Oscars 2024: Oppenheimer Poised to Make Oscar History This Weekend

It’s been a while since a film like Oppenheimer has won Best Picture. The last time any movie that made as much money as Oppenheimer swept the awards was way back in 2003 when the third installment of Lord of the Rings finally brought Peter Jackson a whole bunch of Oscars after two previous Best Picture nominations for the first two chapters of his epic trilogy.

Sometimes a movie is just TOO BIG TO IGNORE, and Oppenheimer is one of those. Why not Greta Gerwig’s Barbie? It was burdened with two factors that prevented it from being the film of the year — though to my mind, it was certainly worthy of winning. The first is that the highest-grossing films of the year never win the Oscar anymore. It hasn’t happened since Return of the King, and before that Titanic, and even that only became the top earner of 1998, not as a Christmas release in 1997. But I suppose it could count. since by the time Oscar ballots were in the voters hands, the box-office already looked unstoppable.

No, you have to go way, way back to when Jaws changed the entire game of the box office and the Oscars and set Hollywood on a path that would eventually diverge into two totally separate worlds — prestige art movies and popcorn movies. At that moment, the last number-one movie at the box-office to win Best Picture was The Godfather.

Over at Coupon Birds, they’ve also tracked how box office aligns with Oscar viewership:

Weirdly enough, being number one hurts Barbie’s prospects as a Best Picture winner. The second reason is that Barbie is a comedy, and those have had a harder time winning Best Picture unless there is an element of “gravitas.”

Oppenheimer is more or less in Return of the King territory.

Since the awards race has become such a hive mind in recent years, we can apply the same argument to the Producers Guild. There was a time, believe it or not, when we in the Oscar-watching world used to think the PGA awarded films that had performed well at the box office. Ha ha ha ha. Silly us.

We believed that producing a movie well meant many people went to see it. That isn’t true now, and it might not ever have been true. In looking over the tragic tale of the box office vs. the Oscars, it’s clear that at some point, the Oscars just decided the public opinion didn’t matter. It’s also clear, at least to me, that Hollywood began serving mostly crap to the most reliable ticket-buyers, which ultimately (I think) has taken us to a much more divided place as a nation than we should be. Why? Because culture — great stories — must include everyone or cast as wide a net as possible. In aiming them at the elite aristocracy, both sides have lost.

The people at the top have become as isolated and out of touch as the Romanovs before the Russian Revolution. The people outside the palace walls are angry and resentful. Why do you suppose so many people in this country are plugged into real-life events way more than into movies? Because there is truth in it. There is drama in it. And there is free market capitalism in it. The aim should be what it used to be: the success of a film is not measured by people like me or a score on Rotten Tomatoes, but by how many eyeballs watch it and love it.

That’s the challenge. Now we see what it’s like to have two separate film industries: First Class and Coach. We see what that has done to Hollywood and to our country. There should not be two separate film industries to satisfy two different classes of people. What would Frank Capra, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock think of that? They would hate it. They would not be happy crafting films like they were hot house flowers, so a bloated awards industry like ours can carry them along like precious eggs delivered to Oscar voters, who would then annoint the “best.” By what measure? Aim higher.

So far, everything is working as it should this year. An Oppenheimer sweep makes history because it is a return to form: dazzling visuals, complex storytelling, and a profound and accessible message.

As we discussed on the most recent podcast, the Producers Guild uses the “ranked-choice” ballot. That means a film can only stage an upset victory if it comes in number two behind the obvious choice of number one, Oppenheimer. It can sometimes overtake the number one leader if the leader is divisive, which Oppenheimer is not (or hasn’t demonstrated to be up to this point).

Let’s say Poor Things was the number one vote-getter. We know it is divisive because people have been either madly in love with it or else got up and walked out of it. Unfortunately, the ranked-choice ballot discourages that kind of film from winning unless it wins a insurmountable majority on the first round. The ballot likes movies that hit in the first three slots, or are always prioritized before other movies. Movies people hate often end at up at the bottom of their ballots. Even with all of its wins — which can wear some people out and begin to feel boring — Oppenheimer has never become a movie people hate.

If Oppenheimer does win big at PGA and SAG, you know the industry has not yet given up on itself.

Here is the chart.

So far, Oppenheimer is sitting where only a few movies have sat before: Argo, The Artist, and Nomadland (in the era of the preferential ballot). All won Best Picture.

So there you have it, folks. All the stats that are fit to print. We’ll see you tomorrow for a fresh new batch of Oscar predictions, plus our SAG/PGA predictions heading into the weekend.