And here we are. Our coverage of all 20 feature categories at this year’s Oscars wraps up today with the top two awards, one of which is virtually assured and one of which very much isn’t.
BEST DIRECTOR
NOMINEES
Paul Thomas Anderson—Licorice Pizza
Kenneth Branagh—Belfast
Jane Campion—The Power of the Dog
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi—Drive My Car
Steven Spielberg—West Side Story
WILL WIN
Campion. It’s weird for the Best Picture race to be exhilaratingly unsettled while this category is on lock. But The Power of the Dog’s rival for the big prize isn’t nominated here, and there hasn’t been a whisper of any emerging threat to Campion’s iron clamp on this category. A woman wins, again!
SHOULD WIN
Spielberg. I’m sorry. I just really love the way he makes movies.
MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
Wes Anderson—The French Dispatch
Jon M. Chu—In the Heights
Julia Ducournau—Titane
Steven Spielberg—West Side Story
Edgar Wright—Last Night in Soho
Anderson is pretty good at the whole movie-making thing himself. Chu enlivens Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first stage musical with extraordinary visual verve. Ducournau is merciless in her execution. Wright turns camera into character, with eye-popping results.
MovieManifesto’s winner: Steven Spielberg—West Side Story.
Honorable mention: John Krasinski—A Quiet Place Part II; Christian Petzold—Undine; M. Night Shyamalan—Old; Joe Wright—Cyrano.
BEST PICTURE
NOMINEES
Belfast
CODA
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story
WILL WIN
This was supposed to be easy. For months, it was looking like a potential battle between The Power of the Dog and Belfast, and as the latter faded, the former’s grip seemed secure. And then the whispers starting getting louder—CODA is a crowd-pleaser. CODA checks all the right boxes. A vote against CODA is a vote against disabled people. These aren’t the Oscars you’re looking for—and then CODA won Best Ensemble Cast at SAG and won again last weekend at the Producers’ Guild, and now, would you believe it, we’ve got a race.
But first: Does any other nominee have a chance? Not really. Belfast’s momentum seems to have completely fizzled. I can’t completely rule out West Side Story—Disney cleverly timed its streaming release (on both Disney+ and HBO!) to coincide with the voting period—but it’s still a remake (well, sort of) of a beloved movie that already won Best Picture 60 years ago. Everything else is a major long shot. This is really about whether CODA, the wily upstart with no stars that was released on a second-tier streaming network, can knock off The Power of the Dog, a classical wide-screen epic by an established director featuring a quartet of acting nominees that premiered on a more popular streaming network.
That’s a false dichotomy, of course. For one thing, The Power of the Dog is a weird little movie; sure, it’s a western, but it’s also restrained and withholding, refusing to offer any of the catharsis traditionally found in a Best Picture winner. CODA, by contrast, is the definition of a feel-good film, cresting with an audition scene that’s practically designed to provoke floods of tears and bursts of applause.
Then there’s the preferential ballot issue, and I’ve given up trying to decipher its labyrinthine machinations and deduce their impact on the results. I feel much the same about the precursors. Power of the Dog wasn’t even nominated at SAG, and though CODA won at the Producers Guild, I’m not sure how meaningful that is. (How much did it win by? What’s the extent of the overlap between the two bodies?) Besides, it isn’t as though the PGA has been an especially reliable bellwether of late; several recent winners—1917, La La Land, The Big Short—all fell short at the Oscars.
You can tie yourself in knots with this stuff; there’s a whole Oscar-blogging industry devoted to unraveling arcane statistics and extrapolating from random crumbs of data. That isn’t my game. I’m just asking myself one question: Do I think Academy members are more likely to select CODA or The Power of the Dog for Best Picture? It’s impossible for me to fully divorce head from heart in this speculation, but in the end, I just don’t believe CODA has the votes. The Power of the Dog takes it.
SHOULD WIN
West Side Story would get my vote, but The Power of the Dog is a terrific movie, so if it does hold on for the victory, I’ll be quite pleased. I could say the same for Licorice Pizza or Drive My Car, both of which I greatly admire. My opinions on the rest range from “That was pretty good” (CODA, Dune, Belfast, Nightmare Alley) to “That could have been worse” (King Richard) to “That was Don’t Look Up” (Don’t Look Up). So if CODA in fact scores the upset, just remember, it could have been worse.
MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
For this, you’ll need to wait for my top 10 list, which will (finally!) be unveiled next month. But in the meantime, if you’re absolutely starved for my opinions on the year’s best movies, by all means check out the podcast I appeared on with the good folks at SportsAlcohol.com, where we discuss some terrific films and also The Green Knight.
I’ll be back on Sunday with an omnibus post collecting all of my predictions and preferences. Happy watching!
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.