THB #384: The Oscar 40

9 days to Venice… 11 days to Telluride… 17 days to Toronto.

The horses are getting into the second starting gate.

The first starting gate was January 1. And for a change, we have a couple sure-fire nominees already locked in. (Make up your own abbreviation.)

Year after year after year, this moment in the year is pretty much the same. Something around 40 movies are really in the race today. Distributors are willing or fully committed. Every major director is still considered to be in the race. Cannes titles are wildly overrated as Best Picture candidates because… they’ve been seen and other films have not. And there are still a lot of hopes for movies that have been seen and are really good or whose filmmakers are well-liked, when all the while, if you are really honest or smart, you see how steep the hill to a Best Picture nomination is.

We did Gurus o’ Gold for a lot of years (even before Gold Derby stole the idea) and it was very consistent that 7 or 8 of the Best Picture guesses in August, pre-fest, always became nominees. The illusion is that it is an even playing field and every film that screens in the fall has a shot… but it’s not. Every distributor with 1 or 2 potential nominees have odds in their heads and every one with more than 2 has favorites and titles they know they are wasting their money on promoting.

Things do change. There are unexpected beloveds, like Moonlight or All Quiet on the Western Front. And there are movies that crash on the launch pad… which I will leave to keep licking their years-old wounds. So we start with around 40. About 25 survive the festival window, to mid-October. November is a battlefield. And then, critics groups, real and fake, narrow the field to about 15 before Christmas. Those films pivot until nominations. And once nominated, about half the field believes they have a real shot. The other half is really happy to have gotten that far.

It remains exciting, for those of us who get excited, because of the movies themselves and all the amazing work in them, from directors, actors, and writers all the way down below the line.

But the dance doesn’t change a whole lot. New tactics and strategies at the start of each year, but when the heat rises, people revert to what they know. And they work their asses off. And they roll the dice.

Here are the 5 movies most sure to be nominated in January, as we enter this juncture…

Barbie
Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Dune: Part Two
Napoleon

No one is likely to fight me on Oppenheimer or Barbie or Scorsese, so I will make no argument.

Of course, Sir Ridley could pull up short with Napoleon. But I won’t bet against him. It’s a story that has been waiting to get made for a long time and Joaquin is pretty perfect for the role.

And whereas Dune: Part Two doesn’t feel like a traditional lock, when you look at it, there have only been 6 franchise-type films nominated in the last 30 years. Two haven’t had further entries since their nominations (Mad Max: Fury Road, Joker) and hadn’t had earlier entries nominated. One was a nomination for a sequel when the original was not nominated (Top Gun: Maverick). And two have been nominated for every film in the series (Lord of the Rings, Avatar).