What a weekend, eh? Award pundits are still reeling from the big switch from the Emilia Perez/The Brutalist wins at the Golden Globes to the PGA/DGA/Critics Choice handing it to Anora. These things do sometimes happen, as with the Hurt Locker, the King’s Speech, Birdman.
Understanding this moment in Oscar history is not easy. It requires looking at the big picture of what is threatening Hollywood now. The box office has mostly collapsed. AI is breathing down the neck of the newly timid and micromanaged artists in Hollywood. Streaming is threatening movie theaters and it seems that movies exist now only to appeal to a shrinking minority of cinephiles.
I appreciate the sentiment of Jeff Sneider’s recent piece about Anora not being weighty enough for a Best Picture win but I do not agree with it:
He writes:
I believe in the Oscars.
I believe that the Oscars matter.
I believe it’s the only awards show that matters.
I believe this, you see, because I have to. I have no choice. If the Oscars didn’t truly matter to me, I don’t think I could even do what I do. I need that kind of emotional investment in my work, which means I need that emotional investment in the work.
If you paid attention to any of the trades this weekend — and really, why would you when you have me? — you’d think that the Oscar race was already over.
After winning the Critics Choice Association’s Best Picture prize, Sean Baker’s Anora won top honors at both the DGA Awards and the PGA Awards, the latter of which uses a preferential ballot to crown its winner — just like the Academy! Duh duh duh…Sometimes you can’t test popularity until thousands vote on a movie instead of hundreds. That’s why the guilds are often the better precursors, especially the editors guild. We can assume now that the consensus has rallied around Sean Baker and Anora. Still, with the BAFTAs coming up and the large contingent of international voters at the Academy, many are still holding out for The Brutalist to win either Picture or Director.
You can read the rest of his piece here.
WIth due respect to my fellow Gate Crasher, he is the one who was pushing for CODA to win so it’s funny that he now believes Anora isn’t weighty enough for the Best Picture prize. CODA was a heart-warming but forgettable film that existed just to win Oscars. No one can say that about Anora. If there has been one true thing about Sean Baker, he hasn’t made movies to win Oscars and voters can sense that. They can see he’s an artist who makes movies out of pure love of it and that matters to them more than anything else.
Anyone regularly reading this site would not be surprised by Anora’s win. If you are a Film Twitter die-hard or reading other sites then you might have been. Not to brag or anything but this ain’t my first rodeo. 25 years covering the Oscars would have taught me a thing or two and this year, I always knew, it would come down to the movie themselves. Which one is the most likable by the most amount of people? Anora is.
Some movies, like Oppenheimer, are big and important and thus, they will win lots of Oscars. But there are some years where the “important” movies are inaccessible emotionally — like the CODA year, which is why CODA won.
At any rate, I don’t agree that Anora is not “important.” It is. It is not woke in any way. It does not obey any of the rules of virtue signaling. It is not lecturing us about any politician (thank god). It’s just telling a good story, which is what we need filmmakers to do now so that we can come away changed. The Brutalist, for all of its ambition — and I wish Brady Corbet nothing but the best in his career — doesn’t seem to be sure of what it’s saying, or what it wants us to feel. Is it another “Trump is bad” movie? Capitalism is bad? Art is good? Maybe. The bottom line is this: how many people are moved by that movie compared to Anora?
I imagine that there are a contingent of voters who choose The Brutalist. Another that will choose Conclave. Another that will choose A Complete Unknown. But the only movie that has been able to gather a consensus is the one that moves people and that’s Anora.
The next step is what international voters will have to say about this race. Will they back up what the voters here think? Or will they go a different way?
Anora has the same nominations at the BAFTAs as it does at the Oscars with one more added for casting. Which awards might it win there? Can it win Best Actress? Kris Tapley floats the idea that it seems unlikely a movie centered on Anora won’t also win Best Actress:
Does a win for Mikey Madison start in the UK? Who’s to say? How many nominations does The Substance have at BAFTA? It has Director, Screenplay, Actress, Makeup, Sound but not Picture. So who knows? The chances seem more than good that Madison could win there. Her performance is the whole movie of Anora, as Tapley points out, so why would the movie win but not her? We’ve only got the Globes and the Critics Choice as a precedent.
The BAFTAs seem to have really loved Edward Berger’s Conclave, at least as much as they loved Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The truth test of Anora’s strength will be if it can win there over Conclave, not The Brutalist. Although if Brady Corbet’s film did win there, obviously that could throw a kink in the works.
The BAFTA probably has the worst track record in matching the Oscars since the years when the Academy expanded to ten and began using the preferential ballot. Often times, the BAFTA would pick the film that wins on a five movie ballot instead.
Let’s take a look at how the BAFTA’s Best Picture winners have aligned with the Oscars:
2009–The Hurt Locker – Oscar/BAFTA
2010–The King’s Speech – Oscar/BAFTA
2011–The Artist — Oscar/BAFTA
2012–Argo — Oscar/BAFTA
2013–12 Years a Slave — Oscar/BAFTA
2014–Boyhood–BAFTA/Birdman–Oscar
2015–The Revenant–BAFTA/Spotlight–Oscar
2016–La La Land–BAFTA/Moonlight–Oscar
2017–Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri–BAFTA/The Shape of Water–Oscar
2018–ROMA–BAFTA/Green Book–Oscars
2019–1917–BAFTA/Parasite–Oscars
2020–Nomadland–BAFTA/Oscars
2021–The Power of the Dog–BAFTA/CODA-Oscar
2022-All Quiet on the Western Front–BAFTA/Everything, Everywhere All At Once–Oscar
2023–Oppenheimer–BAFTA/Oscara
It’s a little strange how different these wins have turned out since 2009. BAFTA is a hit-and-miss scenario, though I do remember some people believed All Quiet on the Western Front might win in 2022 but that turned out not to be true, obviously. In the final analysis, they really didn’t like Everything, Everywhere All At Once and went a completely different way. But it all lined back up the following year with Oppenheimer.
There is a chance that something odd could happen with the preferential ballot this year, but we did just see it win on two preferential ballots (PGA and Critics Choice) as well as a majority vote ballot (DGA).
Full BAFTA preview coming tomorrow.
How different are international voters?
The idea that the international voters will push Brady Corbet through for Best Director isn’t a bad theory. He won in Venice and at the Golden Globes. But looking back on Best Director at Venice, the winners that match with the Oscars are few and far between. Only one has ever gone on to win and that was Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog.
The Golden Lion in Venice has a little bit better of a track record but The Brutalist did not win that. The Room Next Door did.
To recap — Anora is among the few films where the RT score for critics and audience are roughly the same:
As you can see, The Brutalist has a disconnect between critics and audiences. I think that might be a strong clue as to why it’s winning with a consensus the way it is.
This is me dreading the Oscar discourse for the next 20 years about why The Brutalist should have won. Insert Saving Private Ryan over Shakespeare in Love here. I spent years trying to force a consensus to vote for films that should win over the films that moved them. Ultimately, I have come away thinking that “important” movies will hold their place in film history probably better than the Best Picture winners do. But asking a consensus of thousands to vote against what moves them is a fool’s errand.
