by Nathaniel R
Marriage Story would have been a true blockbuster like Kramer vs Kramer or Terms of Endearment in a different era. Now it will just stream but could still be a big player at the Oscars.
There’s still so much we don’t know.
That’s an important fact to start with because reading online discourse about Oscar predictions each year is like pretending we live in a perpetual January when the precursors are well underway and the template is already set which will only vary slightly from organization to organization/pundit to pundit. Oscar fanatics (and pundits) never know as much as they pretend to know early on. History is filled with films with breathless first screenings that didn’t amount to much at the Oscars and vice versa. These things take time and all parts of the cycle should be considered when making predictions. If your predictions are exactly the same as someone else's this early, take a risk. Then you can be wrong in different ways instead of in the same way. Haha.
Five Very Important Things We Don’t Yet Know...
Bombshell is one of the true wildcards in the race. No one has seen it. It could go either way
- What any of the precursors will do (other than the dates on which they will do it)
- Whether Netflix will be able to handle pushing about 4 or 5 movies hard (when they’ve only managed to make one film work with Oscar each year thus far in the high profile categories ... Mudbound then Roma)
- What critics and audiences will think of The Irishman, 1917, Dark Waters, Cats, Little Women, Queen & Slim, Star Wars Episode 9, and Bombshell.
- What audiences will think of everything --everything that isn't The Farewell or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that is. Both of those films have already arrived and proven themselves legitimate contenders. Their challenge is different now...
- Will The Farewell and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (and to a lesser extent Us and Avengers) be able to muscle their way back into the conversation in a real way during voting when all of these shiny new films are playing?
Here are the updated Best Picture and Best Director charts.