In looking over Oscar history, it seems clear that in the era of the expanded Best Picture ballot, most of the acting winners will come from Best Picture nominees, but especially Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.
Actors have the most influence over what wins Best Picture because the acting branch is so much bigger than any other branch. The acting categories are decided by plurality vote. The Best Picture category is decided by a majority vote using the preferential ballot. The main difference is that a performance can be divisive and still win — what drives it will be passion. With Best Picture, the preferential ballot does not like divisive at all. What drives it is passion but it also has to be something people push to the top of their ballots even without passion. For instance, if Glenn Close was up against Olivia Colman on a preferential ballot, Close might have beaten her because she might have had more down ballot votes than Colman, who would have more top ranking support.
Last year, my prediction of both Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman to win without a Best Picture nomination for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was a blind spot I should have seen by looking at the past. Although it has happened before, it’s only happened twice in Oscar history that two actors from the same film won without a Best Picture nomination:
1962 — Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke won for the Miracle Worker.
1963 — Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas for Hud
It has happened but it’s rare. It could have happened, but predicting both was a major risk, given the patterns of the past.
Having ten slots for Best Picture is going to shift how Best Picture will be decided. Passion will matter, but not as much as it mattered from 2011-2020, when there was a choice of anywhere between 5-10 nominees. You were looking at voters’ top five, not their top ten. But with ten, they are going to be more flexible with what they choose. However, given that, it is even more likely than not that the acting winners will come from one of the ten.
31 times has a Best Picture winner won a single acting award. It’s most common for a film to win just one acting award, along with Best Picture.
16 times has a Best Picture winner won two acting awards.
14 times has a Best Picture nominee (not winner) won two acting awards.
2 times has a Best Picture nominee (not winner) won three acting awards.
Best Actor winner matched with Best Picture — 27 times.
Best Actress winner matched with Best Picture — 12 times.
Supporting Actor winner matched with Best Picture — 17 times.
Supporting Actress winner matched with Best Picture — 13 times.
It has only happened twice that all four acting categories went to winners who did not star in Best Picture nominees:
1969 — Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture. Best Actor was John Wayne in True Grit. Best Actress was Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Supporting went to Gig Young for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Goldie Hawn for Cactus Flower.
1995 — Braveheart won Best Picture. Best Actor went to Nic Cage for Leaving Las Vegas. Susan Sarandon won for Best Actress for Dead Man Walking. Supporting went to Kevin Spacey for The Usual Suspects and Mira Sorvino for Mighty Aphrodite.
Which category is most likely to win without a Best Picture nomination?
Four times for Best Actress
Three times for Best Supporting Actress
Once for Best Supporting Actor
Once for Best Actor
That means if you are going to pick one winner in the acting categories from a non-Best Picture nominee, there is a good chance that is coming from Best Actress, almost as good a chance coming from Best Supporting Actress, less of a chance for Actor and Supporting Actor. Most importantly, you should aim for only choosing one of the four, unless you have very good reason to believe another 2011 will happen. In that year (and only that year) did two actors not in Best Picture nominees won. Every other year just one winner in the acting categories did not come from a Best Picture nominee.
So what does all of this mean?
It confirms what we’ve always known: actors are the most influential branch in the Academy. But it also means that voters like to spread the wealth when they have a lot of Best Picture contenders.
The simple rules are:
3/4 of the acting category wins will go to a Best Picture nominee.
Category most likely to be from a Best Picture nominee: Best Actor/Best Supporting Actor
Category least likely to be from a Best Picture nominee: Best Actress
Category most likely to match with a win, along with Best Picture: Actor/Best Supporting Actor
Category least likely to match with a win, along with Best Picture: Actress/Best Supporting Actress
So, in terms of this year, the pundits at Gold Derby have it right now as:
Picture — Power of the Dog
Director — Jane Campion, Power of the Dog
Actress — Jessica Chastain, Eyes of Tammy Faye
Actor — Denzel Washington, Macbeth
Supporting Actress — Ann Dowd
Supporting Actor — Richard Jenkins, Humans
The remaining nine of Gold Derby’s Best Picture Top 10:
Nightmare Alley
Licorice Pizza
Tragedy of Macbeth*
Belfast
Dune
House of Gucci
CODA
West Side Story
Don’t Look Up
This means they are predicting three of the acting winners to come from non-Best Picture nominees. Yah, that ain’t happening. The Best Picture nominees will be driven by actors. The acting wins will be driven by actors. These things will overlap. At least, according to history.
Ann Dowd = not happening
My takeaway is how crazy it is that Hud wasn’t a Best Picture nominee…
I’ve got the feeling that Belfast will win Supporting Actor (Hinds) along with Cinematography and Original Screenplay, to make company to a Best Picture win. It really makes sense, at this point…
Honestly, I hope something completely wild and not-so-obvious makes a splash and turns the Best Picture race upside down. Because, it already looks like a 2-horse race (Power of the Dog and Belfast) and the rest seems to be competing to earn the nom, and some important win.
Interesting to see The Dog staying ahead, plenty of pundits overlooking the Netflix bias. We are waiting for DLU & nightmare alley to drop and then we will have a clearer race I think. Netflix will have to decide which horse it is backing.
This is the best piece on the Oscars you have done. Bravo.
I realize I’m now in the minority… but I just can’t get behind Chastain.
I think she should have won for The Tree of Life and thus any Oscar win she gets won’t be fully undeserved but I doubt that I’ll be passionately talking about her this year either. I think her performance in Tammy Faye is good (I think the very traditional biopic structure of the movie gives her space to make the character into more of a person even if that same structure makes the movie very boring) but there is certainly much more exciting work out there.
she should’ve won for Zero Dark Thirty.
Yes. The torture controversy took it down though. And ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ had to win something.
She’s incredible in that movie and out of that lineup she should have won. But looking outside the lineup, I’d argue at least Lola Créton for Goodbye, First Love, Greta Gerwig for Damsels in Distress and Rachel Weisz for The Deep Blue Sea were even more deserving.
Yes, she should have. But I just knew that wasn’t going to happen. Much as I love Octavia Spencer and, even gave her my personal win two years ago for Luce – I think Chastain could/should have won for The Help. She was so freaking good in that role and for her entire break-out year. But no one was stopping the Octavia Spencer train that year.
Octavia was very impressive in Luce. MVP in that ensemble.
She should’ve won for ‘Take Shelter’.
She’s my first and second choice that year
Michael Shannon was egregiously overlooked too. My favourite performance that year.
Please tell me you meant to say Zero Dark Thirty.
I think that at least a lot of the people predicting Dowd and Jenkins to win are probably just having them as placeholders of some kind. I have for years been baffled by how a lot of people kind of just go with the flow of what others are predicting until at earlies October-November and an actor can kind of just get to even first place in people’s predictions for very little reason. People seem to look at their Oscar predictions as independent of each other on a category by category basis before they know fully what the season is instead of trying to imagine what the season and its narratives will be and structuring their predictions based on that. Then weirdly there’s just a point where everyone course corrects and suddenly the narratives of the season are locked in, which usually baffles me as well just because suddenly the narratives are very strong and they’re not exactly the ones I’ve been imagining for the season.
Say it with me, class: Nothing matters until the guilds chime in.
(And the Golden Globes and Critics Choice only slightly matter more than average regional critics groups because they’re televised.)
They definitely play follow the leader, yet still call themselves experts. I wonder were all of us here willing to put up our ranking/% accurate on Goldderby and compare them with the experts, who would emerge as the experts?
So far 12 movies have won the BP Oscar without an acting nomination. I think that in some cases the lack of an acting nomination did not matter as the BP race was not close like ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, ‘The Last Emperor’ and ‘Braveheart’. Not sure how ‘Around The World in 80 days’ won though.
All the cameos?
Ma Rainey was hurt by two things. One, it wasn’t that good and two, it was Netflix.
Also, The Miracle Worker and Hud were nominated in Best Director, so if you’re a film that’s nowhere near the Picture/Director conversation, don’t expect to get more than one acting win.
Also They Shoot Horses, Don’t They
Nope, only won Best Supporting Actor for Gig Young.
Just as Leaving Las Vegas and Dead Man Walking. Crazy coincidences
Honestly, Leaving Las Vegas should’ve won both Lead Acting Oscars. That said, Sarandon with her career probably deserves an Oscar more than Shue.
Well, doesn’t this mean you letting go of a singer/not particularly great actress winning for RESPECT?