With the 93rd Academy Awards now in the distance and awards season about to begin for another year, it’s time to turn our attention to next year’s Oscars. Using a crystal ball method of buzz, pedigree, and expectation, let’s take a peek at what the 2021 awards may look like so we can regroup in seven months’ time and laugh at how wrong the early noise was.
While awards season always begins with its soft launch at the Cannes Film Festival in July, proceedings don’t truly kick off until September with the slew of film festivals that will still be a mix of in-person and virtual screenings. Whether we’ll see a return to a big, lavish Oscars ceremony in late March 2022 will obviously depend on the state of the world at the time. But the upcoming awards season should look more familiar to years gone by with its usual mix of contenders from major studios, streaming services, and indie distributors.
With four Best Picture wins in the last eight years including last year’s victor Nomadland, Searchlight Pictures will return with two heavyweights in the form of Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. del Toro’s film is a psychological thriller set in the seedy world of a carnival that boats an impeccable ensemble cast including Oscar winner Cate Blanchett and Oscar nominees Bradley Cooper, Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Rooney Mara, and David Strathairn.
After being punted from last year’s awards race, the studio finally unveiled The French Dispatch at Cannes last month. The film boasts a gargantuan ensemble casting including Oscar winners Frances McDormand, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz, and Benicio del Toro plus Timothée Chalamet, Saoirse Ronan, Bill Murray, Elisabeth Moss, and another half a dozen stars. The early reviews are typically strong for an Anderson project, so expect it to echo the awards season success of 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Another casualty of coronavirus delays, Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune will be the great hope of Warner Bros. this season. It’s hard to tell if the film can replicate the 2016 awards success of Villeneuve’s Arrival with nominations across the board including Best Picture or merely be a tech contender like his 2017 film Blade Runner 2049. The studio will also be trumpeting King Richard, which tells the story of Venus and Serena Williams’ super coach father, Richard, played by two-time Oscar nominee Will Smith.
Universal Pictures will be hoping to replicate the success of six-time Tony Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen with Stephen Chbosky’s film adaptation, starring Tony winner Ben Platt, Oscar winner Julianne Moore, and perennial Oscars bridesmaid Amy Adams. In similar fashion, 20th Century Studios will be looking to repeat the success of six-time Tony Award-winning musical West Side Story with Steven Spielberg’s upcoming adaptation. The 1961 film adaptation won ten Academy Awards including Best Picture, so Spielberg faces a daunting task to match that success.
On the indie studio side, A24/Apple TV+ have a major contender on their hands with Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. The adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play will be Coen’s first film project without brother Ethan and stars Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as Lord and Lady Macbeth, respectively. While A24 will handle the theatrical release, Apple TV+ will stream the film globally, so their combined campaign support could be something special.
After debuting to a rapturous response at Sundance, Neon’s Flee could be the film to break Pixar’s stranglehold on the Best Animated Feature category and possibly even breakthrough as the first documentary nominated for Best Picture. If nothing else, it’s a shoo-in for Best Documentary Feature, particularly with recent Oscar nominee Riz Ahmed on board as executive producer. Neon will also distribute Pablo Larraín’s Spencer with Kristen Stewart playing Diana Spencer, which could be the role to secure the actress her first Oscar nod (and maybe even a win) and finally break that Twilight curse that staggeringly still follows her.
The streamers will be back with a vengeance, particularly Netflix who must have surely thought they’d finally nab Best Picture last year with films like The Trial of the Chicago 7, Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the disaster that was Hillbilly Elegy. This season, they’ve got Oscar winner Adam McKay’s black comedy Don’t Look Up starring Academy Award winners Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance, and Meryl Streep (plus Timothée Chalamet, Jonah Hill, Ariana Grande, and Chris Evans), Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, Tick, Tick…Boom!, Rebecca Hall’s Passing starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Thomasin McKenzie.
After distributing the Cinderella story of the season with two-time Oscar winner Sound of Metal, Amazon Studios has a potential contender on their hands with Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos. Sorkin’s latest Oscar-bait film stars Oscar winners Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as TV icon’s Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, respectively and he’ll be hoping to achieve better Oscar success than The Trial of the Chicago 7 could muster.
With their first taste of awards season in 2020 where they scored nominations for Best Animated Feature for Wolfwalkers and Best Sound for Greyhound, Apple TV+ forked out $25 million for the rights to Sundance darling CODA in the hopes it will be their great hope this season. The gorgeous film swept the Sundance awards, taking home wins for U.S. Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Dramatic Audience Award, the Special Jury Ensemble Cast Award, and Best Director for Sian Heder, so it’s one to keep an eye on, particularly Oscar winner Marlee Matlin’s charming supporting performance.
But if there’s one studio to really watch, it’s Metro Goldwyn Meyer, whose awards slate could be rather staggering. Their biggest contender might be Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Salma Hayek, and Jared Leto. To be honest, the film has the potential to also be a gigantic, campy mess, so let’s wait and see. The studio also has Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest drama, which has the working title of Soggy Bottom and stars Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper and Benny Safdie. There’s another musical in the mix with Joe Wright’s Cyrano, starring four-time Emmy winner Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Ben Mendelsohn, Brian Tyree Henry and Kelvin Harrison Jr. And the studio will also finally debut the much-delayed latest James Bond adventure No Time to Die in October, which is sure to be a strong tech contender.
There’ll naturally be plenty of other titles to drop into the race over the next few months, particularly once festival season starts and the hidden contenders begin to emerge. For now, here are my early predictions for the major eight categories at the 94th Academy Awards with my predicted winners in bold. Check back at the end of March to see how wrong I was.
BEST PICTURE
Belfast (Focus Features)
CODA (Apple TV+)
Dune (Warner Bros.)
Flee (Neon)
House of Gucci (MGM)
Nightmare Alley (Searchlight Pictures)
The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Soggy Bottom (MGM)
The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24/AppleTV+)
West Side Story (20th Century Studios)
BEST DIRECTOR
Paul Thomas Anderson – Soggy Bottom (MGM)
Jane Campion – The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Joel Coen – The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24/AppleTV+)
Paolo Sorrentino – The Hand of God (Netflix)
Denis Villeneuve – Dune (Warner Bros.)
BEST ACTRESS
Jessica Chastain – The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Searchlight Pictures)
Penélope Cruz – Parallel Mothers (Sony Pictures Classics)
Lady Gaga – House of Gucci (MGM)
Jennifer Hudson – Respect (Universal Pictures)
Kristen Stewart – Spencer (Neon)
BEST ACTOR
Benedict Cumberbatch – The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Peter Dinklage – Cyrano (Netflix)
Andrew Garfield – tick, tick…BOOM! (Netflix)
Will Smith – King Richard (Warner Bros.)
Denzel Washington – The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24/AppleTV+)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Ariana DeBose – West Side Story (20th Century Studios)
Ann Dowd – Mass (Bleeker Street)
Kirsten Dunst – The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Marlee Matlin – CODA (Apple TV+)
Frances McDormand – The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24/AppleTV+)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Bradley Cooper – Soggy Bottom (MGM)
Corey Hawkins – The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24/AppleTV+)
Jason Isaacs – Mass (Bleeker Street)
Richard Jenkins – The Humans (A24)
Jesse Plemons – The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Being the Ricardos (Amazon Studios) – Aaron Sorkin
Belfast (Focus Features) – Kenneth Branagh
The French Dispatch (Searchlight Pictures) – Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness
Mass (Bleeker Street) – Fran Kranz
Soggy Bottom (MGM) – Paul Thomas Anderson
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
CODA (Apple TV+) – Sian Heder
The Humans (A24) – Stephen Karam
Nightmare Alley (Searchlight Pictures) – Kim Morgan, Guillermo del Toro
The Power of the Dog (Netflix) – Jane Campion
The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24/AppleTV+) – Joel Coen