How (Almost) Every Best Picture Nominee Can End Up With a Trophy

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Neon, Apple TV+, Netflix, Searchlight

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The members of the modern Academy love a Best Picture nominee. On nomination morning they prefer to festoon their favored handful with oodles of nominations, and on the big night they like to spread the trophies among them. Twice in the era of the preferential ballot, in 2015 and 2019, voters went so far as to hand an Oscar to every single Best Picture nominee. Those were years with only eight nominees instead of today’s ten, but still, it’s proof the participation-trophy ethos is alive and well inside the Dolby Theatre.

Can that trend co-exist with a Best Picture frontrunner that seems primed to sweep? It didn’t last year, when Everything Everywhere All at Once dominated to such an extent that fully half the Best Picture field went home empty-handed. But after Sunday’s BAFTAs, I’m starting to think it might be possible this season.

The BAFTAs have been getting less predictive of the Oscars recently — last year, they differed in all eight above-the-line categories — but their membership still shares significant overlap with the Academy. Accordingly, you can think of this year’s BAFTA results as a glimpse of a possible future, one where Oppenheimer still wins big, but the other contenders get a moment to shine as well. Like Paul Atreides, I can now see a narrow path where (almost) every Best Picture nominee ends the night with a trophy.

Let’s start with the locks. At the moment, Oppenheimer looks likely to win Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, and some crafts. The Holdovers is taking Supporting Actress, and Zone of Interest International Film. Barbie is winning Original Song, fulfilling its destiny as the A Star Is Born of this year.

The screenplay categories are where BAFTA made things interesting. In the modern era, the road to Best Picture runs through Screenplay or Director (and sometimes both, if they really like you). With Oppenheimer already taken care of in Director, the Oscars could repeat the result we saw over the weekend, where two films about writers, American Fiction and Anatomy of a Fall, won Adapted and Original Screenplay, respectively.

Who wins Best Actor is irrelevant for our purposes, since Cillian Murphy’s and Paul Giamatti’s films will both be awarded elsewhere. But Actress will be pivotal. It’s Lily Gladstone or bust for Killers of the Flower Moon, so we’ll need to hand Gladstone that trophy. Don’t cry for Poor Things, because we’ll give the steampunk sex romp a pair of craft trophies to make up for it: Production Design and Costume Design, two categories it won at BAFTA, which sometimes go together at the Oscars.

Poor Things also won the actual makeup trophy at BAFTA. However, Maestro took two prizes at this week’s Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild Awards, so it’s fair to slot the Leonard Bernstein biopic in for the Suicide Squad Memorial Oscar.

That’s nine of our Best Picture nominees rewarded without anything too crazy happening. The one going home empty-handed is Past Lives, and try as I might, I can’t find a way to shoehorn the little indie in. (The only other trophy it’s nominated for is Original Screenplay, and if you hand Celine Song that prize, suddenly you’re trying to explain why Anatomy of a Fall will win Best Editing, when films almost never win just Best Editing.)

None of the above would stand in the way of Oppenheimer having a huge night. The atomic drama could still add Actor, Score, Sound, Cinematography, and Editing, giving it a total of eight trophies — the most since Slumdog Millionaire. I don’t necessarily expect things to play out in exactly this way, but the mere fact that they might is a good sign for this season’s second-tier contenders. Even if the dream of taking Best Picture is probably over, there’s every chance they could go home with gold.

SAG: Our Last Chance for an Op-Set?

As BAFTA has gotten less predictive of the Oscars, SAG has gone the other direction: In four of the past six years, the guild’s individual acting awards have matched the Oscars’ exactly. Saturday night’s SAG Awards should shed a lot of light on the lead-acting races in particular. (The supporting races are already done and dusted.) If Cillian Murphy or Emma Stone follow up their BAFTA wins with victory this weekend, their races are over; if Paul Giamatti or Lily Gladstone hold serve, it’ll go down to the wire.

Then there’s the most unpredictable award of the night: Best Cast, which is sometimes a key bellwether in the Best Picture race (like when it went to Parasite), and which is sometimes … not (like when it went to Black Panther). Because of this, I’ve long pegged SAG Ensemble as the most likely place for Oppenheimer to be upset. DGA and BAFTA were always going to love a film so director-y, and so British-y. And since Oppenheimer also made what scientists call “a buttload of money,” it’s widely expected to triumph at Sunday’s Producers Guild Awards, too. But SAG? SAG can be weird.

As Chris Feil wrote for Vulture a few years back, the guild looks for a few key factors in its Best Cast winners. Its members like well-rounded ensembles where everyone gets a chance to cook. They like characters who all interact with each other onscreen. The size of the cast matters less, though you usually don’t want to be too big or too small, and how well a film did in the individual categories doesn’t seem to matter at all. With that in mind, here’s a rundown of the likelihood of each nominated cast pulling out the win.

5. The Color Purple
After a splashy debut, Purple faded from the awards conversation, garnering only a solitary Oscar nomination for Danielle Brooks in supporting actress. As the only Best Cast nominee that’s not a Best Picture rival for Oppenheimer, a Purple win here would be as much a victory for the frontrunner as it would for Fantasia Barrino & Co.

4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Since SAG only nominates cast members who get a solo title card, many of this year’s lists of nominees look a little strange. It’s most notable on Killers, where John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser are nominated, while co-stars with meatier roles like Cara Jade Myers and William Belleau are not. Killers’ biggest selling point in this category is its impressive array of Native American talent, but its claims to inclusion are undercut when many of those actors are literally not included.

3. Barbie
There was a time when I thought Barbie was Oppenheimer’s biggest challenger at SAG. I haven’t changed my mind in regard to Barbie, exactly. It’s got a big, fun, diverse ensemble who fit the bill of many past winners: “Which cast do you most want to see all onstage together?” And since Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are unlikely to win their individual awards, a Cast win would allow SAG to celebrate the Barbie phenomenon. But two things give me pause. One, what stands out about the Barbie cast is all those different Barbies and Kens, and outside Issa Rae’s President Barbie, none of them are nominated here. And two, another SAG nominee appears to be surging at exactly the right time.

2. American Fiction
American Fiction was the rare film to beat Oppenheimer at a precursor, with Cord Jefferson winning BAFTA’s Adapted Screenplay prize over Nolan. Add in a better-than-expected showing at the Oscar nominations, and things are looking up for the literary satire. All of its key cast members are nominated here, and crucially, many of them are playing a family, a factor that boosted past SAG winners CODA and Everything Everywhere All at Once. While it’s undoubtedly Jeffrey Wright’s movie, Fiction also affords its supporting players more space than you’d expect, a quality that powered Sterling K. Brown to a surprise Oscar nomination. I could see this happening!

1. Oppenheimer
Still, while Oppenheimer doesn’t have this in the bag, there are valid reasons to expect the expected Saturday night. It’s got a highly pedigreed cast of former Oscar winners and nominees. (Though Oppenheimer also suffers from the same issue as Barbie and Killers; Rami Malek and Casey Affleck are nominated while David Krumholtz is not.) Most of them get at least one standout moment, and due to the film’s nested structure, they bounce off each other in memorable combinations. And finally, Oppenheimer hasn’t lost any of the big prizes this season, so why should it start now?

Has R.E.M’s Michael Stipe Seen Maestro?

At the height of the Maestro backlash, it was often mentioned that Bradley Cooper had perhaps overestimated the general public’s appetite for a biopic of Leonard Bernstein. I didn’t necessarily agree with this, but I understood it. Like most Americans who did not grow up in Manhattan, my first exposure to Leonard Bernstein came not through any of his work, but through Michael Stipe shouting his name at a climactic moment of R.E.M.’s 1987 single “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

I suspect Cooper knows this, because he took pains to include that bit of the R.E.M. song in his film. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder: As the man who introduced Leonard Bernstein to so many of us, had Michael Stipe actually seen Maestro? Now Gold Rush can exclusively report that he has! Stipe’s publicist confirmed the R.E.M. frontman had indeed watched the film, though she declined to provide his official review.

Interestingly enough, the release of Maestro also throws open the possibility for an “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” movie marathon, a quadruple feature of films about or including the four similarly initialed figures Stipe name-drops in the song:

Leonard Bernstein: Maestro (2023), streaming on Netflix.
Leonid Brezhnev: The Death of Stalin (2017), streaming on Hulu.
Lenny Bruce: Lenny (1974), streaming on Amazon Prime.
Lester Bangs: Almost Famous (2000), streaming on Paramount Plus.

Anyone want to try it on a rainy Sunday, and tell us how it goes?