It’s The Odyssey vs. Everyone Else

When I was a young Oscar pundit, I absorbed one essential lesson from my elders: You never want to be the early front-runner. The Oscar race was thought to operate by the logic of Mario Kart. If you’re too far ahead of the pack too early, you get a target on your back. Every other campaign wants to tear you down. Regular moviegoers get sick of hearing about you. The season is simply too long to sustain a single front-runner.

I’m not sure that’s true anymore. Oppenheimer and One Battle After Another successfully ran the Best Picture gauntlet despite being pegged as favorites from the get-go. Anora didn’t come into its season with quite so commanding a lead, but it held the presumed No. 1 spot in September, and while things occasionally looked shaky, it still wound up on top.

All of which bodes well for The Odyssey. Since storming out of that horse in July, Christopher Nolan’s film has become the assumed Best Picture front-runner on the basis of its epic scale, strong reviews, and record-breaking grosses. Can the Bronze Age blockbuster sustain its momentum over the next six months? Or will its age of (Oscar) gold collapse?

That’s the biggest question yet to be determined over the course of the coming awards season. As tempting as it may be to imagine the Best Picture result as set in stone, history tells us that there will always be a few surprises along the way. A year ago, who saw The Secret Agent getting a Best Picture nom or Amy Madigan winning Supporting Actress? With that in mind, here’s my forecast of where the six biggest races stand at the outset of the season.

Los Javis’s La Bola Negra.
Photo: Carla Oset/Netflix/Everett Collection

Here’s the primary argument against Nolan and The Odyssey. In all of Oscars history, only two filmmakers have ever won Best Picture for consecutive features: William Wyler for Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives, and David Lean for The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. (Winning Best Director for consecutive films is slightly more common, last done by our old pal Alejandro González Iñárritu.) The Academy likes to reward an auteur when “it’s time,” and there may be no worse time than right after you’ve just won a bunch of Oscars for Oppenheimer.

Whose time might it be instead? Perhaps Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi of La Bola Negra, a triptych of queer stories involving the Spanish Civil War that had audiences at Cannes saying, “Oh mi corazón!” (Calvo and Ambrossi used to be a couple but broke up during production, supposedly because they realized their own love wasn’t as earth-shattering as the one depicted in the film — now that’s promo!) La Bola Negra got snapped up by Netflix and just won the coveted People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival; in the words of David Ehrlich, the spirit of ’90s Miramax is strong with this one.

I’m also feeling bullish on Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, a film that asks, “What if In Bruges was set on Easter Island?” Same with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary, whose Best Picture buzz got usurped by Nolan — as one strategist put it to me, there’s nothing PHM has going for it that The Odyssey didn’t do bigger and better — but which was enough of a springtime sensation that it should nevertheless factor into the Oscar conversation. Given how well the first two installments performed, a Best Picture berth for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three feels like a safe bet as well, though since the sequel hasn’t screened for press yet, we’re going on faith, in much the same manner as the Fremen followers of Lisan al-Gaib.

A24 may have its hands full. Not only does it have Olivia Wilde’s sleeper hit The Invite to support and Jesse Eisenberg’s community-theater comedy The Debut coming down the pike, Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid (“Big Daddy remade with a mean gay from Instagram”) has been winning over festival audiences. Not to mention Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s mind-meltingly meta documentary You Can See Everything, which is getting the kind of raves that portend some kind of role to play this awards season — with the major caveat that no doc has ever been nominated for the top prize. Despite this, the temptation to hope-dict YCSE will be high. All four getting in is probably impossible; even three Best Picture nominations for a single studio is extremely rare in the modern era. (If it does happen, there’s usually an asterisk somewhere.) Could A24 pull it off?

Their counterparts in Neon kept their Palme d’Or streak alive with Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, a drama about religious Romanians clashing with Nordic liberalism. If that doesn’t sound heady enough, Neon also has Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, a three-hour movie about the practical application of the Humanitude methodology in a French elder-care facility. Both will pray that La Bola Negra doesn’t suck up all the oxygen for international cinema. On the English-language front, Neon also picked up Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a ripped-from-the-headlines piece about the corporate drama at OpenAI, after Amazon dropped it for totally non-nefarious reasons. Artificial seemed to go over well at its NYFF premiere and could become Neon’s top priority. The folks at Neon also have high hopes for James Gray’s ’80s crime thriller Paper Tiger, which they swear represents the first time the throwback auteur has been given a major Oscar push. Maybe this time will be different!

Also in the mix are classy titles like Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, following a cello player played by Pedro Pascal looking back on his life; Mike Leigh’s swan song Tender Loving Care; Lee Chang-dong’s critically acclaimed Korean drama Possible Love; and Simon Stone’s tearjerker Elsinore, which could be pulled into Best Picture on the strength of Andrew Scott’s performance. On the less classy side, Curry Barker’s Obsession is wishing middle-age Academy members will love it as much as Gen-Z audiences did, while the TIFF runners-up, Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky and Sian Heder’s Being Heumann, will make a play for the meat-and-potatoes voters. As for Michael, we’ll see if Antoine Fuqua’s billion-dollar biopic can expand beyond its primary constituency: people watching movies on airplanes.

John Malkovich in Wild Horse Nine.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures

In what is shaping up to be the season’s most competitive acting race, three names appear to have separated themselves. First up was The Odyssey’s Matt Damon, serving up a feast of world-weariness in the presumed Best Picture front-runner. Next came Wild Horse Nine’s John Malkovich, who won the Best Actor prize at Venice for his performance as a CIA assassin going off the rails. Finally, Elsinore’s Andrew Scott wowed Telluride with his turn as Chariots of Fire actor Ian Charleson, who played Hamlet on the London stage while battling AIDS. None of these men has yet won an acting Oscar; Damon has been nominated thrice, Malkovich twice, and Scott not at all. (Damon does have a Screenplay trophy for a little-seen ’90s movie about apples.)

Things are not exactly going to plan for Digger’s Tom Cruise, but considering the Academy’s well-known fondness for Iñárritu, I wouldn’t declare him dead yet. Hot on his heels is Primetime’s Robert Pattinson, whose reptilian performance as Chris Hansen seems to be gaining momentum, though it’s a fair question whether voters will go for such a repulsive character. A safer bet might be John Turturro of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, especially given that the film comes from Sony Pictures Classics, a label whose bread and butter is getting career-achievement nominations for middle-age actors. Project Hail Mary’s Ryan Gosling is still floating around charmingly in zero gravity in the background.

Pedro Pascal could benefit from roughly 63 percent of Behemoth!’s runtime being shots of his face (though the role may be even more taciturn than his part in The Mandalorian). I Play Rocky’s Anthony Ippolito has the biopic transformation on his side. Fjord’s Sebastian Stan could be pulled in here if his film catches fire; so too with The Invite’s Seth Rogen, though given how stacked Best Actor looks, I’d peg him as the least likely of the film’s quartet to be recognized. Still to come is Brad Pitt in The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, though he’s swimming against Oscars history: Only one actor, Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Marys, has ever been nominated for reprising the role that won him a trophy. And don’t forget, BAFTA winner Robert Aramayo of I Swear is technically eligible for this year’s awards!

If you hadn’t noticed, this is shaping up to be an extremely white year at the Oscars. Right now, there are zero Black performers in Gold Derby’s presumed top five in each acting category. To make things even more complicated, the Black Best Actor candidate with the best chance of making it in is probably Jaafar Jackson of Michael — how’s that for a monkey’s paw?

Julianne Moore in The Debut.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

Welcome to the diciest acting race, where only one thing is sure: Julianne Moore. As a shrinking-violet housewife who comes alive under the magic of live theater in The Debut, Moore was the toast of Telluride, to the point where screenings of the film regularly received mid-movie applause breaks. Anything can happen over the course of the season (do we know what Julianne Moore thinks about ballet?), but at this early moment, she looks like a strong threat to take her second career Oscar.

Other than that, it’s the Wild West out there. A nomination for Obsession’s Inde Navarrette might have once seemed like a pipe dream, but after a dearth of female heavy hitters out of festival season, most pundits think she’s in indeed. Especially now that Demi Moore and Amy Madigan have blazed a trail for horror performances at the Oscars.

Times are so tough that we may be forced to import some international contenders. Sandra Hüller is repping a pair of black-and-white European arthouse flicks: In Rose, she’s a female veteran of the Thirty Years’ War who lives in the world as a man; in Fatherland, she’s a writer surveying the wreckage of postwar Germany. I’m told that Rose, which is the showier performance, will be her priority. Fjord’s Renate Reinsve is an Academy fave playing against type as a demure Christian. All of a Sudden’s Virginie Efira, as a burnt-out care worker who makes a friend, won Best Actress at Cannes. Netflix is planning a campaign for Léa Seydoux in Gentle Monster, who plays a wife confronting the unthinkable, and the streamer just announced it’s also giving a push to Jeon Do-yeon’s subtle and nuanced performance in Possible Love. The Korean actress plays another woman who makes a friend, in this case a posh documentarian. It doesn’t go well!

Closer to home there’s The Invite’s Olivia Wilde, who is a hoot as a tightly wound yuppie, and who could make history as the first woman to direct herself to an acting nomination. Even closer is Slow Horses’s Rosalind Eleazar, who is the best thing about Chris Rock’s Hollywood satire Misty Green. Her former co-star Sophie Okonedo carries Clarissa, a modern Nigerian update of Mrs. Dalloway. We may not be getting out of here without at least one biopic being nominated, in which case you might as well bet on Being Heumann’s Ruth Madely.

More than most years, it might be prudent to go all-in on a wildcard. Denmark’s Mathilde Arcel took the Best Actress prize at Venice for the Golden Lion winner Woman Unknown, despite the fact that she was almost literally a woman unknown. Tender Loving Care’s Marion Bailey could sneak a few critics’ prizes. Could Zendaya get in for The Drama on the basis of her monster year? What about Carrie Coon for The Liberation? (Which is not the same thing as last year’s critically acclaimed play Liberation.) If there’s an actress performance out there you love, now is the time to speak your truth. Who knows — the Academy might be listening.

Andrew Garfield in Artificial.
Photo: Neon

As Numlock’s Walt Hickey put it to me last year, the lead and supporting categories work differently in practice. In the lead races, voters pick their favorite horse and stump for them all season long. In the supporting ones, voters tend to wait and see how the field coalesces, then follow the herd. This makes these categories easier to predict at the end of the season, but perversely, harder to predict at the beginning.

Still, though, I’m confident in a few picks. I don’t see a world where The Debut’s Paul Giamatti doesn’t get nominated for playing Julianne Moore’s hard-driving community-theater director. Wild Horse Nine’s Sam Rockwell seems equally likely to ride his co-star’s coattails, since most of the film is a two-hander with him and Malkovich. John Leguizamo looks to be the supporting actor of choice from the Odyssey cast, though with so many options to choose from, who knows which one the gods will ultimately favor.

To put the ensemble on equal footing, La Bola Negra will be running its three protagonists in Supporting Actor. Netflix is putting most of its chips on the Spanish musician Guitarricadelafuente (real name: Álvaro Lafuente Calvo) as a moon-eyed trumpeter who winds up guarding a Nationalist POW hospital. He’ll try to fend off previous Oscar nominees like Edward Norton of The Invite, Colman Domingo of Michael, and Adam Driver of Paper Tiger. If Wild Horse Nine really pops, there may be room too for Steve Buscemi, who you’d think had been nominated before, but actually hasn’t.

Before anyone had seen The Social Reckoning, Jeremy Strong’s Mark Zuckerberg seemed like a potent option, following in the footsteps of Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-nominated performance. However, the muted reception to the Social Network sequel means another fictionalized tech mogul seems to have eclipsed him: Artificial’s Sam Altman, played by Eisenberg’s old co-star Andrew Garfield. (Running Garfield in Supporting is not exactly category fraud; Yura Borisov is the movie’s real lead.) If he gets traction, those guys from La Bola Negra should watch their back — suddenly, they’re not the only fascist twinks in the race.

Anne Hathaway in The Odyssey.
Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

There was enough uncertainty around the Best Actress race that pundits once mused whether The Odyssey’s Anne Hathaway might hath a way to run in lead, clearing a path for scene-stealer Samantha Morton in this category. Eventually, Universal figured the field in supporting was open enough to allow both contenders to co-exist. A move so wise and judicious it could have come from Athena herself.

That’s not the only double-up that may be in the cards. This year, the Academy rescinded its rule forbidding actors from being nominated twice in the same category. The move came just in time for Penélope Cruz, who is repping roles in two presumed Best Picture nominees: a free-spirit neighbor in The Invite and a tough-talking showgirl in La Bola Negra. Which one to campaign? ¿Por qué no los dos? Before Digger unveiled itself, we might have said the same about Sandra Hüller, but now it’s evident that Hüller’s supporting bid will be her karaoke-assisted turn in Project Hail Mary.

Japanese actress Tao Okamoto should have an iconic Oscar clip, lecturing about capitalism, democracy, and nature with the aid of a whiteboard in All of a Sudden. (She shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes with her co-star Efira.) Like Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong, Widow’s Bay standout Kate O’Flynn could parlay her prestige-TV acclaim to Oscar attention for Tender Loving Care. Chilean actress Mariana Di Girolamo is getting buzz for Wild Horse Nine, but I’m not sure her role is meaty enough; the film runs on machismo. I’d sooner bet on another Best Actor contender’s co-star: Olivia Colman, who plays a no-nonsense doctor with a heart of gold in Elsinore. Even more fun would be Paper Tiger’s Scarlett Johansson, whose permed poof and Noo Yawk accent disguise a performance of surprising depth.

Most fun of all would be a performance I’m not allowed to talk about: [Redacted], who shows up in the second half of You Can See Everything and turns the entire movie inside out. Can you get an acting nomination for a documentary? Well, why not?