The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.
Best Picture
The nominees are:
Belfast, directed by Kenneth Branagh
CODA, directed by Sian Heder
Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay
Drive My Car, directed Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve
King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green
Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Nightmare Alley, directed by Guillermo del Toro
The Power of the Dog, directed by Jane Campion
West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg
For the first time since 2010, we have 10 Best Picture nominees. After trying a couple years with a set field of 10, the Academy switched it up to a field of at least five and at most 10. For a decade, this resulted in either eight or nine nominees. Now, we are back to 10, presumably because the Board of Governors is desperate to find room for some blockbuster entertainment on the list. After all, that was the reason for the expansion in the first place. It has never really worked out that way because as wild as it sounds, Academy members vote with their hearts, not with a spreadsheet.
It is interesting to look at how much the industry has changed in the intervening 10 years as streaming has become the dominant medium for film and television and consolidation has led to a dwindling number of true major studios. Speaking of the studios, let’s compare the distributors of the 10 nominated films in 2010 to those of this year’s nominees.
In 2010, Paramount had three films in contention, Warner Bros. had two, and Disney, Sony, Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, and Roadside Attractions each had one. In this group, we have four classic major studios, two specialty studios owned by majors, and one truly independent studio (Roadside). Give or take an MGM or a Universal, this is broadly reflective of the way the Best Picture lineup looked for the 80+ years leading up to the 2010 Oscars.
Now, look at 2021: Netflix with two nominees, Warner Bros. with two, and each of Universal, United Artists, Searchlight, 20th Century, Bitters End, and Apple TV+ with one. A relatively diverse group at first blush, but let’s dig deeper.
The two Warner Bros. nominees (Dune and King Richard) both debuted on the HBO Max streaming service on the same day they went to theaters. Searchlight and 20th Century are both former Fox studios now owned by Disney. So what we really have are five movies from streamers (two Netflix, two HBO Max, and one Apple TV+), two from Disney, and one each from Universal, United Artists, and Bitters End (the Japanese Distributor behind Drive My Car).
By the way, United Artists is owned and operated by MGM, a studio with a long, proud history of producing Best Picture nominees. In fact, after 20th Century (62) and Columbia Pictures (56), MGM’s 40 Best Picture nominees are third-most in history. MGM maintains this place in the record books despite the fact that Licorice Pizza is the first MGM nominee since Rain Main won the top prize in 1988. The world is changing, and it is changing fast.
It was just three years ago that no less a figure than Steven Spielberg openly campaigned against Netflix’s Roma as Best Picture and for Universal’s Green Book for no other reason than he did not like the idea of a streaming service winning Best Picture. Green Book’s victory was a successful attempt to fight the future, but no matter how hard one tries, we always end up in the future.
Perhaps Spielberg could have fought off the coming sea change a little longer if not for the pandemic, which altered the equation for film distribution once and for all. Perhaps his fight would have more meaning if one of his best friends, Martin Scorsese, had not made one of his best films for Netflix and gone to work on another for Apple TV+. The streamers are here, and they are not going anywhere.
The last mountain to climb: Best Picture. No streaming service has yet to win the award. Amazon Prime has been in the mix, as well as a number of the others, but it has been Netflix making the biggest push to get there first. The company has put everything it has behind the effort to win a Best Picture Oscar, getting seven nominations in the past four years. It has produced three Documentary Feature winners, an International Feature winner, at least one winner in each of the three shorts categories, a Best Supporting Actress, and a Best Director, among a handful of other Oscars.
Some of this is cynical and a bit of a marketing ploy, but it is hard to be mad at a company that in its somewhat vain attempt to be crowned prom king, funds films by auteurs such as Scorsese, David Fincher, Bong Joon-ho, Noah Baumbach, and Jane Campion. Finally, it looked like all that money, all that effort had paid off, as Campion’s magnificent The Power of the Dog hit the scene, becoming the most critically acclaimed film of the year and an apparent awards juggernaut.
It is the nominations leader. Campion is far and away the favorite for Best Director. Four nominated performers. Tons of crafts recognition. Its triumph at the Academy Awards seemingly preordained. At long last, Netflix was going to get there, and it was going to get there first. Then, the Screen Actors Guild Awards happened. And the Producers Guild Awards. And, all of a sudden, the conversation shifted. Was the heat elsewhere? Did it belong to Sundance darling CODA, produced by rival streamer Apple TV+?
And, that is where we find ourselves on the day of the ceremony. To some, this has become a battle between the heart (CODA) and the brain (The Power of the Dog), but that is needlessly reductive. And, anyway, CODA is a lot smarter and more subtly subversive than people are giving it credit for, and The Power of the Dog is actually quite emotionally rich if you give it the time and attention it deserves. Whichever of these two films takes home the prize, history will be made, and the industry will alter permanently. There is no going back. We have arrived in the future.
Here are the 10 films nominated for Best Picture of 2021 at the Academy Awards, in order of likelihood to win (from least likely to most):
Nightmare Alley
One of the biggest champions of great films and filmmakers, Guillermo del Toro is possibly one of the most well liked people in Hollywood. In certain circles, his films are an event, anticipated the same way many comic book films are. Nightmare Alley was the biggest surprise of these nominees – even bigger than Drive My Car, which had a ton of critical support – and apart from its being an impeccably crafted film, its appearance here surely has much to do with the industry’s love for del Toro.
This nomination is made more remarkable by the fact that Nightmare Alley is not an easy watch. It is a grimy, punishing picture, and I mean that in the best ways. Following a con man (Bradley Cooper) who takes his carnival act into high society with disastrous consequences, del Toro’s film concerns itself with the darkness of men’s souls and the evil of which they are capable. Only del Toro could take a movie from 1947 based on a book from 1946 and make the story feel true and vital to the world we live in today.
Don’t Look Up
Unfairly maligned by critics as on the nose and preachy, Don’t Look Up will not win the big award of the night because people just don’t like it enough. To be sure, plenty of people love it, which is why it is nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. But, on a preferential ballot, you need love and like. This is a love-it-or-hate-it film that will be a lot of voters’ No. 1 but very few Nos. 2 and 3, which is usually where you find your winner.
I think the film is fantastic and that the only reason some critics think it is too on the nose is that we live in times too ridiculous to be satirized. You can tell writer-director Adam McKay is taking big swings here, but every time he goes big, he is matched by the ludicrousness of the world around us. Don’t Look Up is about a preventable disaster that requires only collective will to avert and the ways power structures undermine our collective humanity to their own benefit. It is honest, sincere, and all too true. What is the point of making a billion dollars if there is no earth left to spend it on?
Licorice Pizza
Two big controversies swirled around the release of Licorice Pizza, a movie that wants to be a mostly easygoing evocation of long summer days and wild summer nights. The controversy over the age gap between the two lead characters – 15-year-old Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and 25-year-old Alana (Alana Haim) – was overblown and has more to do with the people who have a problem with the film than the film itself. The other controversy, over the depiction of a racist Japanese stereotype, was underexplored by a primarily white critical establishment and mostly serves as evidence of the need for more diverse voices among film writers.
Ultimately, those controversies will not affect the film’s chances with the Academy. It is a longshot to win Best Picture anyway, and Paul Thomas Anderson is still the most likely winner of the Original Screenplay award. Academy members are mostly white, and many would have grown up at the time of the film’s early ‘70s setting, when the age gap would have been weird but less so than we find it today. For me, the film simply does not rise to the level of Anderson’s best work, which often explores the dark core of the American mythos. Like the summer nights it depicts, Licorice Pizza is fun, it is enjoyable, but its impact is ephemeral.
Drive My Car
I said this last time in talking about Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Best Director nomination, but the point remains: I want to see everything he has done now. Hamaguchi creates a world in Drive My Car that is gentle and kind, and even when terrible things happen, there is a sense of determination in the characters that carries us through. The film seems to say: No matter how bad it gets, we will carry on together.
The story of an experimental theater director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) who travels to Hiroshima to put on a production of Uncle Vanya in the wake of the death of his wife, Drive My Car grapples with themes of art, love, trust, and grief, but it comes by all of these naturally. The film’s big ideas flow effortlessly from the characters and the story, engaging the audience’s hearts and minds. The film’s three hours breeze by, and as we become engrossed in Hamaguchi’s world of compassion and community, we start to wonder why we would ever want to leave.
King Richard
The star-driven blockbuster feels like a rare sighting these days, something to be cherished and nurtured as long as we still have them. For a good stretch there from the mid-’90s to the mid-2000s, no one had as much box office clout as Will Smith, but as discussed above, the world has changed. To be fair, much of this film’s failure at the box office can likely be attributed to continuing concern over the pandemic and Warner Bros.’ day-and-date strategy, putting the film on HBO Max the same day it appeared in theaters. Still, it is informative to think about Smith’s place in the landscape of cinema.
In 2019, Smith starred in two big-budget would be blockbusters: the Disney live-action Aladdin remake and Ang Lee’s sci-fi thriller Gemini Man. One made a billion dollars, and the other was a financial disaster. Guess which was which. Smith’s last big hit before Aladdin was Suicide Squad, another film with a lot of intellectual property behind it. Smith absolutely remains one of the biggest stars in the world, but his ability to draw audiences on name alone is dwindling.
It’s a shame, too, because King Richard is exactly the kind of elevated sports picture that would have been a big hit with Smith in the lead just 10 years ago. Remember how much money the also-Best Picture-nominated The Blind Side made? The story of Richard Williams raising his daughters to be the greatest tennis players of all time is inspiring, relevant, and entertaining. It is a wonderful picture, but it feels like it was made for another time.
Dune
I can see the trajectory of this quite clearly. Like The Lord of the Rings before it, the first Dune will score a bunch of nominations and win a few awards, but it will not take the big prize because it is not a complete film. No matter how much voters might enjoy this movie, they will not be able to get past the fact that it is essentially half-finished. However, when the second part is released, the Academy will seize the opportunity to honor the whole project, similar to the record Oscar haul of The Return of the King.
For being but half a film, Dune is a massive accomplishment. Denis Villeneuve has taken one of the densest, most impenetrable sci-fi novels in the English language and made it into a successful blockbuster. That alone would be an achievement. But, Villeneuve was able to do all this within the confines of the studio system. He took the money from Warner Bros./HBO and delivered a film full of strangeness and personality, both of which are true to the original story and evidence of Villeneuve’s care and consideration in taking on this adaptation.
West Side Story
No remake of a Best Picture winner has ever won Best Picture. In fact, in 94 years, West Side Story is just the second Best Picture remake to be nominated in the top category. The other: Mutiny on the Bounty, which won it all in 1935 and was remade to the Academy’s liking in 1962. Zooming out, only two remakes of any kind have ever won the Best Picture trophy: Ben-Hur in 1959 and The Departed in 2006. One would think if anyone could do it, it would be Steven Spielberg, and of the four (4!) remakes nominated for Best Picture this year, this has the second-best chance. But, it’s not at the top of the list.
I didn’t think Spielberg’s take on West Side Story fully worked, the whole being less than the sum of its parts. It is, of course, immaculately mounted – the sets and costumes are gorgeous, the cinematography is lush, and the choreography remains some of the greatest ever designed. Top to bottom, I found the performances strong, with Ariana DeBose and Mike Faist the obvious standouts. But, something about the film feels almost perfunctory. It has the look and the feel of a grand cinematic experience, but there is a hollowness at its core. There is little reason for it to exist beyond dazzling with its technical wizardry, and as nice as it is to be dazzled, it is not enough.
Belfast
It is easy to make the comparison to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. A successful director goes back to the story of his childhood, depicting in crisp black and white a time filled with familial love but also fraught with historical violence. The comparison is unfair to Kenneth Branagh’s film because Roma is one of the crowning cinematic achievements of this century, and Belfast is a very nice movie that is very accomplished but which is no Roma.
In being told from the child’s point of view, Belfast feels lighter, more joyous, but less investigative. There is a sense of incomprehension of the danger and violence all around Buddy (Jude Hill) and his family. This is accurate, I am sure, to Branagh’s experience of growing up in Ireland during The Troubles, but it lacks a sense of maturity and recognition that would have elevated the material. Belfast is Branagh trying to recreate an experience rather than reflect on it, a flaw that prevents a quite good film from being great.
The Power of the Dog
At this point, what is left to say about The Power of the Dog? We have written about the stellar performances, the perfect screenplay, the gorgeous crafts, the remarkable music, and Jane Campion’s flawless direction. It is amazing that this movie exists, and its brilliance is self-evident. The 12 Academy Award nominations speak for themselves. Voters truly saw this movie for the accomplishment that it so clearly is, but is that enough?
There is a difference between a movie that can be admired and a movie that can be loved. The Power of the Dog is like a museum piece. You can stare at it all day and keep finding something new, a subtle detail you missed. You wonder how someone could make something so nuanced and so powerful. If you are a fellow artist, maybe you even envy the work. You admire it. But, can you love it? Can you feel a deep emotional connection to it that makes you want to vote for it as the best film of the year? Or, do you hold it at arm’s length, appreciating it but remaining unsure of how to treat it?
CODA
Then, there is CODA, a movie it is almost too easy to love. At the top of this piece, I called Sian Heder’s film smart and subtly subversive. Those things are true. It forces us to engage with an underseen community in ways we never imagined. As a movie about disability, it undercuts our assumptions and challenges the way the deaf have been portrayed on film throughout cinema history – in much the same way star Marlee Matlin’s film debut Children of a Lesser God did. The Rossis are not some noble victims to be placed on a pedestal. They are real people, who struggle and fight and love and live, and CODA is smart enough to treat them this way.
With all of that said, we come back to love. The hearing child of deaf adults, Ruby (Emilia Jones), wants to be a singer and to study at a prestigious music school, but her family relies on her to be the voice of their fishing business. As we watch Ruby pursue her dreams and weigh her passions against her obligations, we see her sacrifice and compromise in ways that will ring true to anyone who has ever dreamed of more. The details of CODA are specific, but its themes are universally relatable. We see ourselves in these people, and we love them in all their complexity. So, we love this movie.
The final analysis
And, that’s it. Love or admiration? Heart or head?
Best Picture represents different things in different years. Sometimes it reflects how Academy members see themselves, such as Birdman or The Artist. Other times, it is a reckoning with the past, like 12 Years a Slave or Schindler’s List. It can be about the epic grandeur of cinematic achievement, as with Titanic or Gladiator. Often, it’s just about Academy members rewarding a filmmaker they both love and admire, like Martin Scorsese’s The Departed or Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water.
So, what will this year’s Best Picture represent? Will it be about admiring the way The Power of the Dog tells a dark tale of repression and pain and vengeance? Or, will it be about loving the way CODA makes us feel about ourselves and the possibilities of artistic expression?
Jane Campion is a near lock to win Best Director, which in years past, would have made her film the de facto frontrunner. It used to be incredibly rare for the Academy to split Best Director and Best Picture, but that is no longer the case. Five times in the past nine years, the awards have gone to different films. In every case, Director has gone to a technical marvel admired for its virtuosity (Life of Pi, Gravity, The Revenant, La La Land, Roma), while Picture has gone to a movie more attuned to voters’ emotions (Argo, 12 Years a Slave, Spotlight, Moonlight, Green Book).
If we are going to be analytical about this – and what are we doing here if not being analytical – the other commonality of all those split years is that the movies that won Best Picture all won a screenplay award, either Original or Adapted. None of the films to win Best Picture was awarded for its screenplay. So, when The Power of the Dog and CODA face off in Best Adapted Screenplay, we will have a pretty good idea of how this is going to go. If CODA is going to win Best Picture, it will almost certainly win Adapted Screenplay. If The Power of the Dog wins, we are probably in for a sweep.
For our other indicators, let’s look at the Producers Guild Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. CODA took the top prize at both ceremonies. Prior to this year, just 10 films had pulled off that double, and eight of them went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. The two that did not were Apollo 13, which has a unique Oscars trajectory that does not quite apply here, and Little Miss Sunshine, which actually has a lot in common with CODA. Both are indie darlings that debuted to much buzz at the Sundance Film Festival. Both depict families struggling to do their best to support a daughter with a dream. For those who don’t remember, Little Miss Sunshine lost Best Picture to The Departed.
The Power of the Dog won the BAFTA award for best film, but unlike the acting categories, BAFTA has a terrible recent record with predicting Best Picture. In the previous seven years, BAFTA and the Academy have matched just one time – last year on Nomadland. Seemingly, the Brits are more willing to give the big prize to the impressive technical achievement, awarding films like Roma, La La Land, and The Revenant.
Could a third film sneak in and surprise us all? Sure. If you are looking for a spoiler, Belfast and West Side Story have the best chance, but don’t bet on it. We know the two movies this comes down to, and we know all the stats and all the arguments. All that is left is to guess. Do we go with the heart or with the head? Me, I’m going with the heart.
Will win: CODA
Should win: The Power of the Dog
Should have been here: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
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