Like the old story about the blind men and the elephant, this year’s Oscar race is a lot of different things, depending on your vantage point.
It’s a fait accompli, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” seemingly coasting to inevitable Best Picture and Best Director wins and “Hamnet” star Jessie Buckley doing the same in the Best Actress category.
And it’s a complete mystery, with the Best Supporting Actor and Actress categories completely up in the air, with pundits going for Stellan Skarsgard and Teyana Taylor, betting sites making Sean Penn and Taylor the favorites and TheWrap’s Awards Tracker giving the top spots to Jacob Elordi and Wunmi Mosaku.
It’s a sprint, with the Academy using the time constraints of their ABC broadcast as a reason to eliminate performances of three of the Best Original Song nominees.
And it’s a marathon, with 35 days between the nominations announcement and the beginning of final voting and 10 more days between the end of final voting and the Oscar show, stretching out a season that began before Labor Day and won’t end until the Ides of March.
It’s a ritual, with all the usual signposts along the way: Governors Awards, shortlists, nomination voting, giddy, reaction statements, Nominees Luncheon, interview, campaign stop, rinse, repeat…
And it’s an experiment, thanks to what the Academy called “a procedural change” when it was announced in a press release last April: “Academy members must now watch all nominated films in each category to be eligible to vote in the final round for the Oscars.”
All of those things come together on Thursday, Feb. 26, as eight days of final voting begin. Let’s look at where we stand and what it means.
The New Rule
The Academy always wanted voters to watch every film before voting, but they never made it an official requirement, except in certain categories. (More on that in a minute.) But this year, with the rise of the members-only Academy Screening Room as the main viewing portal for nominated films, AMPAS is tracking what its members watch and insisting that they see every nominee in a category before they can vote in that category. And the organization hasn’t been subtle about it: In recent weeks, members have been getting a steady stream of emails reminding them of what they’ve seen and what they still need to see, listing the categories in which they’ve qualified to vote and the ones in which they haven’t.
Most members we’ve talked to support the new rule while also being annoyed by all those emails – but then, the Academy has been known for being on the nagging side as voting approaches.
Where voting in some preliminary categories requires members to identify where and when they’ve seen a film outside the ASR, final voting is essentially on the honor system. The Academy knows when a member streams a film on the platform, but voters also have the option of clicking on a “Mark Watched” button to certify that they’ve seen the film elsewhere.
Assuming that voters are honest and they do see all the nominees before voting in any category, one big question is whether that will affect the outcomes. More than a decade ago, the international and documentary categories had rules in place that restricted voting to people who’d seen all five nominees in a theater, which simultaneously reduced the number of voters in those categories and led to some major upsets: “The Lives of Others” over “Pan’s Labyrinth” in international, “Born Into Brothels” over “Super Size Me” in documentary …
With movies more accessible on the site and the theatrical viewing requirement eliminated, the potential for upsets like those is reduced. But it can’t be discounted.
The Best Picture Race
Here’s a question I’ve been hearing a lot out on the circuit: “It’s over, isn’t it?”
It, in this case refers to the Best Picture category, and my answer is generally along the lines of “Well, it feels like it is.” “One Battle After Another” has won pretty much everything there is to win – from the Critics Choice Awards, where it was thought to be neck-and-neck with “Sinners,” to BAFTA, where “Hamnet” seemingly had home-court advantage.
Conventional wisdom says that it can seal the deal on Saturday by winning at the Producers Guild Awards, the only other major awards show that uses the same ranked-choice voting system that the Oscars uses for Best Picture. There is one thing to keep in mind, though: For some reason, PGA voting ended a full 25 days before the results are being announced. So if there’s been any kind of recent, underground momentum in favor of any of the rivals to “One Battle,” it won’t be reflected in the Producers Guild results, which will show us how those voters were feeling a month ago, not how they’re feeling now.
I keep mulling over alternate scenarios to see if any of them make sense. Since ranked-choice voting eliminates the films with the fewest No. 1 votes and redistributes those ballots to other films ranked near the top of those voters’ ballots, could “Hamnet” get a surge from voters whose first choices were, say, “Train Dreams” and “Sentimental Value?” Could the wildness of “Sinners” appeal more to voters whose ballots were topped by “Bugonia” and “Frankenstein?”
Those scenarios aren’t impossible, I suppose, but “One Battle” feels as if it’s the kind of film that’ll have a nearly insurmountable lead after all the No. 1 votes are counted. To paraphrase Bob Dylan’s “It’s Not Dark Yet,” it’s not over yet…but it’s gettin’ there.
The Crazy Acting Categories
Our Awards Tracker maven Casey Loving will have more to say about this on Friday, but it really is remarkable how jumbled the supporting actor and actress races have gotten. I can easily see a scenario in which each one of the five Best Supporting Actor nominees can win, and one in which four out of the five Best Supporting Actress nominees take the trophy.
In a way, I kind of hope that SAG-AFTRA voters throw a huge monkey wrench into these categories by giving Sunday’s Actor Awards to Miles Caton and Ariana Grande, who aren’t nominated for Oscars. That would be the piece de resistance in two wild and wooly races.
The Damn Calendar
I know the Winter Olympics are thought to make things difficult for the Oscars, which don’t want to go up against the closing ceremony. But really, why is the season stretched out so long this year? Is that month-long gap between nominations and final voting there because the Academy thinks its members need that much time to catch up with the movies they just nominated? And what about the supersized gap between the end of voting and the Oscar show? The accountants at PwC definitely don’t need that much time to tally the votes.
I’ve heard that the longer gap after voting is popular with nominees because it gives them more time to rest and not worry about campaigning, and popular with ABC because it frees the network up to run ads that can favor the better-known nominees in a way that would be untoward while voting was still going on. But it also makes the season feel endless, and it leads to other oddities.
For instance: Do members of the American Society of Cinematographers really need 51 days in which to cast their final ballots? Does the Producers Guild really want its members to vote by Feb. 3 and then wait until Feb. 28 to find out who won? And will anybody, anywhere, feel anything but relief when the final envelope is opened at the Dolby Theatre on, appropriately enough, the Ides of March?
I mean, I make my living writing about awards season, and I would be delighted if there were less of it.
Anyway, it’s time to vote. Let’s wrap up yet another odd awards season.
