2021 Oscar Predictions: BEST PICTURE (September)

My top 10 is eerily quiet this month, even after Venice and Toronto are over and NYFF is underway. Ammonite drops to make room for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which gave us our first look at Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman this week.

As with Best Director, a handful of films moved to 2021 (outside of the new Oscar eligibility) or still without any updated release information are gone from the chart: West Side Story (20th Century), The French Dispatch (Searchlight Pictures), Next Goal Wins (Searchlight Pictures) and Stillwater (Focus Features) among them. Warner Bros’ Dune is the most vulnerable film to find itself with a pushed off release date if theaters aren’t open on a large scale by December, especially after the wobbly release of Tenet in the US. If that happens, voters will be struggling to find big studio fare to support, potentially giving us one of the most ‘indie’ Best Picture lineups in decades.

Here are my 2021 Oscar predictions in Best Picture for September.

Green – moves up; Red – moves down; Blue – new entry this month

• Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
• The Father (Sony Pictures Classics)
• News of the World (Universal Pictures)
• Dune (Warner Bros) [moved to October 2021]
• Judas and the Black Messiah (Warner Bros)
• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
• Mank (Netflix)
• Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)
• One Night in Miami… (Amazon)
• The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)

Other Contenders: Ammonite (Neon), Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix), Minari (A24), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features), On the Rocks (Apple/A24), Soul (Walt Disney/Pixar), Tenet (Warner Bros), The United States vs Billie Holiday (Paramount Pictures)

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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