This awards season is back to normal with no Hollywood labor strikes and no Covid, but it also is lacking consensus frontrunners for Oscars Best Picture.
“So far, 2024 has been a down year at the box office [off 12% year-to-date] and a confusing year on the film festival circuit,” writes Steve Pond in Hollywood trade newspaper TheWrap. “There’s no big commercial movie out there with the clout that ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’ showed last year. And no indie film that seems to have the buzz to become this year’s ‘CODA’ [from Apple Original Films] or ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ [from distributor A24].”
Relationship drama “Coda” won the Best Picture Oscar for 2021 and “Everything Everywhere” the following year.
With prospects uncertain for original films, eyes turn to sequels, although traditionally Oscar voters don’t embrace such derivative movies. Warner Bros. Pictures sci-fi drama “Dune: Part Two” might be an exception because the first installment from 2021 won six Oscars from 10 nominations. (Pictured above is Austin Butler taking selfie with fans at a “Dune 2” publicity event.)
“‘Gladiator II,’ Paramount Pictures’ long-delayed sequel to Ridley Scott’s 2000 Best Picture winner, hasn’t screened yet but has to be considered a strong contender,” writes Pond. “But it’s worth noting that Scott has made 18 movies in the 24 years since the first ‘Gladiator,’ and only one of them, 2015’s ‘The Martian,’ was nominated for Best Picture.”
Originals from the festival circuit with best picture nomination prospects are Cannes fest quirky relationship yarn “Anora” and French director Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical “Emilia Perez.” But they fall short of having a frontrunner halo.
The bellwether film fests that influence Oscars are in Toronto, Telluride (Colorado) and Venice (Italy). Those festivals are strategically scheduled in the lead-in to Hollywood’s awards season (which peaks the Thanksgiving holiday to the Oscars telecast March 2, 2025).
“So far this year, the going has been very slow to say the least” for Oscar worthy, Pete Hammond wrote in Deadline.com in July. “A look at the lineup of official Academy screenings every weekend at its Samuel Goldwyn Theatre has been disheartening, with a lot of smaller movies members say they haven’t even heard of.”
Yes, Oscar films typically premiere in the second half of the year, so the field is not yet set. But at this stage, informal frontrunners normally have emerged in industry conversation.
TheWrap article notes the pool of voters is bigger, younger, more racially diverse and more international than in past decade. Oscars organization the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences broadened membership in 2016 with “inclusion goals” after complaints of being too insular.
Looking at winners over the past two decades, the Best Picture Oscar veered to the arty and serious, dark fare, as evidenced by 2020’s bleak road drama “Nomadland” from Disney’s Searchlight Pictures and others. The larger international contingent is expected to reinforce that arty and dark tendency. But younger and racially diversity should nudge open the door wider for domestic-flavored popular culture.
Looking at this year’s prospects, two new original films thought to have Best Picture potential by oddsmakers have faltered in early screenings and get little love from professional film critics. They are Francis Ford Coppola’s stylish epic “Megalopolis” being distributed by Lionsgate (with a wide range of praise from pro film critics) and Warner Bros. Pictures’ edgy comic book adaptation musical “Joker: Folie à Deux.”
The article also notes that animated films and documentaries rarely crack the Best Picture nominations, in part because they have their own Oscars categories.
The 2020 Covid pandemic closed theaters; in 2023, Hollywood writers and actors walked off their jobs in separate labor disputes, which are resolved but interrupted normal film flow this year.
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