I was having technical issues yesterday, so I didn’t really get a chance to really sit and absorb this year’s Oscar nominations as they came out. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I have to adjust my predictions. I’ve believed for the past month that Paul Thomas Anderson and One Battle After Another were sure things for Best Director and Best Picture. My rationale was that PTA has never won an Oscar after eleven nominations, and OBAA was well-liked (even loved) by Hollywood and the Oscar-voting class. PTA now has three chances to win his first Oscar, after he picked up his twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth nominations for OBAA.
Now that the noms have come out though, I’m rethinking Ryan Coogler and Sinners’ chances. Sinners made history this week by becoming the most-nominated film in Oscar history, with sixteen nominations. Sinners is wholly original and audiences responded to it really well. Coogler is now the seventh Black director to get a directing nomination, and would be the first Black director to win in that category. Plus, AMPAS has done so much to bring in younger and more diverse Oscar voters. So does all of that add up to Sinners taking home some of the big prizes? Well, I was reading through Scott Feinberg’s analysis of the nominations, and I found this part interesting:
Sinners landed 16 noms, besting by two the record of 14 that was previously shared by 1950’s All About Eve, 1997’s Titanic and 2016’s La La Land. Moreover, it landed a nom in every category in which it had a plausible chance, whereas each of the other top contenders had at least one glaring miss: One Battle After Another missed Chase Infiniti for best actress; Hamnet missed Paul Mescal for best supporting actor, as well as cinematography and film editing; Frankenstein missed Guillermo del Toro for best director, as well as VFX; Marty Supreme missed makeup/hairstyling; The Secret Agent missed original screenplay; etc.
All in all, it’s a remarkable achievement for Sinners. But is it enough to jolt the widely held belief that One Battle After Another is the film to beat for best picture?
Over the 16 seasons since the Academy returned to a preferential/ranked-choice ballot to determine its best picture winner, the film with the most noms (or one of the films that tied for the most noms) went on to win best picture only six times (Oppenheimer, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Shape of Water, Birdman, The King’s Speech and The Hurt Locker). So having the most noms, in and of itself, is not a game-changer.
But 16 noms — three more than the second-most-nominated film (One Battle) and seven ahead of the third (Frankenstein, Marty Supreme and Sentimental Value tied with nine) — is quite a statement. And a number of smart industry insiders told me this morning — both at and after the nominations announcement — that they think Sinners is well-positioned moving forward. Its success was less assured; it provokes a less uncomfortable conversation about race; and it’s likely to win the best ensemble Actor Award, which could further fuel its momentum.
Regardless, it will be interesting to see how these two films — both from great filmmakers who are telling largely original stories, even if One Battle is technically adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland — are promoted during phase two, not least because they share the same distributor, Warner Bros., which, largely because of them, led all studios by far with 30 noms … and is now, ironically enough, in the process of being sold. (Fun fact: It has been more than a half-century since we last had a best picture race in which there were two clear frontrunners and both hailed from the same studio — Paramount’s Chinatown vs. The Godfather Part II, which co-led the field with 11 noms each, 51 years ago!)
I expect that Warners will give its two films equal treatment — as it has done thus far, as best as I can tell, with FYC ads, billboards, etc. — and let the chips fall where they may. (Indeed, even at award shows, studio co-chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy split up so that one can sit with the One Battle folks and the other can sit with the Sinners folks.) But this won’t stop personal reps from going all out on behalf of their respective clients.
I actually forgot that Sinners and OBAA are both Warner Bros. That explains why it’s felt at times like Sinners was being made to defer to OBAA. But clearly, the studio put money, time and effort into Sinners’ campaign, and it paid off really well. You know what I’m feeling now? I wonder if there will be a split vote – PTA will take home Best Director, and Sinners will win Best Picture. I actually think PTA would be fine with that, and I think Coogler would probably prefer Best Picture too, because it’s about the team. PTA and Coogler aren’t going head to head in screenplay either – Coogler is nominated in Original Screenplay, PTA is in adapted. It’s quite likely that they both win screenplay Oscars, then split director and picture, right?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red. Posters & promotional images courtesy of Warner Bros.
