I’m a fan of the Oscars. When I was a kid, we watched it in my home every year, and as my love of the Oscars grew, my anticipation of the ceremony became just as fun as the show itself. I looked forward to Entertainment Weekly’s Oscars edition the way other boys my age might anticipate the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I put together an annual Oscars pool with my family members. It was very important that I won.
Now I’m more ambivalent about it all, and part of the reason is the sheer ubiquity of Oscars coverage. It’s hard to love something that is always there. Entertainment Weekly would devote three issues to the Oscars—two preview issues and one wrap-up—but now there are numerous sites that do awards coverage year-round. They see every film through the lens of its awards chances, which to me represents a true degradation of film criticism. It’d be fine if they existed only in a little corner of the internet, but the popularity of these sites—and more to the point, this type of thinking—has dwarfed actual film criticism. It’s the sports-ification of the form, and I don’t like it one bit.
So I try to hold the line by waiting to begin my Oscars coverage for as long as I can. Most critics start thinking and writing about this stuff in early September, when the Venice, Toronto, and Telluride Film Festivals, converge in a two-week period. I try to wait until November, when the Oscars ceremony is a mere…[checks calendar]… four months away.
So let’s start my Oscar coverage by assessing the chances of the biggest movie of the year.
Top Gun Soars to the Oscars?
Ever since Top Gun: Maverick flew into theaters (and into this critic’s heart) in June, pundits have speculated it could be nominated for Best Picture at next year’s Oscars. I was always skeptical. It seemed to be manufactured buzz so that the awards bloggers had something to write about over the summer. After all, a sequel hadn’t been nominated for Best Picture since Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, and that movie is an anomaly, widely considered one of the best films of the century. This year’s conversation reminded me a lot of what went on after the release of Avengers: Endgame, which failed to garner any major Oscar nominations despite a lot of certainty from the prognosticators.
But with most of this year’s Oscar hopefuls now having screened for critics, I’m starting to believe the hype. There just aren’t that many no-doubt, sure-thing Best Picture nominees in there, and with a required ten nominees for Best Picture, they always seem to manage at least once blockbuster, even when the other options are solid. Last year it was Dune. In 2020, it was Joker. There wasn’t one in 2021, but that was a pandemic year, and no blockbusters were released. I thought that Wakanda Forever had a great shot to be nominated this year, but the early reviews have been mixed, and blockbusters need near-universal acclaim to be accepted by the Academy. The key variable here is James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. The first Avatar got nominated (lost to The Hurt Locker), and Cameron has an unblemished track record of critical and box-office success. There’s no reason to think he won’t be nominated again.
But is there room for two blockbuster sequels this year? I’m saying yes, and it’s not because the Academy will be keen to promote films that are a hit with audiences. This is a popular talking point these days, but I don’t buy it. The show’s producers care deeply about appealing to mass audiences, but there’s zero evidence the voters think strategically like this. They vote for what they like. And everybody—I mean, everybody—likes Top Gun: Maverick. It’s a return to a kind of highly-skilled, big-budget filmmaking that we really only see when Tom Cruise is onscreen. It’s an antidote to superhero movies, which are so laden in CGI and steroid-addled performers that they fail to put a single human characteristic onscreen. Cruise is a hero, not a superhero, and the distinction has never seemed clearer.
There’s also a dearth of other options. If I had to make my best guess right now, here’s what the Best Picture category will look like:
Avatar: The Way of Water
Babylon
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans
She Said
TÁR
Top Gun: Maverick
The Whale
Others that could sneak into the party include Thirteen Lives, Women Talking, Empire of Light, The Woman King, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio, and Triangle of Sadness (there’s almost always an international nominee, and I haven’t picked one here). I’d also be thrilled if Aftersun made it, and I think it’s possible. But this slate is weak enough, and so lacking in sure things, that there’s certainly room for Top Gun: Maverick. And if for some reason Avatar is a dud, it becomes close to a lock.
The wild card here is Cruise himself, a strange and unique figure in Hollywood. People love to watch him. People are also profoundly uncomfortable with him as a human being. He seemed a sure bet to win an Oscar early in his career and was nominated three times before the age of 45—for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia. Since then, he hasn’t received a single nomination, and in recent years hasn’t even bothered making a movie that could conceivably interest Academy voters (I wrote about his third act for The Ringer, if you’re interested). He doesn’t really talk about Scientology anymore, but his couch-jumping antics and angry interview with Matt Lauer still loom large in our perception of him.
It’s unlikely (although not impossible) that he’ll be nominated for Best Actor, which is always a stacked category, but he’s also a producer of Top Gun: Maverick, so if it’s nominated for Best Picture, he’ll almost certainly attend the ceremony and be sitting in the front row. If it wins, he’ll probably give the speech that closes the show. Cruise is good at Oscar speeches. In 2002, he was chosen to open the ceremony with a monologue about why movies mattered in a post-9/11 era, and he crushed it. But Cruise hasn’t attended since 2012, and ratings have been plummeting ever since. Coincidence? Probably. But also not. The Oscars need familiar faces to remind people that they are an institution. They need Jack Nicholson or Meryl Streep sitting in the front row every year. Lately, they haven’t had either, and the younger crop of presumed Oscar perennials like Ryan Gosling and Amy Adams have struggled to put together a consistent run of nominated films.
They could use Tom Cruise in the front row to get folks to tune in and, with the chance of him giving the big speech at the end of the night, stay tuned in. Love him or hate him, Cruise is good for the movies, and whether or not it wins, Top Gun: Maverick is good for the Oscars.
A simple request from the author: If you enjoyed this piece, please consider sharing it either on social media or just with a friend who might be interested. That is all.