Why Predicting the Oscars in September is Stupid

I've done it. We've all done it. But let's not do it.

It’s that time of year when the fall film festivals (Venice, Telluride, Toronto) are wrapping up, and the Oscar prognosticators are stepping into the spotlight. Finally, it’s their moment. To be fair, Oscar punditry has become a year-round game now that summer blockbusters are getting nominated for Best Picture. Even snobby film critics have gotten into the game. But the fall festivals signify the official start of awards seasons, when it’s more socially acceptable for awards prognosticators to take center stage.

As for me, I maintain a love/hate relationship with the Oscars. They’re pretty much the only remaining reason adult dramas still get made; the allure of being nominated for an Oscar, and the financial reward that comes with it, is a powerful motivator. But Oscar punditry, i.e. the gamification of cinema, also reduces great art to mere sport, and that makes me sad. It’s fair to say that awards show coverage has overtaken serious criticism as the dominant way people talk about movies, and that bodes poorly for the future of the form.

If you’re gonna do it, though, do it right, and here’s what drives me nuts: when pundits come out in September and declare with certainty who the real contenders are for Best Picture. I get why they do it. At this time of year, you can get a lot of clicks for declaring that any particular film is “a lock” for Best Picture or has a nomination “wrapped up.” I don’t mean to pick on the guy, but this tweet is a great example.

No, the Best Picture race is not down to those two, or any other two. But every year at this time, the critical community likes to declare an unbeatable frontrunner for the award, and more often than not, they’re dead wrong. Here’s a history lesson.

Last September, it seemed like Steve Spielberg’s The Fabelmans seemed like a lock for Best Picture and Spielberg’s third Best Director Oscar. Here’s Indiewire’s David Ehrlich, one of our most respected critics, on it:

It’s easy to see why folks thought this was Spielberg’s next Oscar moment. The Fabelmans is a movie about movies (always a popular subject with the Academy), and it felt like a swan song for one of cinema’s great masters (Spielberg subsequently revealed he has no plans of slowing down). It was also just a great movie with impeccable performance, strong craft all around, and a raw vulnerability from a director who usually buries his personal filmmaking inside genre.

In case your memory is short, The Fabelmans won a grand total of zero Oscars, and Everything Everywhere All at Once ended up sweeping.

Let’s keep going.

2022 Oscars: The Power of the Dog was the frontrunner coming out of the fall festivals. It would have been the first Best Picture winner from Netflix and a long-overdue award for writer/director Jane Campion. Campion did end up winning Best Director, but CODA came out of nowhere to win Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

2021: Nomadland was both the early favorite (winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival) and the eventual winner. But 2021 was the Covid year, and there was a dearth of releases in competition.

2020: We all thought Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would be Quentin Tarantino’s Oscars coronation, his first Best Picture winner, and another Oscar-night celebration of Hollywood. Hot tip? The Oscars love nominating movies about the industry, but they don’t often give them the big prize. That year, Parasite became a cause celebre among voters and ended up the surprise winner of Best Picture, Director, and Editing.

2019: Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma was the early favorite. Actually, it was the favorite right up until the moment the words “Green Book” passed through Julia Roberts’s grimaced lips.

2018: There was no clear favorite this year, although Three Billboards won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, a semi-reliable predictor of Best Picture, and a few important precursors. The Shape of Water was at first thought to be too weird for the Academy—it’s about a woman who screws a fish, after all—but it ended up winning Best Picture and a bunch of other awards.

2017: La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s ode to classic Hollywood musicals, was the favorite from festival season until about three minutes before the Oscar ceremony ended. Nobody really expected the Academy to give their biggest award to a film like Moonlight—until they did.

2016: Okay, Spotlight was both the early favorite and the eventual winner, but there was a long period in between where it seemed like The Revenant would win Best Picture. The momentum shifted a couple different times, and I remember it being a minor surprise when Spotlight won.

2015: After the fall festivals, The Imitation Game was the favorite for Best Picture. A LGBTQ-focused historical biopic with Hollywood’s hottest leading man. What’s not to love? Birdman was thought to be too weird for the Academy, but its ostentatious filmmaking and earnest grappling with the ambiguities of superheroes won them over.

2014: 12 Years a Slave was the early favorite and the eventual winner on Oscar night. And rightly so.

So what lessons have we learned from this little exercise? Of the last 10 early favorites for Best Picture, only three of them ended up winning the big prize, and one of them was in the COVID year. Being the early favorite is not always a good thing. Voters get bored. They start looking for an underdog to root for. It gives publicists time to run negative campaigns. To sum up, anyone who says they know which films are the real contenders for Best Picture at this time of year are just posturing for clicks.

It’s perfectly fine to speculate about a film’s Oscar chances, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees. This is the time of year when the best films come out. The most challenging, the most artful, the movies that remind us of how good movies were when we were younger. We should be engaging with them on an artistic level, not reducing them to sport. There is plenty of time to make your Oscar predictions. For now, let’s avoid the fool’s errand and just enjoy the movies.