An Early Pre-Festival Look at Oscar Best Picture Contenders

At what point Oscar prediction season begins and ends will certainly depend on who you're talking to, but the end of August is where things start to kick into a new gear. The reason for this is the bevy of fall festivals - including the Venice Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Telluride Film Festival, and New York Film Festival - are set to premiere tons of new films in the next few weeks, many of which are anticipated to be big players for awards in the coming months. I thought it was about time to take a look at where the field stands today before the festivals inevitably shake everything up.

I'm not super dedicated into Oscar predictions, so I'm mostly going off of what the odds say, previous history, scuttlebutt, and general vibes. And I decided to just stick with Best Picture - not sure if I'm ready to put in effort to think about any of the other categories yet. I'm more looking at this too as a look at what films are worth getting excited about in the future. I've got my 10 titles, roughly ranked at the moment based on which films I think are most likely to get nominated. I've got a brief explanation for each after the list, although one general note I'll add is that I tried to balance out the major studios that typically get contenders in the lineup. At this point, we're not shooting for accuracy here - I'd probably be lucky if more than half of these get nominated:

1. Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler; Warner Brothers)

2. Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier; Neon)

3. Wicked: For Good (dir. Jon M. Chu; Universal)

4. Jay Kelly (dir. Noah Baumbach; Netflix)

5. Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie; A24)

6. Rental Family (dir. Hikari; Searchlight Pictures)

7. Deliver Me from Nowhere (dir. Scott Cooper; 20th Century Studios)

8. Hamnet (dir. Chloé Zhao; Focus Features)

9. After the Hunt (dir. Luca Guadagnino; Amazon MGM)

10. One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson; Warner Brothers)

I'll admit when I saw Sinners I wasn't exactly thinking it looked like your typical Best Picture nominee - but neither did Everything Everywhere All at Once, and we all saw how that turned out. There's no doubt that for much of the film world, Sinners has been the key movie event of the year, and we've recently seen films with huge passionate followings (EEAAO) and near-universal critical praise (Oppenheimer) take home the grand prize in recent years, despite both films having earlier release dates than your typical "Oscar window". It may not end up going all the way, but at this point Sinners has to be considered the title to beat.

I feel extremely confident about Sentimental Value making the lineup too, based on the rave reviews from Cannes and the power of Neon and their track record of garnering Oscar glory for international cinema. Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier's previous film The Worst Person in the World scratched the surface of the Academy Awards, garnering a surprise original screenplay nomination, so this feels like a logical next step forward.

After the success of Wicked last year, I'd be pretty surprised if Wicked: For Good didn't crack the lineup. Even if it's not as good as its predecessor, merely a "pretty good" response from audiences should be enough to put it in. Noah Baumbach isn't someone I typically associate with Oscar success, but he did achieve it once before with Marriage Story, and by all accounts Jay Kelly is gearing up to be Netflix's top contender this year. As a huge Baumbach fan myself, I'm eagerly looking forward to this one.

A24 spent a boatload of money on Marty Supreme and has it nicely positioned for a Christmas release date, so barring a disaster I'm expecting to see the Timothée Chalamet-led semi-biopic in the lineup. Rental Family apparently has all the makings of a feel-good charmer and has potential to play very well with audiences (especially those at TIFF), so Searchlight, in theory, should have a good contender on their hands. And based on the recent success of music biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvis, and A Complete Unknown, I'm anticipating that the Bruce Springsteen story Deliver Me from Nowhere will make some noise. Even mediocre reviews may be enough if strikes a chord with the right people.

The rest of the field is extremely hard to predict. At the moment, I'm predicting a return to the Oscars for Chloé Zhao after her brief Marvel detour with Hamnet, a film centered around the Shakespeare family told from William's wife Agnes' point of view. Amazon MGM oftem manages to sneak a title into the Best Picture lineup without a ton of support elsewhere (Women Talking and Nickel Boys comes to mind), so I'm thinking Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which may be a fascinating showcase for Julia Roberts, might take that slot. And for the final selection, I'll go with Paul Thomas Anderson's new film One Battle After Another. It's hard to say PTA here - he's had films in recently, but his previous Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice wasn't one of them - but I'll give him and Warner Brothers the benefit of the doubt here. Considering the impressive string of box office hits they're having this year, it wouldn't surprise me to see multiple Warner Brothers titles in the Best Picture lineup.

OTHER CONTENDERS:

There's no shortage of other titles that have been generating potential Oscar buzz at this point. Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia is on a lot of pundits' early lists - I'm not sure if I'm buying a Save the Green Planet! remake as a major Oscar player, but if this gets the reception that Poor Things and The Favourite received, it could very well make it. Edward Berger has had massive Oscar success with All the Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, and his new film The Ballad of a Small Player comes out soon on Netflix. Other Netflix possibilities include Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite. Neon has a few other international contenders - Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, while No Other Choice could perhaps finally be Park Chan-wook's breakthrough into the Oscars universe. And if the Academy is in the mood for more Brazilian cinema, Kleber Mendonça Filho's new film The Secret Agent may be just what the doctor ordered.

For more mainstream fare, we should never count out James Cameron, and if Avatar: Fire and Ash proves to be as much of a success as the previous Avatar entries, it may be undeniable. F1 feels like a longshot, but its international appeal makes a Best Picture nomination not too far out of the realm of possibility. Weapons is perhaps an even longer shot, but if the Academy is already embracing one Warner Brothers horror film with great box office numbers, who's to say they can't embrace another one? Other possibilities include Benny Safdie's The Smashing Machine, Derek Cianfrance's Roofman, Ronan Day-Lewis' Anemone, Olivier Assayas' The Wizard of the Kremlin, Lynne Ramsay's Die, My Love and Bradley Cooper's Is This Thing On?, to name just a few.

There's a couple films that I thought had the potential to be Oscar contenders that seem unlikely at this point. Last year's surprise TIFF People's Choice winner The Life of Chuck had big-time Oscar buzz at the time, but holding Mike Flanagan's latest Stephen King adaptation until this summer may not have been the best choice for Neon, as it got a very quiet release and seems dead in the water at this point. When I saw Sorry, Baby at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, I thought it had an outside shot at a nomination, but it also made little impact on its summer release and barring some miracle re-release fever closer to the nominations, I doubt it'll score any nominations at this point.

While I covered no shortage of options here, the odds are pretty good that at least one or two of the nominations will be films I didn't mention. Recent nominees like Drive My Car, American Fiction, and The Substance were either unknown titles or extreme long shots at this point in their respective years. So don't be surprised to see some new buzz generated over some mystery film at one of these upcoming festivals.

And I'll wrap up by noting that I'm eagerly looking forward to films that I'm not expecting to get much Oscar attention. These next few months of cinema should be really exciting for me personally as there's so many directors I love who have new titles coming out. In addition to filmmakers like Trier, Baumbach, and PTA who were previously mentioned, Bing Liu, Kogonada, Kelly Reichardt, James L. Brooks, and Richard Linklater (who has 2 films!) all have new movies coming out very soon. So regardless of what happens with the upcoming festivals, there should be no shortage of potentially great films coming our way in the near future.