Ranking the Best Picture nominees for the 2024 Oscars
We're sizing up the chances of the 10 films nominated for the top honor at the Academy Awards, from Oppenheimer to Past Lives
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When the 96th annual Academy Award nominations were announced today, the biggest surprise was that there weren’t any really big surprises. With 13 nominations to its name, it may seem like Oppenheimer is set to dominate the awards, as it has all season. But the Academy is still the Academy and, to borrow a phrase from the world of sports, that’s why they play the game (or in this case, count the votes). Even the most inevitable winners can lose steam as the ceremony looms closer. Remember 2016, when La La Land earned a record-tying 14 nominations and then went on to lose Best Picture to Moonlight?
Could Poor Things win over enough Academy voters to overcome the Oppenheimer effect? Will they instead honor Martin Scorsese for the late-career triumph that was Killers Of The Flower Moon? It would make for a rather boring ceremony if all the usual suspects currently making the rounds at the precursor awards shows are called to the podium to give the same speeches again, so we’re keeping our options open for now. We’ll make our final predictions closer to Oscar night, but in the meantime, because this is what we do for fun, we’re taking a closer look at the Best Picture nominees and ranking them from least to most likely to win at this point in the race. We’ll all find out how we did together on March 10, when the awards are finally handed out.
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Exceptional:1) Past Lives2) The Zone of Interest3) BarbieReally solid but significant quibbles:4) The Holdovers5) Killers of the Flower Moon6) Anatomy of a Fall7) OppenheimerLots of fun but kinda vacuous:8) Poor ThingsBeautifully mounted but dramatically inert:9) Maestro
Haven’t seen American Fiction yet. Go back to five nominees, please!!!
Not really interested in ranking the nominees (I mean, I am, just not in this particular setting), I more just wanted to note that it’s a bummer Spanfeller, G/O Media or whoever the hell it is that runs this place apparently decided to get rid of commenter avatars. I realize it’s only a very small part of the long, slow, sad death of this site, but it kind of sucks nonetheless.
Also I lied, Barbie totally got jobbed.
yeah it’s weird, right? did some corporate lawyer asshat start scanning random sites avatars and decide there was too much copyrighted material? At least let me choose my pixel color, man–come on!
did some corporate lawyer asshat start scanning random sites avatars and decide there was too much copyrighted material?I guess it’s time to bust out my Stemboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse avatar, then!My feeling about this, along with the rest of the slow degradation of commenting on this site, is that it wasn’t a deliberate act. Never attribute to malice what could adequately explained by incompetence or indifference. Some piece of code stopped working right or some switch got flipped by accident and no one cares enough to fix it. When they first started up comments on the AVC, the snarky tagline was “Now tolerating your opinion.” ; it seems far more fitting now.
Jobbed? Eight nominations is pretty damn good, especially for a comedy.
It’s not unreasonable to think that all avatars were purged just because a lot of people had the red Unionize Gawker logos, myself included.
Boy, if the Academy were to talk themselves into Poor Things over Oppenheimer at the last minute, it would pretty much be the final death knell for the Oscars’ cultural relevance (and of course their TV ratings). This is a chance to reward a movie that was both artistic and *actually seen* and enjoyed by moviegoers —one people will actually still remember in a couple of decades (as opposed to Birdman, The Shape Of Water, Nomadland, CODA, or pretty much the lion’s share of the winners over the past 15 years). Oppenheimer (together with Barbie) was a cultural moment that just might have saved the movies at a crucial time. Can’t imagine a bigger unforced error than to reject it for yet another quirky late-breaking indie film that most people have never even heard of.
If the category was Best Cultural Moment, that’d make sense, but I still don’t understand why Academy voters shouldn’t pick whatever movie they thought was best, even if it was a lesser-seen film. Movies as a whole are losing their cultural relevance; why try to fool people?
Right?? I’m so sick of people disparaging good movies by saying “no one saw them.” Why should we pander by refusing to honor those movies?
I think you’re confusing the Oscars with the MtV movie awards–pretty sure those are the ones for cultural relevance (and I expect Barbie will fucking clean up on those popcorn bucket things!).
It’s a two horse race between “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” with everyone else in the “just happy to be nominated” group.Any other film would be a huge upset.
I don’t agree. The pre-curser ceremonies are pointing to Oppenheimer v. Poor Things. Killers of the Flower Moon was a very average movie that was 1.5 hours too long.
Agreed that it’s Oppenheimer’s to lose—given how it ran away with the nominations, in general—and agreed that Poor Things has the best chance of playing spoiler, as it should be. A rare insightful 1-2 punch from the current AVC writing staff.Having said that, you can tell how much this site’s commentariat has changed since its heyday when two of the first three comments say that Barbie is top 3 while Poor Things is “vacuous” (jfc), and that the Academy should pick Oppenheimer over Poor Things because of “cultural significance” (read: box office gross, according that same comment’s rationale) rather than, you know, what the best fucking picture actually was.
Yeah, just…god damn do I hate awards season.
Is Poor Things really primed to be a spoiler? I guess I shouldn’t underestimate Emma Stone’s star power, but it really seems like the kind of weirdo movie that Oscar movie voters normally bounce off of. I mean, I liked it (as I have liked all of Lanthimos’ films), but I *am* weird.
My fingers are crossed for a Best Picture win for Oppenheimer, but if voters split the ticket, I’m rooting for Nolan to nab Best Director. It’s his time.
Agreed—I’ve had issues with a few of his movies (though “The Prestige” is my favorite of his, so far as deftness of directing a story far more intricate than it seems on the surface) but have to agree his directing is superb in nearly everything. And even my issues are more “eh this didn’t really work for me” than “what a turd this movie is”
Time has been very kind to The Prestige. I still think it’s his best film.
It’s really had to pick a favorite Nolan film for me. The list is always different for me based on what criteria I weight heaviest. If it’s rewatchability, Inception wins in a runaway (and I still think it’s the best cast of any of his films, Oppenheimer included). If it’s the total package, including score, complexity, etc. it’s Interstellar (which seems to just get better with every viewing). The Prestige probably only rivals Inception in terms of originality and how compelling the plot is for me.
I go:MementoThe PrestigeDunkirkOppenheimerInsomniaInceptionI think The Dark Knight, Interstellar, and The Dark Knight Rises are messes in their own way — without Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight I don’t think it would have a good reputation — and I haven’t seen Tenent.I don’t remember Following or remember it being very good.
While I understand that there has to be a cut off somewhere, and a Best Picture nomination doesn’t necessarily mean (or warrant) a Best Director nomination, shouldn’t the Academy at least consider expanding that category to a ‘possibility’ of 10 nominees. Just on the off chance that all the BP nominees are so well-directed the director deserves a nod, too? It’s always off-putting to me when a director doesn’t get nominated at least for the ‘highly praised’ films, anyway. Was the movie so good in all other areas that anyone could have directed it and it would still have been as good?
I’ve never gotten the impression that Nolan “clearly craves” Oscar glory. Most of his movies wouldn’t fit your typical “Oscar-bait” criteria and even Oppenheimer was more of a passion project for him. I know it’s always been part of the AV Club’s mandate to snark on Nolan though, so they had to say something like that.
I agree. I don’t hear them saying the other directors are only making their film to win an Oscar. It’s so dismissive of the work that goes into a film like Oppenheimer. The same goes for how Cooper has been treated on this site and others. “I’m going to spend years working on a project on the if come that I’ll get an Oscar”. Maestro was a brilliant film, but unless you know something about Bernstein or are interested in seeing a more personal look into his life, I’m not sure it’s something people are interested in. Half the people under 30 I work with don’t even know who he is. When I tell them he wrote the music to West Side Story, they didn’t realize there was a movie and Broadway musical made several decades before Spielberg’s remake. But they were all over a movie about a plastic doll, that used lazy metaphors to discuss misogyny. Nobody claims Gerwig only made that film to win an Oscar.
Like Brad Coopers Martin Short SCTV makeup for Maestro, all I have to do is look at Emma Stones eyebrows to know that movie is an embarrasing dud without even watching it.