And now we get to the big one. One Battle After Another is winning Best Picture. Good night, everybody. After wins at the BAFTAs, the Critics Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Producers Guild of America Awards, that’s fully what I anticipated saying in this final piece. And, for many reasons, it’s probably all I should say.
When a film sweeps those four awards, the Best Picture race inevitably feels like it’s over. Oppenheimer did just that two years ago. Nomadland did as well in 2020. By Oscar night, no one was predicting anything but a victory for either of these two films. And they were 100% correct. So why does this season feel even slightly open for an upset victory? It comes down to a little thing called passion.
You only have to journey back to 2016 and 2019 to find two films that won these four important precursor prizes and still lost Best Picture. La La Land and 1917 were seemingly the unsailable frontrunners. They did everything right. They won everything they needed to. But they were both thwarted by films that had more passion behind them. For 1917, its unlikely Best Picture defeat was signalled when the cast of Parasite won the ensemble prize at the SAG Awards.
The elation was huge. The love in that room was overwhelming. In retrospect, it should have been obvious the tide had turned, and this was now the film more people wanted to see win Best Picture. Sinners is following a very similar trajectory. It couldn’t defeat OBAA anywhere else, but it does have that SAG ensemble win, which is why it’s still absolutely in the hunt to win here.
Statistically, it seems impossible. But Sinners has one thing Parasite did not: the record for the most nominations in the history of the Academy Awards. Now I know what everyone is saying. The film with the most nominations actually very rarely wins Best Picture in the modern age of the Oscars. It’s only happened twice in the last five years.
But those “history-making” headlines gave Sinners a tremendous campaign push and more visibility and exposure than any other film in the hunt. For those members who don’t pay attention to things like precursor wins, hearing Sinners has the most nominations of any film ever made could indeed make them feel like it’s the film they “should” be voting for.
But let’s just pause for a moment. You can argue Sinners is this year’s Parasite or Moonlight. But One Battle After Another is not 1917 or La La Land. Both of those films suffered backlash in the latter part of their seasons. 1917 was dismissed as the type of war movie the Academy had acknowledged numerous times over the years. La La Land was criticised as frivolous fluff that did nothing but “plagiarise” decades of movie musicals. Their eventual defeats ultimately weren’t all that surprising.
Have we seen any form of similar backlash to a potential One Battle After Another Best Picture win? At all? Would anyone really be mad that a Paul Thomas Anderson film finally wins the Academy’s big prize? We didn’t hear any conjecture after it won any of those four prizes. We haven’t heard it during the Oscar voting period. Plenty are talking up Sinners, but nobody seems to be bringing One Battle After Another down.
Because the truth is, there is no mud you can sling that will stick to it. It opened to rapturous reviews back in September and has ridden that wave of acclaim for the entirety of the season. People have wanted to see a PTA film dominate the Oscars for years, and the opportunity has arrived at last. Are we really expected to believe a film can win PGA, DGA, WGA, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Critics Choice, ACE Eddie, and ASC, and still lose Best Picture? That has never happened in history, so it would be a loss for the ages.
On the flip side with stats, you can argue that Sinners has won SAG ensemble, WGA, and ACE Eddie, and no film that’s won these three prizes has ever lost Best Picture. However, every Best Picture winner that did have that trio of preseason victories also had key wins elsewhere, like PGA or DGA, so it feels like a moot stat to use to prove a victory is inevitable.
But I never like to lay my final prediction on stats and history. The truth is, the majority of Academy members don’t know anything about all this statistical mumbo jumbo we Oscar writers love to pull out. When it comes down to Best Picture, you have to presume they simply vote for the film they love the most. You can see that being One Battle After Another. You can also see that being Sinners. It comes down to these two.
If Sinners had won somewhere else, like say PGA, I’d be comfortable in predicting the upset. But I can’t ignore that One Battle After Another simply hasn’t faltered all season long. Like Nolan in 2023, Scorsese in 2006, and Spielberg in 1993, PTA’s Oscar coronation has finally arrived.
BEST PICTURE PREDICTIONS:
1. One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) – BAFTA, CCA, GG, PGA
2. Sinners (Warner Bros.) – BAFTA, CCA, GG, PGA, SAG
3. Hamnet (Focus Features) – BAFTA, CCA, GG, PGA, SAG
4. Marty Supreme (A24) – BAFTA, CCA, GG, SAG, PGA
5. Sentimental Value (NEON) – BAFTA, CCA, GG, PGA
6. Frankenstein (Netflix) – CCA, GG, SAG, PGA
7. Bugonia (Focus Features) – CCA, GG
8. The Secret Agent (NEON) – GG
9. Train Dreams (Netflix) – CCA, PGA
10. F1 – PGA
Will win: One Battle After Another
Should win: One Battle After Another
Possible upset: Sinners