Honestly, some evil part of me wishes that Donald Trump had withheld federal aid from California after this winter’s wildfires, because then you’d really hear Trump-bashing from every presenter at the Oscar ceremony. You’re probably going to hear some anyway, but they are also going to give out some awards, too.
Thus, I present my annual Oscar feature. Since it’s back in the print edition, I’m running down all the major categories. This article may be too big for our print version, so be sure to check our website for a full accounting of the mid-major categories. As always, any wrong predictions will result in a refund of the newsstand price of this paper.
Picture: Wouldn’t it be something if Emilia Pérez wound up winning this after all? I don’t think it would be something good, but it would be something. It does seem as if Karla Sofía Gascón’s offensive Twitter history has mainly hurt her own chances of winning rather than her movie’s. Still, I rank Jacques Audiard’s film as the ninth-best of the 10 nominees, and I could be talked into rating it as worse than A Complete Unknown. If you read my Top 10 list, you’ll know where my sympathies lie, but it seems like the votes are leaning toward either Anora or Conclave, the supposedly safe pick that (spoiler alert) elected an intersex man as pope.
Actor: There would be no bigger middle finger the Academy could give Trump than awarding this Oscar to Sebastian Stan for The Apprentice. The president’s Twitter reaction alone would be priceless. There’s an outside chance of that actually happening, but the favorites here are Adrien Brody for The Brutalist and Timothée Chalamet for A Complete Unknown. I’m not overly high on either of those performances, but maybe the voters decide that Chalamet is ready for the statuette after so many roles in Oscar-winning films as well as a proven ability to carry crowd-pleasing blockbusters. If he wins, he’ll be the youngest actor ever to win this Oscar, breaking the record held by, uh, Brody. Anyway, check my list of best lead performances to see who I think deserves a nod.
Actress: This is going to Demi Moore for The Substance as a de facto lifetime achievement award. And she really is fantastic in Coralie Fargeat’s Hollywood satire, which pulled in many more viewers at the box office than its profile would seem to have portended. So many of us have freaked out over a gray hair or a new wrinkle, and it’s hard not to relate to Elisabeth Sparkle’s quest to be hot again. Mikey Madison does seem like the best dark horse, but I’m guessing the voters bypass her until she turns in a few more performances like the one in Anora. My heart is with Cynthia Erivo for Wicked, and my outrage is on behalf of Marianne Jean-Baptiste not being part of this field for Hard Truths. Fun fact: This is the first time since 1977 that all the performances in this category come from movies that have also been nominated for Best Picture.
Supporting actor: Speaking of de facto lifetime achievement awards, Guy Pearce has been doing magnificent work for almost 30 years now, and I stand by my earlier assessment that his performance in The Brutalist is the best of his glittering career. However, his chances may get dragged down by the fact that the three-hour epic he’s in is not the easiest film to warm up to, which is why the smart money is on Rory Culkin, who is stupendous in A Real Pain. I’m happy that Yura Borisov gets a nod here for Anora. I can’t help thinking Clarence Maclin would have gotten one for Sing Sing if only he’d been a white guy.
Supporting actress: I really don’t understand how Margaret Qualley gets left out of this category for her work on The Substance, since her performance was better than any of the nominees. Isabella Rossellini was only on screen for eight minutes of Conclave, and if she wins, it won’t break any records, because Beatrice Straight won this award for a five-minute performance in Network. Zoe Saldaña still managed to win awards for her Emilia Pérez turn even after controversy engulfed the movie, and the Marvel and Avatar movies have made her one of the highest-grossing actors in cinema history. Maybe that pushes her over the top. Then again, the chance to make Ariana Grande from a pop star into a movie star may be irresistible to the actors’ branch.
Director: The Directors Guild gave their award to Sean Baker for Anora, and that’s probably where this race is heading. His first film, Starlet, came out in 2012, so he’s not exactly a grizzled veteran, but he did shoot an entire feature (Tangerine) on an iPhone 5S. His sensibility may appeal to the younger voters in this branch, but his soundness on the nuts and bolts of storytelling also gets him points with his older colleagues. The nominee most likely to pull an upset here would be Brady Corbet for The Brutalist, but I wouldn’t put down any money on that happening. The left-field picks I wish were up for this honor would be Osgood Perkins for Longlegs, Luca Guadagnino for Challengers, and Jeremy Saulnier for Rebel Ridge.
Original screenplay: Baker looks like he’ll take this category as well, though Fargeat might take him down for The Substance. Jesse Eisenberg’s fame as an actor likely helps him for his script for A Real Pain, but I think he’ll have to settle for his nomination. How the dry-as-dust script for September 5 made it in here over Jane Schoenbrun’s electric I Saw the TV Glow and Azazel Jacobs’ searching His Three Daughters, I’m sure I don’t know.
Adapted screenplay: Conclave has been a favorite in this category ever since it came out, but maybe it’s not as much of a lock as we think. Much of Peter Straughan’s dialogue is taken pretty straight from Robert Harris’ novel, though his slight tweak of the ending is well-judged. Maybe this is where the Academy rewards Nickel Boys, which Joslyn Barnes and RaMell Ross adapted in largely visual terms from Colson Whitehead’s novel. For my list of worthy nominees here who were overlooked: Richard Linklater and Glen Powell for Hit Man, Tina Fey for Mean Girls (since the original film wasn’t nominated for an Oscar in this category), Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington for The Piano Lesson, and Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping for Femme.
Cinematography: Everyone seems to think Lol Crawley is the leader for his work for The Brutalist. I happened to think it was the best film photography I saw last year, but there appears to be insistent chatter on behalf of Greig Fraser’s work for Dune: Part Two (since he won this Oscar for the first movie), while Ed Lachman won the American Society of Cinematographers’ award for Maria, which is also nominated here. That probably doesn’t tip the scales. I think I Saw the TV Glow would be a worthy nominee here (as well as for Best Picture) as well as Mikhail Krichman for The End. I didn’t think much of Strange Darling, but Giovanni Ribisi — a rare actor-turned-cinematographer — gave it the look of a 1970s drive-in film with a talented lenser.
Editing: The prognosticators seem to be plumping for Conclave, as Nick Emerson helped turn what could have been a turgid theological meditation into a taut political thriller. However, The Brutalist’s Dávid Jancsó is also attracting buzz for making such a long film hold together. What should have been in here? How about Kathryn J. Schubert’s snazzy work on Blink Twice? Marco Costa’s complex job for Challengers, anyone? Mike Cheslik edited his own Hundreds of Beavers with great precision to make the jokes work. The Indians didn’t stop making movies after RRR — Monkey Man (which Jancsó co-edited) or Kill (edited by Shivkumar V. Panicker) should have been considered here.
Production design: The battle here looks like it’s between Nathan Crowley’s Oz-adjacent designs in Wicked and Judy Becker’s highly architectural mid-century modern styles for The Brutalist. Suzie Davies’ photorealistic re-creation of the Vatican for Conclave also has its devotees as well, and I thought Patrice Vermette’s eclectic settings for Dune: Part Two were among the best interiors I saw in 2024’s movies. The Substance and Challengers would have been worthy nominees here, but my pick for the worst omission is Jette Lehmann’s designs for the post-apocalyptic musical The End, contrasting the family’s homey interiors with the spectacular ice caverns that they’re set in.
Costume design: Paul Tazewell’s looks for Wicked probably take this category. When they’re not rewarding historical epics requiring meticulous research, the costume branch likes to reward fantasy films where the designer gets to indulge their imagination. If the costume branch weren’t biased against contemporary movies, I’d tell them to look at Emmanuelle Youchnovski’s blazing outfits for The Substance, which are even sexier than Jocelyn Pierce’s sex-worker outfits for Anora, which also merited consideration. Jenny Beavan won an Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road, but didn’t even bag a nomination for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which makes no sense to me.
International feature: I’ve always said that the “one country, one movie” rule for this category was stupid, and now people are catching on. Neither Israel nor Palestine submitted No Other Land for this category (see the entry on Best Documentary), nor did Iran choose The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which is nominated here as Germany’s entry. Canada snubbed Red Rooms in favor of Universal Language, and India did not submit All We Imagine as Light, which made more than a few critics’ top 10 lists in this country. France did look like the front-runner here when Emilia Pérez got more Oscar nominations than any other movie, and it may still win this, which would break France’s 30-year streak without a win in this category. However, I’m Still Here (Brazil) would be the most likely pick to pull the upset, and Flow (Latvia) has quite a devoted following of its own. I’m pulling hard for The Seed of the Sacred Fig myself, but it would have been fun to have Kneecap (Ireland) in this race, and Dahomey (Senegal) deserved both a nod here and in the documentary race.
Documentary: I did not include Shiori Itō’s Black Box Diaries in my list of the year’s best documentaries because I hadn’t seen it despite numerous attempts to do so. Now I have, thanks to a free trial from the Showtime network, where this nominee is playing. It has a fairly decent chance to win this because it has the distinction of being a #MeToo film directed by one of its high-profile victims, as Itō was drugged and raped in 2015 by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a celebrity journalist in Japan and the official biographer for then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. A trained journalist herself, Itō documented everything about her four-year legal odyssey to bring her attacker to justice, including the suicide note that she recorded on her phone before trying to kill herself. No Other Land remains the front-runner here, but Itō’s harrowing film is a dark horse worth watching.
Animated feature: A real competition here, for once! Both The Wild Robot and Flow take place on an Earth where human society has been wiped out, and they both feature brilliant visuals. I’m not enamored of either film, and while I do admire how director Gints Zilbalodis used the open-source animation engine Blender to make his Latvian film, I think the Hollywood movie covers its themes better. If I had to pick a winner out of the five nominees, I’d go with Inside Out 2 just for the sequence with Riley’s panic attack. I think Piece by Piece is better than any of the nominated films, while its fellow documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin was not submitted for the category.
Score: The big uproar in this category was over the omission of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for Challengers, and, yeah, I not only thought it was the year’s best film score but also the best score in the duo’s career. In that massive absence, Wicked would be the crowd-pleasing choice, and Daniel Blumberg’s score for The Brutalist has its devoted followers. I’m not that big a fan of the field here, and I would have chosen Robin Carolan’s lush and discomfiting score for Nosferatu, Raffertie’s electronic music for The Substance, and Jerskin Fendrix’s wobbly soundtrack for Kinds of Kindness, even though I didn’t care for the film. The same goes for Babygirl, in which Cristobal Tapia de Veer composed a score that would have fit a better movie.
Song: The big news is that Fort Worth’s Abraham Alexander is nominated in this category for “Like a Bird,” which he collaborated on with Laredo’s Adrian Quesada for the film Sing Sing. Unfortunately, it will be up against steep competition, with “El Mal” and “Mi Camino” from Emilia Pérez both nominated. The latter song appears to have the edge, but if the two songs from the same movie split the vote, then “The Journey” from The Six Triple Eight would be in the best position to take advantage. That would give songwriter Diane Warren her first-ever victory in 16 nominations. Another Fort Worth musician was left out of the running, as Maren Morris’ “Kiss the Sky” from The Wild Robot (which won a number of awards) should have made it in. Also, Kristen Wiig’s utterly charming “Harper and Will Go West” from Will & Harper and Sloppy Jane’s disquieting “Claw Machine” from I Saw the TV Glow would have made this race more interesting, and Andra Day’s “Bricks” from Exhibiting Forgiveness resonated best with its movie’s themes. One more worth mentioning: “My Stranger” from Your Monster, a dead ringer for a Broadway showstopper from non-Broadway songwriters The Lazours.
