia Pérez
Saturday Night
Sing Sing
Wicked
Saturday Night probably won’t make the cut, although who knows? It seems that A Complete Unknown will probably get in there.
I feel sure these are the strongest ensembles:
Anora
Conclave
Emilia Perez
Wicked
But it’s entirely possible we’ll see a surprise with Anora missing. It’s easy to overlook how great all of the key players are, especially since many of them are Russian and Armenian, not well known. But it is some of the best acting of the year across the board.
However, if Anora misses, probably Sing Sing gets in, along with A Complete Unknown.
I personally think that the ensembles that are the best I’ve seen all year look more like this, if we’re choosing five:
Anora
Conclave
Wicked
Sing Sing
Juror #2
I know it’s highly unlikely that Juror #2 makes it in. But it is worthy from an ensemble standpoint. There’s also The Piano Lesson, Nickel Boys, A Real Pain, September 5, and yes, Saturday Night. Who knows. It’s an ensemble-driven movie if there ever was one.
Moving on to Best Director, this is a little less complicated than ensemble cast. We can see the strongest names emerging already. A great director doesn’t feel the need to lead by ego to the point where he or she forbids any criticism. So many of the films this year were directed by people who did not know when to reign it in and how to be more disciplined, like Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolis, like Kevin Costner and Horizon, like Todd Phillips and Joker Folie a Deux. These films should have been great. They weren’t because their directors got in their own way.
To my mind, there are two directors, maybe three, maybe four, worthy of a win this year. Not a nomination, but a win. They would be directors who either listened to their screenwriters or wrote a screenplay that was so good, the directing came easily.
At the top of that list is Sean Baker who has made a great leap forward as a filmmaker with Anora. It might not be so apparent at first with all of the violence and chaos that surrounds the moment when Ani is separated from her fiance and must kick and scream her way through the situation.
What I so love about this movie is how Baker brings us into this world so completely, we forget we’re even watching a movie. We’re a fly on the wall, which is what watching his films are like. Sometimes you even feel kind of embarrassed just for being there, witnessing what you’re seeing.
The beauty of this movie is how quiet things become, how intimate, how personal, how deep. The last scene of the film is a killer, partly because of how Baker films it – trained on Ani’s face as she shifts from her real life self — angry, foul-mouthed, brutally honest — back to her sex worker self — nice, compliant, agreeable, easy — and in the background the wiper blades are going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. That’s the only sound we hear as we watch her try to pay back the guy who looked out for her, got her ring back and showed her such kindness. She pays with the only thing she thinks she has to offer. But she is so much more and Baker has just shown us the real her. It’s such a beautiful scene and has stayed with me all season. I don’t know if he’ll win on Sunday. There is tough competition, to be sure, but I know he is a great director and has made his masterpiece with Anora.
Edward Berger already showed us what he could do with All Quiet on the Western Front. With that movie I felt like the song, “Just one look…” I thought, who is this talented artist and where has he been hiding? The amount of BAFTA wins for All Quiet was, I thought, well-deserved. With Conclave he isn’t working with the same kind of traumatic material. It is more a circular film about the internal worlds of people who must hide who they are and what they really think. In keeping the film trained almost entirely on the face of Ralph Fiennes, we are led through an intriguing game of cat and mouse.
Berger is a visual director more than he is anything, which is what makes watching Conclave, and All Quiet on the Western Front, so thrilling. Might he win on Sunday? He might.
I had the same sensation watching Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as I did with Conclave. I was already a fan with Revenge. I could see that this woman could really direct. But she outdoes herself with The Substance with every shot, every nod to the famous directors she admires. In-depth essays could be written about the substance, including age, sexism, patriarchy, etc. But to me, that’s the weakest part of this film, or maybe I’m just sick of identity politics. But I loved about it is that it’s so rare to find a female director with that kind of visual style. It happens — Kathryn Bigelow, etc — but it’s rare. Fargeat is fearless, vulgar, funny and surprising. Can she win? Not sure. It’s not a film for everyone and that might hurt it in the end.
Brady Corbet is Film Twitter’s favorite director and they all believe he will prevail on Sunday for his grand, sweeping epic, The Brutalist. It’s certainly possible. I came away from the film impressed with the scope of it, the big bite he took and his high ambition. We need more directors like him working who will make original work like that. But what I saw in The Brutalist was an artist just beginning to find his way toward greatness. I might be alone in that but that’s what I saw. He is still but a learner on his way to becoming a master. My advice to him would be to leave the politics of today out of it. Don’t try to convey big messages but instead allow the characters to exist within the story. The Brutalist is almost there but I felt it was slightly weighed down by the desire to “say something.” I don’t think he should worry so much about that because everything else is so great. But who cares what I think. He could very well win on Sunday and even win the Oscar. What do I know?
Finally, Jon Chu probably should be in the conversation with what he’s achieved with Wicked, Part One. It isn’t only Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande that make this movie, it’s also his direction. How else could there be such a brilliant ending with Erivo blooming into the witch she was destined to be? He’s good, even if there are many moving parts and it’s far from perfect. He would win if the film was on its way to winning Best Picture. Unlike Corbet, he isn’t just going to win Best Director without the film winning Best Picture.
So that’s all I have to say. Here are my updated Oscar predictions for this week, before the Golden Globes:
Best Picture
Anora
Conclave
Wicked
The Brutalist
Emilia Perez
A Complete Unknown
Dune Part Two
The Substance
Nickel Boys
Sing Sing
Alt: A Real Pain, Nosferatu, The Apprentice
Best Director
Sean Baker, Anora
Edward Berger, Conclave
Brady Corbet, The Brutalist
Jaques Audiard, Emilia Perez
Coralie Fargeat, The Substance
Alt: James Mangold, a Complete Unknown, Jon Chu, Wicked, Denis Villeneuve, Dune Part Two, RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys
Best Actress
Mikey Madison, Anora
Cynthia Erivo, Wicked
Nicole Kidman, Babygirl
Demi Moore, The Substance
Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths
Alts: Karla Sofia Gascon, Emilia Perez, Angelina Jolie, Maria (split vote, Netflix)
Best Actor
Ralph Fiennes, Conclave
Timothee Chalamet, A Complete Unknown
Daniel Craig, Queer
Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
Alt: Sebastian Stan for The Apprentice or a Different Man
Best Supporting Actor
Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
Denzel Washington, Gladiator II
Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown
Yura Borisov, Anora
Clarence Maclin, Sing Sing
Alt. Adam Pearson, A Different Man, Jonathan Bailey, Wicked, Samuel L. Jackson, The Piano Lesson
Best Supporting Actress
Zoe Saldana, Emilia Perez
Ariana Grande, Wicked
Felicity Jones, The Brutalist
Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown
Isabella Rossellini, Conclave
Alt: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Nickel Boys; Danielle Deadwyler, The Piano Lesson, Elle Fanning, A Complete Unknown
Original Screenplay
The Substance
Anora
The Brutalist
A Real Pain
September 5
Alt. Hard Truths
Adapted Screenplay
Conclave
Emilia Perez
Dune Part Two
A Complete Unknown
Queer
Alt. The Piano Lesson
Cinematography
Nosferatu
Dune Part Two
The Brutalist
Conclave
Emilia Perez
Editing
Challengers
Conclave
Anora
Emilia Perez
Wicked
Alt. September 5, The Substance, Saturday Night
Production Design
Nosferatu
Wicked
Dune Part Two
The Substance
Emilia Perez
Alt. Furiosa
Costumes
Wicked
Nosferatu
Dune Part Two
Emilia Perez
The Substance
Sound
Wicked
Dune Part Two
A Complete Unknown
Gladiator II
Deadpool & Wolverine
Animated
Inside Out 2
The Wild Robot
Flow
Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Moana 2
Score
The Brutalist
The Wild Robot
Challengers
Conclave
Emilia Perez
Makeup and Hair
The Substance
Wicked
Beatlejuice Beatlejuice
Nosferatu
A Different Man
I’ll be posting our Globes predictions a bit later.
Tags: 2025 Oscar predictionsBEST DIRECTORSAG ensemble
