Oscar Predictions 2024: What Will Win This Year

Unlike most of the Oscar ceremonies over the last decade, the biggest question we’ll get answered on Sunday, March 10 isn’t what will win Best Picture, because we essentially already know that. Instead, the question is just how dominant an evening “Oppenheimer” will have.  One of the most under-the-radar trends for the Oscars over the last 15-20 years is that it’s become quite rare for one movie to dominate the evening. Even last year, when “Everything Everywhere All at Once” became the first movie to ever win six of the top eight categories, it only won a single craft race (Best Editing), finishing with a reasonably modest seven wins. And even that total was the highest for a Best Picture winner since “Slumdog Millionaire” won eight in 2009.  Part of the reason Best Picture favorites win fewer overall Oscars than they used to is likely due to the changing Academy votership, but part of it is also due to the increasing rarity of true zeitgeist blockbusters that trample through awards season. “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” was the last movie with double digit Oscar wins (it tied “Titanic” and “Ben-Hur” for a record 11 wins), and that was 20 years ago.  Could “Oppenheimer” challenge those numbers? With 13 nominations and a billion-dollar global take, it has the best chance at true Oscar domination of anything we’ve seen in the last two decades. But 2023 was also an extraordinary year for cinema, and you could make a real case that this is among the greatest crop of Best Picture nominees we’ve ever had. So for as strong as “Oppenheimer” looks, it also faces tough competition and a votership that seems increasingly resistant to sweeps.  How might those competing realities manifest in the Oscar results? Let’s break it down. Best Picture“American Fiction”“Anatomy of a Fall”“Barbie”“The Holdovers”“Killers of the Flower Moon”“Maestro”“Oppenheimer”“Past Lives”“Poor Things”“The Zone of Interest” Every great once in a while, we get a Best Picture contender that seems to be what every different type of Oscar voter wants out of a “Best Picture Winner,” all at the same time. “Oppenheimer” is that rare Best Picture unicorn. It enjoyed phenomenal critical success while also becoming both a massive financial blockbuster and (thanks to “Barbenheimer”) a genuine cultural phenomenon. It’s a grand populist period piece that amply showcases every technical aspect of Hollywood magic, while also kind of being a small domestic drama through much of its runtime. It’s an important story about an important person, and it’s by one of the world’s most important filmmakers at the top of their game (and a previously unawarded filmmaker, at that). It was classical filmmaking that employed cutting-edge technical acumen. It has big movie stars, a soaring score, and a show-stopping centerpiece scene that became the year’s ultimate “You gotta see it on the big screen” moment.  To find another Best Picture favorite that checks even most of those boxes, you probably have to go back to 1997’s “Titanic,” which became one of the biggest Oscar juggernauts of all time.  For most of the last decade, the Best Picture race has been defined by pairs of seeming opposites competing for the top prize, from “La La Land” and “Moonlight,” to “Green Book” and “Roma,” or “Parasite” versus “1917,” and “CODA” versus “The Power of the Dog.” But the amazing thing about “Oppenheimer” is that you can pretty easily compare it to either side of all of those matchups. It’s as close as we’ve ever seen to a movie that’s all things to all voters.  Since 2017, I’ve written a massive breakdown of the Best Picture preferential ballot every year, trying to guess at how the votes might look every step of the way, and predicting how the eliminations will go, one by one, until finally the winner crosses the 50% of the vote threshold with the final elimination. In races with two major contenders, getting that granular with the ballot felt like an instructive and useful exercise. But not this year. The Academy refuses to ever release the votes, so we’ll never know if I’m right about this, but I think this is the first year of the preferential ballot (which has been in use since the Best Picture lineup expanded in 2009) that the winner will reach 50% of the vote without even needing a final elimination round. That’s how far ahead of the competition “Oppenheimer” is, and how much of a sure thing it is to win Best Picture.  Best DirectorJonathan Glazer, “The Zone of Interest”Yorgos Lanthimos, “Poor Things”Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”Martin Scorsese, “Killers of the Flower Moon”Justine Triet, “Anatomy of a Fall” Other than Bong Joon-ho’s shocking upset over Sam Mendes in early 2020 (the last cool moment of that year before Covid ruined everything), Best Director has been the most boring Oscar category of recent memory, and you have to go back more than 20 years to find another real surprise. That streak won’t be ending this year, because as per usual, this is one of the