Ok, here we go. The big finale, with Best Picture and Director.
BEST DIRECTOR
Kenneth Branagh, Belfast
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car
Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Steven Spielberg, West Side Story
It’s silly to go against the DGA winner in this category (even though it did happen just a couple years ago with Bong Joon-ho and Parasite), so I’m sticking with Jane Campion because the director of Power of the Dog’s main rival in Best Picture, CODA, isn’t even nominated here. I don’t see who the alternative would be and Campion has won every precursor, so people seem to agree that she should finally win this, nearly thirty years after she became only the second woman to ever be nominated for directing with The Piano. And now the first woman ever to be nominated twice (a sad, shameful stat if ever there was one). But there is some possibility for an upset, given Power of the Dog’s relative weakness, as the guilds have revealed, in spite of its nomination haul.
Winner: Jane Campion
Alternate: Steven Spielberg (why not, right? the 1993 rivalry between Schindler’s List and The Piano lives on)
Dark Horse: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
BEST PICTURE
This kind of unprecedented win should signal the end of the preferential ballot
Belfast
CODA
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story
Okay, here’s the thing. The Oscar stats girl in me really does not want to predict a tiny, barely nominated movie like CODA going three for three and tossing 100 years of Oscar statistics out the window. On the other hand, there are only two movies that can win here- and the PGA just showed us that CODA is the movie that can win on a preferential ballot. It’s got the SAG, the WGA and the PGA under its belt- the first movie to get that trifecta since Argo. It’s in a great position to pull this off.
But. How could it be that a movie that got zero below the line nominations and is not supported by any of the crafts branches of the industry, would actually get the votes to pull off Best Picture? On paper, this just makes no sense. But the momentum says otherwise, and people’s reactions to these two films- Power of the Dog (right) and CODA, are at opposite ends of the spectrum. POTD is a cerebral, challenging film while CODA is the equivalent of a by the numbers TV movie that makes you cry in the end. One of these, in my opinion, would be a very embarrassing Best Picture winner but it speaks to how little people want to be challenged, especially perhaps in times like these. CODA makes you feel good, and maybe that’s it. That’s enough.
It may be that POTD, despite its 12 nominations, simply turns too many people off and they really were looking for that alternative to it this entire time. Belfast (left) never performed like a #2, so it may be that CODA, despite premiering at Sundance of 2021 (that’s 15 months ago, people), really was fairly under seen until this last month, and if the nominations were coming out now it may well receive the 5 or 6 that indicate broad industry support for a movie that’s in contention to win the grand prize. And it may well be time for another Grand Hotel, a movie that was nominated for one and only one Oscar (Best Picture) and won it back in 1933, during the last decade the Academy used this godforsaken preferential ballot with ten nominees.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that this movie could never win on the old 5 nominee, majority vote system, when for decades Director and Picture matched more often than not and sweeps could sometimes happen when the consensus rallied around one strong film. I think it’s time to admit this experimental ballot has failed and go back to five. Let’s give it up and let CODA be the one to bury it.
Winner: CODA
Alternate: The Power of the Dog
