FINAL 2024 Oscar Predictions: BEST PICTURE

Unification has been the theme of this awards season if there ever was one.

The dominance of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer – with BAFTA, Critics Choice, Golden Globe, PGA and SAG wins – while not unprecedented, doesn’t reflect what we’ve seen very much of since the Oscars’ expanded Best Picture lineup began in 2009. That was the year after Slumdog Millionaire‘s eight Academy Award wins, a number that hasn’t been matched since. Yet. Everything Everywhere All At Once came close last year with seven and the floor for Oppenheimer seems to be a Slumdog-tying eight (Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Film Editing, Cinematography, Score, Sound) with Adapted Screenplay in reach and any one of Costume Design, Production Design and/or Makeup and Hairstyling as possibilities if voters go down the line for the film.

Are we entering a new, throwback era of the Oscars where a film can dominate once again? In the years between Slumdog and EEAAO the most Oscars a film had won was six, when 2009’s The Hurt Locker did, that first year of the expanded lineup and the start of the preferential Best Picture ballot. But not long before that were the massive sweepers like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Titanic; both expensive but brave undertakings that paid off handsomely at both the box office and awards season, one a fantasy genre that the Oscars had never embraced and one an example of classic Hollywood filmmaking. Which is what makes Oppenheimer so unique and perfectly situated, it’s really both. It’s a biopic, to be sure, but one told visually and aurally in the most unconventional of ways, the most Nolan of ways. It’s a blitz to the senses but also, largely, a film of people in rooms talking. But Nolan is smart enough to know there’s kinetic energy in both and he trusted the audience to feel that too and they did, en masse. His 3-hour, R-rated drama with no real action sequences like his previous blockbusters, carved out $330M domestically in the U.S. and $957M worldwide. No bomb, Oppenheimer, it was a hit.

After all of the Barbenheimer talk last summer and both films doing boffo box office, when it came to their awards season standoff, the talking doll took a backseat in the Barbie Corvette to the much more atomic contender. For better or worse, the decision to release both films on the same day last July was a lightening in a bottle moment for the modern era. In the 80s and 90s it was commonplace, intentional counter-programming benefitted everyone and kept us in the theaters all day. But that was also the era of summer TV reruns, not 500 channels of something always on and a dozen social media apps to sap our time and attention span. Inevitably, we’ll see some copycat Barbenheimer-style mashups in seasons to come, hoping to capitalize on that phenomenon.

But there’s another element to Oppenheimer‘s dominant success, one that’s become more custom in the last two decades and that’s its escape of the villainization of the frontrunner. Especially evident in the expanded Best Picture era, sometimes a critics favorite gains so much steam so quickly that the feeling starts to percolate among voters that they’re being told how to vote, and the Academy likes nothing less than being told who or how to vote. This was a major component in the Crash vs Brokeback Mountain year (plus a big dollop of classic homophobia). They like to feel they’re ahead of the curve, not behind it (they’re usually the former though) and god forbid your frontrunner gets the curse of being called ‘cold.’ Or it’s from Netflix. That stigma is still firmly in place as evidenced by winners like Green Book and CODA becoming phase 2 warriors in the Oscar race and passing by Roma and The Power of the Dog, respectively, as voters began looking for an alternative. For Oppenheimer, there was no real backlash, no animus to vote against. But also, there was no clear alternative to gravitate to. Killers of the Flower Moon has the gravitas of a classic Best Picture winner and was even an early critics favorite but the Scorsese film is winning one Oscar, at best. Poor Things defied odds to become a box office hit and an awards season favorite, nabbing double digit Academy Awards nominations. But even this Academy, who awarded Best Picture to a fantasy film about a woman fucking a fish man, feels like Poor Things is ‘too weird.’ You can make arguments for Anatomy of a Fall or The Zone Interest but not realistic ones. Maestro and Barbie occupy a similar space as films with one (maybe two?) below the line wins. Past Lives only has one nomination outside of Best Picture. That leaves two films, like Green Book and CODA (although clearly not comparable creatively), that would be easy choices for those looking for something else: American Fiction and The Holdovers. Each are likely (definitely) going to win an Oscar elsewhere and they both have a feel good nature or valuable lesson in just the right basic measure that voters love. The preferential ballot even favors that type of win, most evident in Best Picture/Director split years. But, if that was going to happen it would have happened. Neither of those films could beat Poor Things at the Globes, nothing toppled Oppenheimer at PGA or even SAG. It can’t and won’t fail on the preferential ballot and it wouldn’t on a plural vote one either.

Early on, I admittedly did not think Oppenheimer could or would go all the way. Partly because since the expansion of the Academy membership beginning in 2015, it’s not the kind of film that wins anymore. There’s a “that’s what the money is for!” feeling about box office hits and Best Picture, and the Oscars have more closely mirrored the Spirit Awards than the Academy of yore. But one thing voters like to do here is subvert those expectations. Like I mentioned, they don’t like being told where to go, they’re the drivers, not the passengers.

The 96th Academy Awards are Sunday, March 10. Here are my ranked final 2024 Oscar predictions for Best Picture.