Welcome to the weirdest Oscar season ever! In a year with very little in-person campaigning, no festival crowds, and basically no box office receipts for any of the nominees, voters will be basing their selections on fewer external factors than ever before. They’ll almost solely be relying on their (Gasp!) taste, which goes a long way toward explaining why we might be in for the most unpredictable Oscar results in years.
But that’s exciting! Not only will it make for a more dramatic show, with a diminished air of interminable inevitability, but correct predictions will make bragging rights all the sweeter. On that note, let’s do this. Categories follow in a vague reverse order of importance: Short films, then technical categories, and then Best Animated/ Documentary/ International Film, followed by the screenplay categories, the acting categories, and finally Best Director and Best Picture, which features an extended simulation of how the preferential ballot might play out (complete with all vote totals, eliminations, and reallocations).
Here we go!
Best Animated Short Film
Burrow
Genius Loci
If Anything Happens I Love You
Opera
Yes-People
Voters could go one of three ways here—the cutest one (Burrow), the most creative and visually memorable one (Opera), or the one that gives them the most feels (If Anything Happens I Love You). Burrow is probably too slight compared to the ambitions of the other two, and it’s also the one by Pixar, which actually has a pretty bad track record in this category (perhaps because it seems like they have too much of a financial and structural advantage).
It’s a tough call between Opera and If Anything Happens I Love You. Opera might be the most ambitious and visually exciting animated short film I’ve seen in my dozen or so years of watching the nominees in this category. It’s really that good—the kind of film you want to immediately watch again the second it’s over (which is okay because it’s only eight minutes long)—and it would be an incredibly deserving winner. But If Anything Happens I Love You, aside from being genuinely good and touching, is about losing a child to a mass shooting. Now, I’d love nothing more than to be able to tell you with a straight face that maybe that just won’t resonate with voters. But unfortunately, during the week-long Oscar voting window, there were multiple deadly shootings in the news every goddamn day. So let’s just say voters may think it’s a timely choice. And that will probably always be true, because apparently Americans will never stop shooting each other. Fuck this shithole country.
Best Documentary Short Film
Colette
A Concerto Is a Conversation
Do Not Split
Hunger Ward
A Love Song for Latasha
Do Not Split, which documents the Hong Kong protests, is the wild card here. Because of its nomination, China is refusing to air the Oscars live. That kind of real-world censorship and fascism could provoke a lot of people to give it a statement vote (plus it’s also, you know, good). But another enduring lesson is that a lot of Academy members take Oscar TV ratings very seriously, and if they believe giving this film an Oscar will ultimately be a major detriment to the show’s global TV revenue, that could cause some voters to view the film as a pariah.
Hunger Ward is by far the bleakest of the five, which almost assures it won’t win. The other three are all fairly touching and uplifting portraits of fairly weighty topics. Latasha and Concerto are both about the legacy of racism, while Colette is about a French resistance fighter going back to Germany to confront her memories of the past.
Most pundits are split between Latasha and Concerto, while Colette could win simply by inertia of being the cliched Holocaust entry of the year. But there’s an urgency to Do Not Split that really sets it apart from the other nominees, and I think voters will enjoy feeling like they’re engaging in an act of rebellion by supporting it.
Best Live Action Short Film
Feeling Through
The Letter Room
The Present
Two Distant Strangers
White Eye
For the first time in the dozen years I’ve been able to watch the films in this category, I can honestly say I was incredibly impressed by all five. They’re all so good that it’s possible to imagine any of them winning and being happy about it. But there are three that stand a notably better chance. The Letter Room, starring Oscar Isaac, is the only one with an actual movie star. And Feeling Through, about a DeafBlind man who needs help crossing the street and getting home, is the most touching and heartwarming of the bunch.
But Two Distant Strangers will almost certainly be the winner. It involves a time loop where a young Black man keeps getting killed by the same cop over and over again, no matter what he does to try and change his fate. It’s the kind of film that would sadly be timely no matter when it came out, but has somehow been even more so during the brief window of Oscar voting, which involved not just the guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, but also multiple additional killings of young people of color at the hands of police.
Best Cinematography
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
News of the World
Nomadland
The Trial of the Chicago 7
This likely comes down to the black and white movie (Mank) versus the two movies that captured beautiful vistas (Nomadland and News of the World). News of the World had some absolutely gorgeous imagery, and it represents the first nomination for the criminally underappreciated Dariusz Wolski (who also shot Prometheus, Sweeney Todd, The Martian, Dark City, and The Walk), but sadly voters just don’t seem very enthusiastic about the film. And News of the World could easily split the vote with Nomadland, which works on a similar kind of level in the way it captures the beauty and isolation of the American West. If that happens, then Mank should emerge as the winner for the way it stands out from the other nominees and impeccably captures an era. It’s the film that will most strike voters as an immense technical achievement.
Best Costume Design
Emma
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mank
Mulan
Pinocchio
As a British Costume Drama, Emma might have the kind of immediate association with costume design that helps to galvanize voters in this category. On the other hand, Mulan probably has the most opulent costume work, and Mank is the kind of film that could pull off a mini-sweep in many of the technical categories. Any of them could win here, but the most likely outcome is that they all lose to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which will win for sheer memorability of what the actual costumes looked like.
Best Film Editing
The Father
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7
The Father subtly deploys its editing to deliberately create confusion and convey the slow deterioration of reality in the mind of the titular character and it’s the only one of the nominees that attempts to use editing to create a puzzle-like structure. That’s the kind of tactic that often gets rewarded here, but somehow The Father wasn’t even nominated at the editors guild awards. Their top prize went to The Trial of Chicago 7, which juggled both several flashbacks and a large ensemble cast. That’s also what most pundits expect to win here, and I’ve allowed myself to be swayed from my instincts. Though I’d love to see a Father upset, it seems unlikely to happen.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Emma
Hillbilly Elegy
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mank
Pinocchio
I have an intense fear that Hillbilly Elegy might win here, which means it would dethrone Suicide Squad as the worst movie to ever win an Oscar. But I’m trying to purge that possibility from my mind and I’m absolutely not picking it. Assuming most voters won’t actually watch Pinocchio, the other good possibility here is Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which at least created a memorable look in its use of makeup that voters should be able to immediately recall.
Best Original Score
Da 5 Bloods (Terence Blanchard)
Mank (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross)
Minari (Emile Mosseri)
News of the World (James Newton Howard)
Soul (Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Jon Batiste)
Though Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are double nominated, there’s little chance of a vote split because the ballots only list the film name for the technical categories, not the names of the actual nominees. (Or at least that’s the way it’s been in past years, and presumably still is.) And regardless, a vote split shouldn’t be a problem anyway because Soul is expected to win here by a pretty substantial margin. It’s not just a film about music, but it’s the film that used music most effectively to tell it’s story, and a film you can still hear in your head long after the credits roll.
Best Original Song
“Fight for You,” from Judas and the Black Messiah (D’Mile, H.E.R., and Tiara Thomas)
“Hear My Voice,” from The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Daniel Pemberton and Celeste)
“Husavik,” from Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (Richard Göransson, Fat Max
Gsus, and Savan Kotecha)
“lo si (Seen),” from The Life Ahead (Diane Warren and Laura Pausini)
“Speak Now,” from One Night in Miami (Sam Ashworth and Leslie Odom Jr.)
Dianne Warren, who is now a 12-time nominee and has never won, has actually been campaigning quite a lot, and will probably get a lot of votes just for her body of work that’s been written about so exhaustively during awards season. But here’s the thing—her nominated song this year just isn’t good. Like Glenn Close, no matter how much love there is for her and how much people want her to have an Oscar, people generally won’t want her to win for something bad.
There’s some buzz that “Husavik” could win, but I just can’t imagine a pseudo-joke song from a movie that no one even really liked winning over two songs that are actually pretty great. Those two great songs, “Fight for You” and “Speak Now,” could both take it, but I’ll give the edge to “Speak Now,” which has the added bonus of being sung by Leslie Odom Jr., who is also up for an acting Oscar (largely for his incredible singing) for his portrayal of Sam Cooke. And a win here will be a nice way to award a film that a lot of people think should have been in the Best Picture lineup.
Best Production Design
The Father
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mank
News of the World
Tenet
Mank’s re-creation of classic Hollywood could easily get it the win here, and indeed that’s what nearly every pundit is predicting. It’s the safe bet, but I think voters will be more impressed by the subtle ways The Father used production design to really tell its story and take us inside the character’s mind as the walls of reality begin to completely fail him.
Best Sound
Greyhound
Mank
News of the World
Soul
Sound of Metal
Okay, I just double- and triple-checked my research, and I’m almost positive that only one of the nominees actually has the word “sound” in its title. But joking aside, Sound of Metal uses sound design about as skillfully and memorably as any film of the past several years. People will think its win here is the kind of fluke that could only happen in a year with no blockbusters or franchise movies, but honestly? I think it might’ve won this category anyway.
Best Visual Effects
Love and Monsters
The Midnight Sky
Mulan
The One and Only
Tenet
Since almost no voters actually know anything about visual effects, they just vote for what they think looks cool and memorable. And generally speaking, to think something looks cool, you have to have seen it in the first place. That alone probably eliminates two or three films from this category (and possibly four). Anyway, Tenet is gonna win.
Best Animated Feature
Onward (Directed by Dan Scanlon)
Over the Moon (Directed by Glen Keane)
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (Directed by Will Becher and Richard Phelan)
Soul (Directed by Pete Docter)
Wolfwalkers (Directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart)
Wolfwalkers and Onward are wonderfully creative films that certainly have their fans, but they still have no chance. The beautiful Soul is Pixar’s best film in years, and there’s absolutely no chance it doesn’t take this. Probably the biggest sure thing on the board.
Best Documentary Feature
Collective (Directed by Alexander Nanau)
Crip Camp (Directed by James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham)
The Mole Agent (Directed by Maite Alberdi)
My Octopus Teacher (Directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed)
Time (Directed by Garrett Bradley)
Time and Collective are probably the best reviewed films of the bunch, and the ones with the most passionate fans, but they’re also the arty-est fair in a category that almost never rewards that kind of thing. Crip Camp is probably the most heartwarming film of the bunch—the kind of attribute that usually does very well in this category—and it has the added bonus of being executive produced by the Obama’s. That could be enough to give it the win, but it would still be an upset. Because My Octopus Teacher, a story about a man and an octopus he forms a bond with during his daily snorkeling adventures in a coral reef on the coast of South Africa, has turned into an unlikely runaway favorite in this category.
My Octopus Teacher has quite a few critics among, well, critics, many of whom view it as a glorified nature documentary and mock it for anthropomorphizing an animal in vaguely creepy ways. But there’s no real indication that Academy voters agree with or care about any of the criticisms levied against it, and it’s undeniable that this film just captures people on an emotional level. My Octopus Teacher is normally the kind of film that the gatekeepers in the Academy’s Documentary Branch refuse to even nominate. But once it got into the final field of five, it was pretty clear that it would be our winner.
Best International Feature
Another Round (Denmark—Directed by Thomas Vinterberg)
Better Days (Hong Kong—Directed by Derek Tsang)
Collective (Romania—Directed by Alexander Nanau)
The Man Who Sold His Skin (Tunisia—Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania)
Quo Vadis, Aida? (Bosnia and Herzegovina—Directed by Jasmila Žbanić)
When Thomas Vinterberg managed to get a Best Director nomination for his funny, poignant, sad, and ultimately uplifting film about four friends in Copenhagen who embark on an experiment to maintain a constant blood alcohol level of .05, it just confirmed what we really already knew—Another Round is definitely winning this category. It’s vaguely possible that the powerful Bosnian war drama Quo Vadis, Aida could pull off a shocking upset if enough voters watch it, but that’s still pretty doubtful.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Sacha Baron Cohen and eight other people)
The Father (Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller)
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao)
One Night in Miami (Kemp Powers)
The White Tiger (Ramin Bahrani)
With only two Best Picture nominees, the winner will almost certainly be one of them. Nomadland winning here could be part of a sweep in the main categories where it’s nominated, both for the film and for Chloé Zhao, who by all accounts wrote a very loose adaptation of the novel. But I think a lot of voters, even those who love Nomadland enough to give it their first-place vote for Best Picture, still think of it as a largely visual achievement. Whereas The Father may feel like a more tightly structured achievement in screenwriting. And that film certainly has its passionate fans, which should galvanize with a win here.
Best Original Screenplay
Judas and the Black Messiah (Will Berson, Shaka King, Keith Lucas, and Kenny Lucas)
Minari (Lee Isaac Chung)
Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell)
Sound of Metal (Abraham Marder, Darius Marder, and Derek Cianfrance)
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin)
In a race between five Best Picture nominees that all have significant voter support, theoretically anyone could win here. But the race seems to have settled between the two films most reliant on great dialogue to work their magic—Promising Young Woman and Trial of the Chicago 7. There’s a relative consensus among that PYW will win here, with writer/director Emerald Fennell appealing to voters in similar ways as recent winners Jordan Peele (Get Out) and Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit), both of whom also won for creative, sometimes funny looks at difficult subject matter.
That could well happen, and indeed Promising Young Woman won this award with both BAFTA and the Writers Guild, but I don’t think defeating Aaron Sorkin will be easy. He previously won for 2010’s The Social Network and has a few other nominations since then (for Moneyball and Molly’s Game). And Trial of the Chicago 7 is the only film in the category that can galvanize the fabled Steak Eater vote—the type of older, usually male voters who predominantly care about a classic style of Hollywood movie about Big Issues being solved by Great Men. While Promising Young Woman probably appeals to the same type of voter that will also love other films in the category, like Minari or Judas and the Black Messiah, Trial of the Chicago 7 likely has its own corner staked out.
In a race where my brain is telling me to predict Sorkin and my heart is telling me to predict Fennell, I’m gonna take the same path I always do in my Oscar predictions—go with my heart to a fault. I’m picking Emerald Fennell and Promising Young Woman to eke out a narrow victory.
Best Supporting Actress
Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm)
Glenn Close (Hillbilly Elegy)
Olivia Colman (The Father)
Amanda Seyfried (Mank)
Youn Yuh-Jung (Minari)
It’s sometimes worth remembering how circumstantial a lot of Oscar results are, in that they become very tied to what voters are thinking about during any given awards season. For the 2016 Best Foreign Language Film race, the wonderful German film Toni Erdmann had been the presumed winner since its debut at Cannes. But then an evil idiot who unfortunately happened to have just been inaugurated as President of the United States banned Muslims from entering the country, the director of the Iranian film The Salesman announced he wouldn’t be coming to the Oscars, and suddenly it became the runaway favorite and cruised to the win.
Now, that’s not to knock The Salesman, which is a very good film (and its director, Asghar Farhadi, is one of the world’s greatest active filmmakers), but it does illustrate that sometimes the national and/or global politics of the moment can have a substantial effect on Oscar voting. And so it is with this year’s Best Supporting Actress race.
For much of awards season, it was presumed that this would likely come down to sentimental favorite and perennial bridesmaid Glenn Close versus the upstart Maria Bakalovo, who came from nowhere to hijack a Borat movie and make it her own. But Glenn Close, who was already nominated for a terrible movie to begin with, may have had her chances killed by the very subject of the movie itself.
In Hillbilly Elegy, Close plays the grandmother of J.D. Vance, a law student who grew up in Appalachia and was raised partially by a mother with a severe drug problem. But since writing the awful book the film is based on, J.D. Vance has recently become a somewhat prominent conservative media pundit, and he regularly appears on Tucker Carlson’s show spouting what can only be called All Kinds of Racist Bullshit. To be clear, voters mostly hated this movie anyway, and I’m honestly not sure Glenn Close would’ve won this category even if Vance had been muzzled for the last six months. But I especially can’t see her winning now, when she’d be put in the position of potentially having to thank Vance in her acceptance speech. Yes, it sucks that Glenn Close has still never won an Oscar. But I can’t imagine many voters want to see her win for that.
So that would seemingly allow Bakalova to get the win for her incredible performance with noted costar Rudy Giuliani, in which she was essentially acting without a director and without a script. It’s an astonishing performance, and it might have won her the Oscar until some truly abhorrent anti-Asian hate crimes turned a long-overdue spotlight on the systemic mistreatment and erasure of Asian women in American Society.
And that brings us to the lovely, understated work of Youn Yuh-Jung as a very different (and better) kind of Meemaw. Youn is both the heart and the comic relief in what is probably the most beloved film in the race, and her hilarious, endearing acceptance speeches at various precursor awards have all but sealed her victory. There’s still a vague possibility that Close or Bakalova could win here, but either outcome would be a huge upset.
Best Supporting Actor
Sacha Baron Cohen (The Trial of the Chicago 7)
Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah)
Leslie Odom Jr. (One Night in Miami)
Paul Raci (Sound of Metal)
Lakeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah)
In the year’s only acting race that’s easy to call, there’s no reason to bury the lede—Daniel Kaluuya is winning this. There’s some fear among Oscar prognosticators that the presence of his co-star, Lakeith Stanfield, in the category may create a vote splitting scenario that could lead to a Sacha Baron Cohen win. But I don’t see it. Stanfield’s inclusion here might have been the single biggest shock of the nominations, and I don’t think he has anywhere near the support that Kaluuya does. The only unknown with this category is how we only ended up with a single performer from One Night in Miami, when arguably all four main characters should have been here.
Best Actress
Viola Davis (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom)
Andra Day (The United States vs. Billie Holiday)
Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman)
Frances McDormand (Nomadland)
Carey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman)
Best Actress is this year’s ultimate “no one knows what the hell is gonna happen” race, and it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a major race this divided in terms of precursors. Andra Day won the Golden Globe, but wasn’t even nominated with SAG or BAFTA. Viola Davis won the SAG, but SAG has a history of utterly loving her. Frances McDormand won the BAFTA, but she already has two Oscars and a third would put her in extremely rarified company. Carey Mulligan won the Critics Choice, but wasn’t even nominated for BAFTA despite being actually British. And Vanessa Kirby managed to get nominated everywhere but hasn’t won anything.
There’s pretty broad agreement that Kirby isn’t gonna win, and beyond that anything could happen. And yet, despite how wild this category is, I’m bizarrely confident that Mulligan will take it.
First, let’s talk about the precursors. I completely discount the Globes. Day’s win there certainly got Oscar voters to watch her film, but her win means absolutely nothing in terms of Oscar voting. SAG is a far more populist voting body than the Academy, with an infinitely larger membership, and when SAG and Oscar results differ, it’s almost always because SAG went for the more popular performer and/or the more popular film, while the Oscars went for something more esoteric and/or British. (For example, Denzel Washington and Casey Affleck in 2017, Viola Davis and Meryl Streep in 2011, and Glenn Close and Olivia Colman in 2019.) As for BAFTA—yes, it was a huge surprise Mulligan wasn’t nominated there. But those nominees actually weren’t selected by the whole BAFTA body, they were selected by small committees. So Mulligan’s miss there tells us nothing about the opinions of the BAFTA voters as a whole.
In other words—all of Mulligans precursor losses are (1) very easily explainable, and (2) don’t actually tell us much about her Oscar chances. And in general, because the major precursors were all split in every direction, anyone arguing for why Person X will win Best Actress can’t use precursors to make that case. They have to explain why they believe the Academy will vote in a certain way. So let’s do that.
We absolutely know that Promising Young Woman was well loved by the Academy. You don’t get nominations for Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Editing without substantial passion for your film. Of course, films get passion for different reasons, and that doesn’t always translate to wins. American Hustle got 10 nominations and won nothing. But people who loved American Hustle loved it for many different reasons. That’s less true with Promising Young Woman.
For people that really loved Promising Young Woman, it’s difficult to imagine Mulligan not being a huge part of that. The movie only works if you 100% buy into her performance and her character. A fair comp might be Darkest Hour. It’s difficult to fathom any Oscar voter thinking Darkest Hour was the best film of 2017 but then *not* giving Gary Oldman their Best Actor vote. One belief almost has to lead to the other.
And we know that there are a lot of Academy members who think Promising Young Woman is the best film of the year! Kyle Buchanan of the New York Times said that he’s been hearing so much voter love for PYW that he considered picking it for a Best Picture upset. I’m not suggesting PYW will win Best Picture, but it will surely get a lot of first-place votes.
Now let’s talk math. In Best Picture, because of the preferential ballot, receiving the most first-place votes does not guarantee a win. But in every other category, they absolutely do. In a tight, five-person race, it won’t require a ton of votes to win. The Best Actress winner could easily cruise to the win with only, say, 28% of the vote. And for a movie with a seriously passionate fanbase, and big support among several demos (actors, directors, writers, editors, women in general), that’s a very gettable vote total.
Plus, we know that voters really like to spread the love. And Mulligan’s biggest competition—Davis and McDormand—are in films that have other major categories all but locked up. Whether it happens or not, most voters likely believe that Ma Rainey is for sure winning Best Actor, and Nomadland is for sure winning Best Director. They also might be nervous that Trial of the Chicago 7 could win Original Screenplay over PYW, meaning PYW’s best shot for an Oscar win lies with Mulligan. And I promise, voters absolutely think about stuff like this.
Plus, there is some Oscar history working against Viola Davis. No movie has ever won Oscars in both lead acting categories without getting a Best Picture nomination. Yes, that’s the kind of stat that may seem very circumstantial, but it does have some intuitive sense behind it—a film winning two lead acting Oscars would seemingly indicate widespread voter support, while a film missing out on a Best Picture nomination would seemingly indicate the opposite.
And that’s what I think it comes down to. It’s just really hard to win a lead acting category for a movie that voters aren’t particularly passionate about, and which is largely carried by someone else, when you’re up against someone who absolutely carries a movie that voters really love. So yeah, anything could happen here, and no outcome would shock me, but I will be surprised if Carey Mulligan doesn’t end the night with an Oscar.
Best Actor
Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal)
Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom)
Anthony Hopkins (The Father)
Gary Oldman (Mank)
Steven Yeun (Minari)
Ever since Ma Rainey first screened for critics last fall, there has been an overwhelming consensus that the late Chadwick Boseman would just cruise to this award. And so far that assumption has been mostly correct—Boseman won with the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Critics Choice Awards. But then Anthony Hopkins won the BAFTA and put the seeming inevitability of this race into at least some slight doubt.
Hopkins could absolutely win here. He delivers a monumental performance in a film that many older Academy members feel passionate about. What he’s able to do on screen in portraying a man suffering from dementia and losing his grasp on reality is the exact kind of towering achievement that tends to win people their second Oscar. And look, we saw a very similar scenario play out a few years ago between Glenn Close and Olivia Colman; Close was the sentimental favorite, she won almost every precursor, and it was impossible to imagine she wouldn’t win the Oscar. But then Colman won the BAFTA and upset Close for the Oscar largely for two reasons: Voters thought Colman gave an all-time great performance, and no matter how much voters may have wanted to give Close an Oscar they just didn’t really love the movie she was nominated for.
All of that could apply here as well. There is very little doubt that voters like The Father more than they liked Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and it’s exceedingly possible that many voters will think Hopkins gave the better performance. But, of course, there is one major difference: voters know this is their last chance to award Boseman, a truly stunning talent and a major star, cruelly gone too soon. Two years ago, voters could hope they’d have another chance with Glenn Close (and indeed she’s back again this year, with yet another film that no one wants to see her actually win an Oscar for).
And I think that’s the difference maker. In probably eight of the last ten years, Hopkins would have won this award handily. The performance is truly that good. But Chadwick Boseman also turns in an outstanding performance, and an Oscar speech by his wife will make for a deeply moving end to an incredible career.
Best Director
Lee Isaac Chung (Minari)
Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman)
David Fincher (Mank)
Thomas Vinterberg (Another Round)
Chloé Zhao (Nomadland)
For as complicated as most of the acting categories are this year, Best Director seems extremely straight forward. Chloé Zhao is gonna win. She has won everything that it’s possible to win on her way to Oscar night—Golden Globe, BAFTA, Directors Guild Award, and Critics Choice Award—and there frankly isn’t any reason to believe she has a major challenger for the Oscar. Not only was she a consensus pick anyway, but being an Asian woman additionally helps her at a time where there should be an added desire among voters to support Asian women.
It’s hard to imagine anyone else winning here, though it’s at least conceivable Fincher could pull off an upset. He’s widely considered one of the best filmmakers of his generation, he’s never won an Oscar, and he made a black and white film about the Golden Age of Hollywood that’s considered a technical marvel. In most years, that would be the recipe for a Best Director win. But despite 10 nominations there’s actually very little enthusiasm for Mank in the major categories, and it’s viewed as an extremely niche film compared to Nomadland, which speaks more widely to both the country and the moment.
Best Picture
The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7
As always, we’ll start with a refresher on the rules: Voters are asked to rank all nine films (though some voters only rank a few of them, because following instructions is hard). The goal is for one film to end up with over 50% of the first-place votes. Assuming that doesn’t happen upon the initial tally (which is virtually impossible), an elimination process begins. The film with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated from contention, and all of the ballots that ranked that film first get reallocated to whatever film was ranked second. Assuming no film is at 50% of the first-place votes yet, the process repeats; the film with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and the ballots for that film are reallocated to whatever was ranked next highest on them. This process repeats and films are continually eliminated from contention until one has over 50% of the first-place votes.
Before we get into the specifics of how this may play out, there are a few generalities of what we’re kind of looking for. The logic behind the preferential ballot is that the winner will be the film the Academy most agreed on. That means we’re not explicitly measuring passion or concensus, but rather the intersection of both.
For a film to survive the first few elimination rounds, it needs to begin the process with a lot of first-place votes. That means the films that don’t start with many first-place votes can’t win, no matter how many second- or third-place votes they rack up. But after those first few eliminations, we start getting pretty deep into voters’ ballots. Films that voters ranked fourth suddenly morph into first-place votes. At this point the process has changed, and what we’re primarily looking for in these later stages is the film that will be toward the bottom of the fewest number of ballots.
So now let’s get really hypothetical and speculative, and try to game this out. Remember, every nominee will likely get at least 5% of the initial first-place votes, or it wouldn’t have gotten a nomination. (Although that’s not completely accurate, the caveats there are way too complicated to go into here, so let’s just start with the assumption that everything is getting at least 5% of the initial vote.)
Here’s my best stab at what the initial first-place vote totals may look like. (And if these numbers seem too low to you, remember that they do have to actually add up to 100):
Promising Young Woman: 21%
Nomadland: 19%
The Trial of the Chicago 7: 17%
Judas and the Black Messiah: 13%
Minari: 11%
The Father: 8%
Mank: 6%
Sound of Metal: 5%
Those vote totals would mean Sound of Metal is our first elimination, so its share of the vote will be reallocated, most likely to other small, character-driven films, and perhaps films that place an emphasis on representation or life on the margins. That could give us a next total that looks like this:
Promising Young Woman: 22%
Nomadland: 21%
The Trial of the Chicago 7: 17%
Judas and the Black Messiah: 13%
Minari: 13%
The Father: 8%
Mank: 6%
Mank is our next cut, and as one of the two big Steak Eater movies (movies that appeal to mostly older voters, and remind them of what the Oscars used to be—honoring movies about Great Men doing Great Things), I expect that vote will heavily reallocate to Chicago 7, but also with some going to The Father and Judas.
Promising Young Woman: 22%
Nomadland: 21%
The Trial of the Chicago 7: 21%
Judas and the Black Messiah: 14%
Minari: 13%
The Father: 9%
Now The Father is gone. Its votes will likely reallocate to the other film that most appeals to older voters (Chicago 7), but also with some going to the other two understated character dramas in the mix (Minari and Nomadland). So now we may have a vote total that looks like this:
The Trial of the Chicago 7: 26%
Nomadland: 23%
Promising Young Woman: 22%
Minari: 15%
Judas and the Black Messiah: 14%
Judas is our next cut. We’re now deep enough into people’s ballots that everything gets a bump, but the biggest bumps are likely to go to the other two films with the most overtly political messages, Chicago 7 and Promising Young Woman.
The Trial of the Chicago 7: 31%
Nomadland: 26%
Promising Young Woman: 26%
Minari: 17%
It’s been a good run for Minari, but now it’s out. The remaining three films will all get bumps, but I expect the lion’s share of Minari support to go to the other two arthouse films about marginalized people.
The Trial of the Chicago 7: 35%
Nomadland: 33%
Promising Young Woman: 32%
So Promising Young Woman, which I predict will begin with the most first place votes, has finally run out of steam, and how its votes get reallocated will determine the Best Picture winner. And I expect a very healthy majority of those votes to go to the other arthouse film remaining; the other film that revolves around a great female lead character and was written and directed by an exciting new-ish female filmmaker. That could give us a final vote that looks like this:
Nomadland: 53%
The Trial of the Chicago 7: 47%
And I think that’s how it’ll go. In this simulation, Promising Young Woman is in the lead for the first few rounds of reallocations because it likely has the most singular passion behind it. And then The Trial of the Chicago 7 holds the lead for the next several reallocations because it will likely be the biggest beneficiary from some of the first few films that get eliminated. But I think Nomadland will win in the end because ultimately it’s the film with the broadest consensus behind it, and it seems to be the film with the fewest detractors.
And on the face of it, that’s just demonstrably true, because Nomadland has been conquering everything in its sight for almost eight months. It won the top prize at the two major Fall festivals, Venice and Toronto, and then it officially started awards season with wins at the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards. Then it cemented its heavy frontrunner status with further wins at BAFTA, two of the top guild prizes (from the Directors Guild and the Producers Guild), and it even won top prize at the two biggest indie movie awards bodies, the Gothams and the Spirit Awards. Really the only top prize that Nomadland hasn’t won is the Best Ensemble award from the Screen Actors Guild, but that’s easily explainable because Nomadland isn’t much of an ensemble film.
However, I don’t want to make it sound like Nomadland has this in the bag, because it doesn’t. The Best Picture preferential ballot is a very complicated animal that has yielded several surprise wins for Best Picture in the last six years. If my opening percentages are off a little bit (and surely they are), that could change everything about the elimination order. If Nomadland doesn’t start with a significant amount of first-place votes, it may not even survive until the final elimination.
Another major factor is last-place votes. In the preferential system, getting ranked last on the most ballots can really come into play in the later eliminations. For example, in my simulation, any ballot that had The Trial of the Chicago 7 ranked seventh and Nomadland ranked eighth would become, at the end, a first-place vote for The Trial of the Chicago 7. In other years, it’s been more obvious which films might rank last on the most ballots, because there were so many polarizing Best Picture nominees. But this year there don’t really seem to be any nominees that a lot of voters strongly dislike, and that’s interesting in itself. Because no matter how much everyone may like all eight films, one of them will still get the most last-place votes. And which film that is may turn out to be very consequential.
But again, the above simulation leading to a Nomadland win does feel intuitively right because it’s won over every single voting body and voting method that it’s come up against. And Nomadland feels like the historically correct film to go down as the Best Picture of 2020, a year in which we were all isolated in our own nomadlands, trapped in our pods that might as well have been aging vans, and spending way too much damn time thinking about our next depressing visit to Amazon.