The game of Oscar predicting is fun. Except when it’s not. Take it from an old-timer who built Oscarwatch.com in 1999 and watched an entire Oscar-watching industry explode. The early days of the internet were like the Gold Rush. Building a business in such a wide-open new world was an exciting time. You could be anything, say anything, or disrupt anything. Only Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Premiere Mag (along with Gold Derby) were covering the Oscars when I got online.
The LA Times would publish Oscar predictions closer to the day of the big show, which was always in March, sometimes April. It was a springtime thing, an outdoor event for the public to gawk at the movie stars, and essentially a publicity event for Hollywood.
But except for a few op-eds now and again and their film reviews, the trades were simply publicity outlets for the studios. They made money on ads and they served the needs of their advertisers well. When I came along, I saw an opportunity to carve a unique path, as so many bloggers were doing back then, to talk about stuff that no one else was talking about.
Eventually, blogs would bloom at the trades and at sites like the New York Times and the LA Times. But now, Jay Penske owns a major portion of entertainment coverage. The Penske Media Corp owns Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Gold Derby, and Indiewire. He has consolidated all of their Oscar ad money under one umbrella, more or less, to build an empire on For Your Consideration ads.
It was a smart move when the Oscars were doing well, and the industry was profitable. But Hollywood is having a moment of crisis. The major studios are making fewer films. People aren’t really going to see them, and all you get from the press is gaslighting: “this isn’t happening, everything’s fine.” Well, everything is not fine. The Oscar industry has become oversaturated. Too many people are covering the Oscars, and not enough content to fill the demand.
But that also presents a unique opportunity for Hollywood and the Oscars to rebuild or build back better. It’s a clean slate of sorts. That’s why I think the way to survive won’t be business as usual at the Oscars and why I think the trend to way-too-early predictions might be a bad idea. All the ones I’m seeing seem a wee bit off base.
In looking at two of the early Oscar predictors I see that neither of them have named Kevin Costner’s two-part western, Horizon. I know these guys are young. They don’t remember the old days when the Oscars were BIG. They’re accustomed to seeing the Oscars go small. But I think Oppenheimer’s win last year signaled a pendulum shift. There is no way the Academy can go back to small without killing what’s left of their brand. Unless they want Hollywood to sink like the Titanic.
Here are Ryan Casselman’s early Oscar predictions:
And in case you did not know, there is a phone app called Awards Expert run by two enthusiastic brothers known as the Oscar Experts. You can download the app and enter your own picks, if you dare.
Their predictions from March are here:
Their Best Picture predictions:
With one or two exceptions, I look at these predictions with healthy skepticism. I think many of their choices are a better fit for the Spirit Awards, the Gothams, and Film Twitter. This isn’t where the Oscars need to be. They need to focus on BIG OSCAR MOVIES like they used to do. They know this. Good thing for them, they have a promising batch of grand and ambitious movies coming up this year, to do just that. In addition to Dune 2, we have:
Horizon – Kevin Costner’s epic western in two parts is exactly the kind of thing Hollywood and the Oscars were made for. A film in two parts means either they’ll be seen as one movie or two movies. Either way, that’s what I’m looking at right now.
Joker: Folie à Deux – Todd Phillips has a great Oscar story. Joker might not have been the right film for Best Picture 2019, but it is most definitely hits the right zeitgeist for 2024. That makes me think there will be a strong narrative for the follow-up.
Furiosa – George Miller’s Mad Max prequel. Yet again, a Big Oscar Movie ahead that will be huge at the box office.
Gladiator 2 – yes, I know it’s another sequel, but so are Furiosa and Folie à Deux. It is what it is. If the Academy is going to keep ten slots then we have to fill them.
After that, then we move on to the films the other guys have on their lists. That’s not only how I see the race panning out; it’s how I think we should think about the race at this stage of the game. Think BIG.
The Oscar race right now is already making the same annual mistake: building a consensus out of nothing. And while that’s fun way to feed hungry YouTubers, for sure, in a crisis like the one Hollywood is living through, it’s potentially deadly strategy. Mark Harris used to talk about how the pundits narrowed the race too much too soon. Which meant, by Oscar Night, the whole thing was already a foregone conclusion. Not only is that boring, but at the moment, we really do need movies themselves to lead the way, not pundits.
That a consensus is already building this early is strange. Some have A24’s Sing Sing winning. Almost all of them do. And maybe they’re right. I guess you never know. But I think that looks more like a Best Actor thing than a Best Picture thing. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I’m not so sure this is our winner this early out. The reviews are good but I’m not picking up a Best Picture of the Year vibe from them. That’s not to diss the movie at all. It’s just to say, aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves here?
We need to find a way to get the Oscar prestige and box-office clout back together again, like we did last year. I really do feel that this is the path for Hollywood going forward.
I think about The Godfather in 1972. Of course, we’re never going back to that era, but is worth remembering that there was a time when a film was released to the public, earned it’s credentials by topping the box office, and then won Best Picture for the sole reason that it was the greatest film of the year. Not like now, when so many voters coddle the Oscar-friendly hothouse flowers. The greatest film of the year should return to the days when Best Picture moved the needle in American culture.
The Godfather was such a great movie — it is every bit as fresh and thrilling today as it was in 1972. I might say the same about all of the Best Picture winners in that decade:
1970 – Patton – still as great as it ever was.
1971 – The French Connection – holy shit great, even still.
1972 – Do I need to name it?
1973 – The Sting – aged gracefully by today’s standards.
1974 – The Godfather II – brilliant beyond words.
1975 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – good, though not as good as Jaw
1976 – Rocky – very good for its time – Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men were better
1977 – Annie Hall – off the charts great.
1978 – The Deer Hunter – are you kidding me?
1979 – Kramer vs. Kramer – it’s good, but Apocalypse Now was right there.
Okay, so it’s never going to be that good again. One of the reasons things bottomed out is because of the advent of the tailor-made “Oscar Movie.” It became a thing in the Weinstein Miramax era. They figured out they could bypass the whole popular movie thing and hand-deliver to Oscar voters the exact kind of movie that the veteran voters wanted without the need to be successful and popular with audiences.
That inevitably made the Oscars more niche. This shift in Oscar attitude took place in the 1990s, and it’s effects have continued to drizzle down through the years ever since. We’re still living through the era of the “Oscar Movie.” But we’re due for a counterculture movement and a pendulum swing.
The bottom line is this: the days of hothouse flowers winning top Oscars are probably over. At least let’s hope so, as Hollywood tries to resurrect the corpse. First step to recovery? Moving from grim predictions to vibrant prognosis means we need to see a better alignment between big Box Office and prestigious Oscar acclaim.
So far, all the movies these guys are predicting look to me like the Film Twitter Awards, more or less. None of them look like the Big Oscar Movies that I think the industry will want to reach for, cling to for dear life, and hope for enough lifeboats to hold all the survivors.
