From ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ to ‘May December’ to ‘Godzilla Minus One’: If We Picked the Oscars – 2024 Edition

If you’re an Oscar follower or an awards watcher it’s probably, more than once, crossed your mind that it might be kind of cool, kind of fun, to be able to have your say, to cast your ballot for the biggest show of them all. We’re no different here at AwardsWatch and many of us spend probably an unhealthy amount of time wish-dicting and hope-dicting all season (year?) long.

With 10 films represented, the AW crew looked at every category to ask ourselves What If We Picked the Oscars? Here are the results.

BEST PICTURE – Oppenheimer

Over the past twenty years, the great Hollywood epic has been ignored on Oscar night in the ceremonies most important category. Movies like Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, The Godfather: Part II, Titanic, Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and more have displayed the beautiful marriage between general audiences and the Academy in winning the top prize at their respected Oscars due in large part because they are more than just movies; they were cinematic events that transformed into one of defining artifacts of its year. The time has finally come to have another epic join the prestigious ranks of those stellar titles, as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer deserves to be the winner of Best Picture at the 96^th Academy Awards. In what feels like the career culmination of ideas he’s been working on for over two decades, Nolan crafted the cinematic achievement of the year with a nearly billion-dollar biographical examination of one of history’s most complex geniuses. At its inception, Nolan and his team became fascinated with the idea of Oppenheimer and his group of scientists creating something that had the slight possibility of blowing up the world. With this informative seed of doubt, Oppenheimer created the weapon to end all wars, thus springing us all into the nuclear world he manifested. For Nolan, he used this information to construct a profound, bone chilling, entertaining masterpiece lead by an all-star cast, including career best performances from Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. Oppenheimer is beyond astonishing, and is the modern epic of our time that everyone couldn’t stop seeing, including the AwardsWatch team. Since its release and multiple re-releases in theaters, it’s the number one movie the staff has seen collectively in a theater this past year, with a couple of dozen viewings to confirm its majesty. It only seems right that a movie of this size, scope, artistic merit, and global acclaim be the film to take home Hollywood’s biggest award on March 10. It’s just that damn good. – Ryan McQuade

BEST DIRECTOR – Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest

History often remembers the loudest executioners, replicated in popular culture via a signature mustache whose followers bend the knee and blindly follow their every order. Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing masterpiece, The Zone of Interest, instead remembers and forces the eye to the violent ordinary, specifically, S.S. commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig, dubbed “The Queen of Auschwitz,” who, along with their children, live just beyond the walls of the concentration camp because it’s convenient. Glazer’s creation is a devastating timepiece, recording a particular moment in history while stretching across the bounds of time into the present day and onward. A handful of films last year, namely Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, looked to the tragedy perpetrated by the hubris of men in the past as a link to the horrors of the present, but no filmmaker illustrated the immense gravity of that link with as much focus and formal clarity as Glazer. Comparisons have naturally (and rightfully) been made to Kubrick for his stylistic choices and chilly, distant approach to point of view, but there is also something entirely new here. By running multiple stationary cameras, Glazer creates a Big Brother effect that doubles as an anthropological gaze onto the Hoss family, not from them. At the Telluride Film Festival last year, Glazer shared that alongside cinematographer Łukasz Żal and sound designer Johnnie Burn, he effectively created two films, “one you see and one you hear.” The distant sounds from beyond the walls of Auschwitz intertwine with the brilliant image-making, forcing a delayed release on the senses. The realization of who Hedwig’s fur coat belonged to, that the young boy was mimicking the sound of gunfire on his toy drum, or that a boy locking his brother in the greenhouse parallels the smoke rising from the chimney in the distance work like a slow poison trip to complete Glazer’s terrifying tableau of generational evil. When Hoss is on the phone dictating the contents of a message, he says the most chilling, callous line in the film, “Heil Hitler. Et cetera.” Glazer’s masterwork lives in the danger and the damage not only in the obvious but also in the “et cetera.” With The Zone of Interest, Glazer doesn’t just connect the horrors of the past to the present. He dares to force us to stare into the void, reflecting on the images we had in our minds before the film’s first haunting sounds and those we’ll carry into the future after its conclusion.  – Sophia Ciminello

BEST ACTOR – Colman Domingo, Rustin

The Academy has the opportunity to make history by choosing to reward Colman Domingo with the Best Actor Oscar for his magnetic performance as Bayard Rustin: It would be the first time an openly gay man wins the Lead Actor Oscar for playing a gay character. They should take it. Not just because it would make history, but because Domingo gave the best performance in the category (regardless of how much the Academy liked the film as a whole). Let’s be honest: The likelihood of a Domingo victory is small, given that Rustin received no other nominations, but if the Academy has the good sense to reward him, they can rest easy knowing that his work stands on its own. Domingo does everything myriad past winners have done: He transforms himself both physically and internally, channeling Rustin’s essence so well that he “becomes” him. He has moments of dazzling showmanship, getting to chew the scenery with several monologues, but he also has subtle, quiet moments of internal reflection. In honoring Domingo, the Academy would “also” be honoring Rustin, an important hero of the civil rights movement who has never gotten the recognition he deserved. Some will say that the nomination is the reward in this case, but a nomination is not reward enough for this magical performance. Rustin himself has gotten appropriate recognition for his groundbreaking work too late. For any voters on the fence, the opportunity to make history and honor the memory of someone not properly rewarded in their lifetime, an opportunity not given to them by any of the other nominees, should be incentive enough! The fact that the performance itself is of such high quality is just the cherry on top. – Dan Bayer

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY – Oppenheimer, Written for the screen by Christopher Nolan based on the nonfiction book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

We are all familiar with Christopher Nolan’s ambition as a filmmaker. He loves to cover multiple locations at separate points in time, relying on the technical magic of editing to make up for any shortcomings in the writing. In the case of Oppenheimer, the technical components, as immaculate as they are, come secondary. The story wouldn’t function properly without first having a firm foundation of writing in place. The original Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus” covers so much narrative ground, from Oppenheimer’s academic pursuits to the loss of his security clearance via kangaroo court, even going so far to include biopic details such as the aftermath of his family members. Nolan’s style of writing and directing appears to be the most perfect treatment for a chronologically-told biopic. By simultaneously telling the story through Oppenheimer’s security hearing and Strauss’ Senate hearing, our traditional biopic story points are told through a flawed human lens, full of hindsight, regret, and resentment. Most biopics fall into the trappings of becoming a straightforward Wikipedia rundown of a person’s life. Nolan’s approach allows us room for self-reflection and self-reckoning. As much as it is about one man’s life, about America’s efforts during the war, the film is just as much a universal cautionary tale about mankind reaching a point of no return and impending doom. We can talk about the score, the editing, and the technical achievements in Oppenheimer, but it is Nolan’s screenplay that gives the film its devastation, urgent weight, and its well-deserved acclaim. – Kevin Lee

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY – Anatomy of a Fall, Screenplay by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari

A thoroughly incisive look at relationships is prevalent amongst every original screenplay nominee, but the sharpest is Justine Triet and Arthur Harari’s Anatomy of a Fall, a screenplay following the before and after the death of Sandra Voyter’s (Academy Award nominee Sandra Hüller) husband after he’s found next to the house, appearing to have fallen from the second floor. There are moments in this film so intimate, even in unabashed fury between the central couple, that it feels voyeuristic to even be watching the story unfold. Intersecting the past and the courtroom to piece together the mystery is riveting, but there was no other film this year with lines of lacerating dialogue like, “you made us live here among the goats!” which is one of the funniest possible exclamations someone could make during an argument. Triet and Harari’s script expertly navigates the (insane?) French court system, creating the villain of the year in the prosecution’s attorney, a man intent on putting Sandra in prison for her husband’s death. A screenplay that understands the little resentments that build between lovers, how children are affected by their parents’ relationship, and the cruelty that exists within families, Anatomy of a Fall finds itself among the GOATs. – Tyler Doster

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY – May December, Screenplay by Samy Burch; Story by Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik

If you were alive on the internet this fall and winter you couldn’t escape Julianne Moore’s “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs” line from Todd Haynes’ May December. Whether in or out of context it was weird, funny, goofy. Coming so early in the film, Samy Burch’s screenplay – from a story by her and then boyfriend/now husband Alex Mechanik – lets you know right away what you’re in for; a tone-shifting, off-kilter exploration of the 1990s where magazine and television tabloid culture in the U.S. was at its peak. Murder, adultery and every sordid detail of them laid out for consumption, whether it was fact or fiction, and the long-lived aftermath of it. Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth, a television actress is tasked to play an infamous woman who, at 36, seduced a 13-year-old boy and bore his children. If that story sounds familiar, it’s because it is. In the U.S. the story of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau rocked the news. But this isn’t the story of Letourneau and Fualaau, even if it capitalizes on a collective consciousness of it and our own culpability and complicity in the craven need the public had for the dark details of it. We know that the phrase ‘May December’ refers to a relationship between an older person and a younger person but traditionally the involved are also both adults. Burch perverts and subverts the term here by placing it in the context of the cruel robbing of youth and unflinchingly so. It’s also a razor-sharp examination of vampiric behavior as Portman’s mimicry of Moore’s affectations becomes something altogether different, method acting at its most diabolical. Think Persona meets Single White Female. One wonders of the acting branch of the Academy felt a little too seen to nominate the deserving cast here. Balancing tone and structure is already a heady task for any screenwriter but Burch isn’t interested in finding that zone, she wants us off-balance and we are, constantly. Taking material embedded in trauma and spinning it into a melodrama, a satire and yes, a comedy. By the time we get to Portman’s extended monologue directly into the camera we’re no longer bystanders, we’re participants. If you’re uncomfortable with it, good. You’re supposed to be. Structurally genius, violently clever and one of the most quotable films of 2023. “That’s just what adults do” and “Insecure people are really dangerous” cycle through my head every day, burrowed in and there to stay. – Erik Anderson

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM – The Boy and the Heron

2023 was a huge year for foundational auteurs. We got new masterpieces from Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, David Fincher, and Todd Haynes, among others. But one film brought the return of a cinematic genius who many feared would never complete another movie: Hayao Miyazaki. His latest wonder, The Boy and the Heron, is a titanic achievement so wondrous and unendingly creative that it practically defies description. It’s the story of, like so many of his films, a young person’s adventure into a world of fantasy and horror in pursuit of something that they’ve been missing. And it just might be his most abstract film yet. Relying on dream logic and arresting imagery in place of typical narrative milestones that audiences are used to, Miyazaki invites us into a realm of beauty where feeling and impression matter more than logic. And in that way, viewers are welcome to project as much or as little personal meaning onto the film as they like. But the best way to watch the film is to simply let it wash over you and allow the gorgeous animation and impactful storytelling affect you on a basic primal level. It’s the kind of mythic tale that feels eternal and timeless, and yet so much of it has never been seen before. Miyazaki is not only the greatest director of animation in history, he’s one of the most accomplished filmmakers the world has ever seen, and his latest achievement absolutely deserves the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. – Cody Dericks

CINEMATOGRAPHY – Killers of the Flower Moon, Rodrigo Prieto

How the image is captured within the frame of a film is one of the most important qualities when assembling a cinematic landscape. The decisions made by a cinematographer are crucial in crafting not just the visual aesthetics, but also establishing the tone of this textured world. Throughout the years, Rodrigo Prieto has masterfully demonstrated this artistry, and his contributions to Killers of the Flower Moon is no different. It’s easy to immediately recognize the grand vistas that are showcased. The vast landscapes illuminate the wealth of this town and its inhabitants in a luxurious manner. This also underlines the darker specter that hangs over this community, and the clash of light and shadows encapsulates this vicious battle. Prieto’s skills display the soul of this environment, whether that be the pain of Mollie’s trauma or the starkness by which the violence is presented. He is able to construct stunning imagery, with a particularly vivid example being the burning of the fields on Hale’s ranch that come vibrantly to life in the hazy heat lines. The silhouetted figures are both alluring and monstrous, a perfect analogy to the villainy that is thick in the atmosphere. The lens is evocative of American period classics in the vein of Giant or Days of Heaven, being able to communicate the beauty of the land while also speaking thematically to its harsh narrative and characters. All four of Rodrigo Prieto’s Oscar nominations speak to the wonderful ability to mix gorgeous scenery with devastating emotion, and it makes him worthy once again to take the prize for Best Cinematography this year. – Josh Parham

COSTUME DESIGN – Barbie, Jacqueline Durran

There are many categories this year that would stump me as an Academy Award voter, but choosing a nominee for one category would be ridiculously easy: Jacqueline Durran’s costume design for Barbie is an achievement far above the other nominees. Durran’s work is the most impressive both for the way that it references archival material and for how it plays into the story of the film itself. Durran is a celebrated costume designer, already having won two Academy Awards for Anna Karenina and Little Women, and she is absolutely deserving of another Oscar for her work on Barbie, particularly considering that it sits a bit outside of her usual period drama wheelhouse. Barbie boasts many of the most iconic looks from 2023 films, including Ryan Gosling’s fur coat and Margot Robbie’s hot pink cowgirl look. Some of the costumes Durran created were (human-sized) recreations of iconic Barbie doll outfits, like the 1959 Barbie black and white swimsuit that appears in the film’s opening scene or the 1994 Hot Skatin’ Barbie neon roller-blading look that Barbie wears when she arrives in LA for the first time. Other looks were built to reference an era (like Ryan Gosling’s 1980’s retro sportswear), a profession (like Alexandra Shipp’s doctor outfit), or even a way of being played with (like Kate McKinnon’s paint-splattered hot pink dress). But perhaps most importantly to me, if I were a voter, the costuming of Barbie is the most integral to the story as the clothes do a lot of the heavy lifting to create the world of Barbieland, and later of Kenland, and to create the sense of nostalgia for the way we used to dress our own Barbies. If you need proof that Barbie had the most culturally significant costume design of the year, you need only think about Halloween 2023 and how many of Durran’s looks were recreated by people of all ages. – Nicole Ackman

ORIGINAL SONG – “I’m Just Ken,” Barbie

Hey my dudes, it’s time for the ultimate beach off in the 2024 Oscars Best Original Song category. The five nominees include John Batiste and Dan Wilson’s “It Never Went Away,” “Wahzhazhe” by Scott George, “The Fire Inside” by Diane Warren, What Was I Made For?By Billie Eilish and FINNEAS and last but not least, “I’m Just Ken”by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt. I’m Just Ken feels like one of the best examples of how a song can enhance, explain character motivations and make an actor shine and maybe why Ken (Ryan Gosling) even stole Barbie’s thunder. It’s truly baffling that for my lukewarm love of the Barbie movie overall, I still could not stop pressing play on “I’m Just Ken” so much so that Gosling was my #1 artist on my Spotify Wrapped. I owe that to a combination of Gosling’s performance throughout the musical number in the film and the delivery of the lyrics – those subtle and not-so-subtle facial expressions are so spot on. They are silly, they are true to what the character is going through mixed in with the spectacular set design, costuming (that mink coat) and the choreography of this scene that makes “I’m Just Ken” so magical. The song truly transports you to a different world from what the start of the song is to the unexpected tempo beat change towards the end. You go on a journey with Ken through this song and it’s truly marvelous for a song to capture such a pivotal moment in this fictional doll’s character arc and to see an actor like Gosling fully become Kenough. It deserves the Oscar for originality, for whimsy and for such a goddamn fun time that makes you want to press play over and over again. – Catherine Gonzales

VISUAL EFFECTS – The Creator

The Creator is a game changer. In his soulful, awe-inspiring, original sci-fi film, Gareth Edwards set out to flip the conventions of filmmaking on their heads. Rather than setting up green screens and compositing all of the necessary effects and enhancements in post using fully digital tools, Edwards enlisted Industrial Light & Magic to embark on a daring mission that would allow him to shoot everything they possibly could in-camera, utilizing wholly unique locations across East Asia and physical stand-ins which would then be worked over by the VFX team. If you’re a VFX artist, that approach sounds like a logistical nightmare in the era of the “fix it in post” mentality that’s tragically become the norm plaguing much of the industry’s tentpole productions. But what The Creator had that those projects didn’t was trust; complete trust in a filmmaker with a comprehensive understanding of the post-production pipeline (Edwards began his career working in VFX) and who had their backs at every turn. The end result is some of the rawest, most organic, and spectacular VFX work that live-action sci-fi has ever seen, with arguably not a single frame that jars or falls flat. It redefined how blockbuster films of this caliber should operate by placing great importance on the design and post-process, dialing back the excess and large crews and soundstages traditionally seen on a film like this, to instead maximize the inherent production value of real locations they chose to shoot in. The production process, modeling assets that would eventually transfer over to the production side and be created for real, in an intense collaboration with production designer James Cline both during production and in post, is intensive, hard work, but because ILM was brought on at the very beginning as an equal creative partner with Edwards – as opposed to a sort of cleanup crew in post-production – they were able to plan and realize some of the most breathtaking visuals of 2023. Visual effects aren’t nor should ever be an afterthought. If you’re crafting a film that requires wildly imaginative setpieces that can’t be realized in camera, you need to onboard these artists to help realize that vision. Give their imagination time to create and innovate; to help you realize that dream that is your movie. Cinema isn’t something made on an assembly line, it’s something hand-crafted through heart, passion, and creativity by artists with a soul When you watch The Creator, the soul of thousands of artists coming together to realize a single vision shines brighter than ever; it feels like you’re watching old-school movie magic at its finest. Something beyond worthy of the Best Visual Effects Oscar. Creating something game-changing is never easy, but The Creator succeeded, and I’m sure will go on to inspire a whole new generation of independent filmmakers in what’s possible with the tools available to them when you maximize your creativity and imagination. – Griffin Schiller

VISUAL EFFECTS – Godzilla Minus One

If we are going to gamify the art of film, we must take into consideration degrees of difficulty. The visual effects team for Godzilla Minus One had a few things working against them. First, and most obviously, was the film’s limited budget. Director Takashi Yamakazi confirmed that the final cost of the film was somewhere between $10 million and $15 million. To put that in perspective, Todd Haynes’ May December, a (great) film about people contemplating the implications of re-enacting bad behavior that, notably, doesn’t feature a giant lizard laying waste to a major urban hub with a nuclear blast emitted via its mouth, cost $20 million. Godzilla Minus One managed to be the most rousing, epic action film of 2023 with about 5% (FIVE PERCENT!) of the budgets granted to fellow nominees Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.  That brings us to Godzilla Minus One’s second hurdle: retooling the inherently goofy design and movements of classic Godzilla to make sense in the context of modern cinema while also honoring the important heritage of the character and its place in the histories of both film and Japan. For years, Godzilla was brought to life by some guy in a rubber suit, somehow managing to capture the cultural paranoia of Japan in the wake of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Godzilla Minus One takes place shortly before those attacks in 1945, which firmly plants the iconography of the original film, released in 1954, in the minds of audiences. This Godzilla has a frame similar to that of the original and captures the essence of that classicism evoked by the period and music used in the film. It feels of a piece with the thematic and emotional cores of the best the series has to offer. This creature is an achievement of both design and execution. It is one thing to be pretty and look expensive, but it is another to enhance a film’s storytelling. Unlike many of today’s blockbusters, where the effects are the star of the show, the effects in Godzilla Minus One are tools to make the audience think more critically and feel more intensely. The action is more thrilling, the destruction is more horrifying, and the victories are more cathartic because of the mighty efforts of the VFX team. All hail the King of the Monsters. – Jay Ledbetter