Predicting Oscar’s Best Picture in The Most Unpredictable Year In Recent Memory

One of the constants about the Oscar season is that it is long. From the point where critics start handing out their year-end awards in early December, beginning the process of narrowing the field, through Golden Globe nominations, the SAG Awards, all the guild honors and Critics Choice and the BAFTAs, by the time we get to the Oscars in late February (or in this year’s case, due to an Olympics-dictated longer season, early March) the winners have become pretty obvious. You can see that having happened this year in the acting categories, where the Globes, SAG, Critics Choice, and BAFTA have been in unprecedented lockstep in honoring the quartet of Frances McDormand, Gary Oldman, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney.

But Best Picture has been another story entirely. The past few years have been thrillingly turbulent for the top Oscar category, with surprise last-minute upset wins by Spotlight two years ago and Moonlight last year. But in both of those cases, we had a clearly established frontrunner (The Revenant in 2015; La La Land in 2016) that got overtaken by a stalking horse. That’s not the case this year. While you could make the case for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or The Shape of Water as a frontrunner, that’s kind of the point: you can make the case for either one of those movies. Or Get Out. Or Lady Bird. Or Dunkirk.

The most recent example of a year this wide open in Best Picture is probably 2006. That year was thrown into chaos on nomination day, when perceived frontrunner Dreamgirls was left off the Best Picture ballot entirely, despite still having the most nominations of any film, and everybody else went scrambling. The Golden Globe drama champion was Babel. The SAG ensemble award (which the year prior had set the stage for the Crash Best Picture upset)  went to Little Miss Sunshine, as did the Producers Guild. BAFTA was no help as they went with the hometown nominee The Queen. The Critics Choice and Directors Guild went with Martin Scorsese and The Departed. Scorsese was heavily tapped to win Best Director (much the same as Guillermo Del Toro is this year), but Best Picture was a four-way race, with two-time champ Clint Eastwood as a dark horse possibility with Letters From Iwo Jima if the other four split. The Departed ended up triumphing, and history, as it does, began treating it as more of an inevitability than it was, but that award was up in the air until the final second.

So, too, is this year’s Best Picture. What looked like a fairly straightforward split between the nomination leader / technical masterpiece / likely Best Director winner The Shape of Water and the hit-a-nerve acting/story showcase / likely Best Picture winner Three Billboards got thrown into chaos when Martin McDonagh, the Three Billboards director, was left off the Best Director ballot. Suddenly, everything was wide open.

So how to make sense of Best Picture as we head into Oscar weekend? More importantly how should you be filling out your Oscar pool ballot? Let’s try and work through this.

Who Can We Rule Out?

This seems easy, though it should come with the caveat that with a race where votes are as spread out as we expect the votes here to be, a lot of very strange things could happen. Still, it feels like movies like Darkest Hour and The Post, both well-made films about big, important political concerns being dealt with on a granular level, would be competing for the same votes, and neither one of them appears to have captivated wide enough segments of the audience to accumulate the votes they’ll need.

Call Me By Your Name was subjected to a disastrous rollout from Sony Pictures Classics that kept it out of theaters forever, and while Oscar voters all got screeners, sure, the refusal to just LET AMERICANS SEE THE DAMN MOVIE completely sapped it of any kind of popular momentum.

Phantom Thread, meanwhile, was a surprise Picture/Director movie and, while proving incredibly popular with critics and Paul Thomas Anderson partisans (a Venn diagram that is essentially a circle), this will likely only serve as further ammunition for when PTA finally does get his Oscar in some future year.

The Case for Lady Bird

A Lady Bird win would be shocking historically simply due to its subject matter. Family dramadies, contemporary stories about teenage girls, small and personal films that don’t have death or disease or addiction at their core … these movies barely ever get nominated, much less win. But Lady Bird has been defying those very odds all season, mostly because people just tend to love it. And year after year, whenever Oscar “rules” end up broken, the simple explanation is usually “voters just loved it more.” Lady Bird is fighting some Oscar history here, as movies without any nominations in the so-called “tech” categories (your cinematography, your production and costume design, your sound and visual effects and editing and makeup) hardly ever win. The largest voting body within the Academy is actors, sure, but the tech branches together are a significant enough bloc that it’s pretty tough to win without impressing them even a little. Still, the case for Lady Bird remains that it could be the last film standing if the other frontrunners split their vote.

The Case for Dunkirk

If Lady Bird is bereft of tech support, Dunkirk is basically all tech support. The Oscar history that Christopher Nolan’s film is working against is that it’s gotten no acting nominations and no screenplay nomination (and was never really in contention for either). The last time a film won without either was 1932’s Grand Hotel, which resides singularly in the Oscar record book for being the only Best Picture to win with only one nomination. But Dunkirk very well might be the beneficiary of the preferential ballot (the instant-runoff tally that decides Best Picture, where voters rank all nine nominees, and then one by one, the last-place vote-getters have their ballots redistributed to the next-highest film on their list, until one film can get 50% + 1 of the vote). It’s been said that the preferential ballot favors consensus choices over polarizing ones, and the industry-wide respect for Nolan’s achievement, while not being the stuff of very many #1 votes, might put it at #2, 3, or 4 on enough ballots to have it survive an hugely split vote. A Dunkirk win would be a massive shock if only because the last time anyone talked about it as a possible Best Picture winner was last summer.

The Case for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The case for Three Billboards is pretty simple: if Martin McDonagh had finished 5th on the Best Director ballot instead of the 6th that we all assume he did, no one would even be questioning its Best Picture chances. It won the Golden Globe, the SAG, and the BAFTA. It’s the story-and-acting-based movie that would beat the technical fave (The Shape of Water), much like Spotlight and Moonlight did. But that Best Director snub acts as the canary in the coal mine for a movie whose divisiveness was always going to be a problem. And even though Argo triumphed only five years ago despite a Best Director snub, that film was the beneficiary of a Ben Affleck sympathy narrative (imagine such a thing!) that began pretty much the instant nominations were announced. Hollywood has not rallied around Martin McDonagh in the same way. Three Billboards‘ chances at winning come down to this: is the movie truly a love-it-or-hate-it affair, which would likely doom it with the preferential ballot, or are the hate-its all on Twitter and the love-its all in the Academy? If the latter is true, it’ll win.

The Case for The Shape of Water

A decade ago, there would be no doubt that The Shape of Water is winning. Thirteen total nominations to lead the field, a runaway favorite in Best Director, and a movie that evokes Old Hollywood romance without being in any way “problematic” (no matter how many “fish-fucker” cracks you hear about this movie, nobody is calling the film racist against fish). But after the last five years or so of Oscar history, the technical achievements and total nominations for Shape start to align with movies like Gravity, The Revenant, and La La Land: big, impressive feats of moviemaking that win Best Director with ease only to falter in Best Picture. And while you could throw Birdman in there as the exception — the movie that fits all these criteria and still wins Best Picture — history still feels like it’s waiting for another movie, perhaps with a more urgent story, to overtake it.

The Case for Get Out

If the last five years or so have given Best Director to the showy, director-driven, big productions and feats of large-scale filmmaking, they’ve also reserved Best Picture for smaller, more impactful films that seem to speak to something urgent or relatable or human-sized within Academy voters. The journalistic heroism and grunt work of the reporters in Spotlight. The aching humanity on display in Moonlight. When it comes to Get Out, it’s the only movie besides Three Billboards (which has been knocked for its treatment of race but also widely celebrated for what many see as its Trump-era-appropriate feminist rage) that really speaks to the moment. Jordan Peele’s film hit such a nerve when it was released a year ago because it spoke to a black experience in America that was fraught, insidious, and under threat. Get Out is a horror movie, yes, but it’s the kind of horror movie that perfectly communicates real social stakes. It’s the one movie in Best Picture that gets exactly to at least one part of this moment we’re living in. To win, it would have to triumph with the fewest total nominations of any Best Picture winner since the ’30s, but we’ve been steadily moving towards Best Picture winners with fewer and fewer total nominations lately. There’s no mathematical requirement for Oscar voters to meet here. They just have to vote for the movie that affected them the most. With an ever more young and diverse Academy, Get Out would be a triumph that makes a lot of sense.