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It is often a function for any awards prognosticator to suggest that this year, whichever it might be, is the most competitive we’ve seen in ages. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it amounts to a bit of creative fiction, with industry watchers straining to imagine a scenario where anyone could seriously challenge Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer for Best Picture, Director, and the whole slew of other awards it inevitably won last March.
Still, with all that being said, we can say in complete honesty and without a sense of hyperbole that this year, 2024, might indeed be the most competitive and open the field has appeared in a long, long time while on the long road to the Oscars. And you do not have to take our word for it. Just look at the first slate of awards winners in the first week of December.
Generally recognized as the moment where awards season heats up—and simmers from being merely a months-long run of speculation to an actual period where major voting groups’ winners are announced—the start of December should give at least an inkling of who is competitive for major nominations throughout the rest of the season. Yet a cursory glance at Monday’s Gotham Award winners and Tuesday’s announced slate of New York Film Critics Circle picks reveals a sprawling, and confusing, field.
At the Gotham Awards, A24 had a big night but for two glaringly different films: Aaron Schimberg’s dark satire A Different Man pulled an upset to win a surprise Best Feature Award, despite Schimberg himself not being nominated in the Gothams’ Best Director category. The film, which is an amusing skewering of our concepts of identity, beauty, and exploitation stars Sebastian Stan as a struggling actor living with neurofibromatosis, which manifests as a disfiguring facial condition. Yet after taking a miracle drug that “cures” him to look like the real-life Stan, the character still finds himself losing in popularity to another man with neurofibromatosis, this one played by Adam Pearson, who is a real-life actor living with neurofibromatosis.
Trust us, the film is far more subversive and slippery than even that description implies. It’s also bleakly funny and off-the-beaten-path for many awards voters. Indeed, the film was not nominated even at the Gothams for Director or Best Actor. The latter award went to Coleman Domingo for stunning work in Sing Sing, a striking new drama directed and co-written by Greg Kewedar about the theater program in the actual Sing Sing prison. Sing Sing also dominated the Gothams with wins in the Best Supporting Actor category, courtesy of Clarence Maclin’s performance, and a Film Tribute Award. Meanwhile Amazon/MGM’s Nickel Boys made an impression when it won Best Director for RaMell Ross and Breakthrough Performance for Brandon Wilson.
It should be noted, too, that Ross’ work on Nickel Boys is the only place of major overlap with the New York Film Critics Circle, with the prestigious critics organization mostly going head-over-heels for Brady Corbet’s pensive and formidable The Brutalist, another A24 release, this one clocking in at an astounding 3.5 hours (with an intermission). That film also seems much more the speed of the critics group that recently awarded Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon Best Picture, with The Brutalist being an epic study of the Jewish-American immigrant experience after World War II and the Holocaust. The Brutalist also won Best Actor for Adrien Brody.
Meanwhile two performances that haven’t been heavily featured in rotation among awards watchers’ blogs, that of Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths and Carol Kane in Between the Temples, won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively. Elsewhere Kieran Culkin took Best Supporting Actor for A Real Pain while Sean Baker picked up Best Screenplay for Anora.
Finally, and perhaps most tellingly about the state of the Oscar race, it is worth comparing these early wins with yesterday’s Independent Spirit Awards nominations, which like Gotham and the general tastes of the NYFCC voting body, celebrates independent American cinema. While Sing Sing is nominated for Best Picture by the Spirits, neither of Gotham’s or NYFCC’s biggest winners, A Different Man or The Brutalist, are. In their place is Anora and genre-fare like The Substance and I Saw the TV Glow.
Cumulatively, these films reveal a race that is in a complete state of flux with no obvious frontrunner.
It should be noted that none of these voting groups are obvious predictors of the voting tastes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Most of the films nominated for Best Picture by the Spirit Awards never get nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. But with a single exception, four of the last five years featured one or two of the Best Picture Oscar nominees overlapping with the Spirits, and twice they shared the Best Picture winner: Nomadland and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Five of the last six Gotham Awards’ Best Picture winners likewise were nominated for the Oscars top prize with two of the Gothams’ winners—again Nomadland and Everything Everywhere—taking home the same big prize.
Intriguingly, the NYFCC has recently shared no Best Picture wins with the Academy in the last decade, but their picks usually are seen as major contenders: Roma, The Irishman, La La Land, Tár, and Killers of the Flower Moon. Also as the oldest film critics organization in the United States, their picks carry a lot of influence in shaping awards narratives in the months afterward, such as giving a major boost to Lily Gladstone as a frontrunner for Best Actress in Killers of the Flower Moon and pegging Barry Jenkins as Best Director for Moonlight in 2016.
In other words, these voting groups’ tastes differ considerably from the Academy, but they tend to echo the race that comes afterward, and even shape it in the NYFCC’s case. So… should we consider A Different Man a contender for Best Picture? Is The Brutalist a frontrunner now? Or should Anora and I Saw the TV Glow be getting a lot more attention after they both received the most nominations at the Spirits? It should be noted Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but then again so did Titane.
The truth is this year still has a lot of fog and ambiguity around who is a major contender and who is just an internet darling. Even the usually reliable populist pick to emerge out of the Toronto International Film Festival feels like an anomaly with Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck getting the People’s Choice Award despite the film not even being slated for release this year (previous TIFF People’s Choice winners include more Oscar-friendly frontrunners like Spotlight, La La Land, Green Book, and The Fabelmans).
Frankly, in a year with no clear frontrunner among the critical and indie darlings, we think the stage could be set for a true studio populist favorite to run the table by bringing good vibes to the industry (and lucrative success, which theoretically translates to eyeballs on the telecast). In which case, perhaps we’re all looking in the wrong places. Instead we should maybe turn our attention to how Wicked just grossed another astounding $81 million in its SECOND weekend…
*UPDATE: After publication, the National Board of Review announced its winners for the year, including Wicked as Best Film and Jon M. Chu as Best Director….
The post From Wicked to Sing Sing: Early Awards Season Bellwethers Confirm Wide Open Oscar Race appeared first on Den of Geek.
