The State of the Oscar Race as Voting Begins
The State of the Oscar Race as Voting Begins
I’m Rebecca Ford, and we are officially two days into the final Oscar voting period, which will run until Tuesday, February 18. By now, Academy members have hopefully seen all the movies, and are ready to cast their votes. What they’ve also probably noticed is the very good week that Anora just had. Sean Baker’s film won the top prize at the Critics Choice Awards on Friday, and then on Saturday it won at both the DGA Awards and the PGA Awards.
As we discuss on Little Gold Men this week, Anora’s accomplishment is so monumental because this season has been wildly unpredictable up until this point. No one expected the sort of sweep you would have in a year with a very obvious front-runner, like Oppenheimer last year, or Everything Everywhere All at Once the year before. But maybe we’ve all been kidding ourselves and not seeing what’s been standing right in front of us, given that Anora won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
It’s very rare for a film to win both the PGA and DGA awards and not go on to win best picture at the Oscars, but it does happen. The most recent example is from 2020, when 1917 won both guild awards but lost the Oscar to Parasite. The same thing happened to La La Land in 2017 when it eventually lost to Moonlight.
Does Anora’s momentum help the movie in any of its other races as well? If it does sweep at the Oscars, Baker could win up to four individual prizes himself—for directing, producing, writing, and editing—but that still feels like a long shot. Could Mikey Madison’s chances be improving in lead actress? What about Yura Borisov in supporting actor? We are still waiting for SAG to weigh in on all this (the show is on February 23), so we’ll have a much clearer picture once that’s happened. For now, it seems like the acting front-runners are holding strong.
I’m personally hoping that a different film takes the SAG Awards’ best-ensemble prize—because if the winner is Anora, then every other film vying for best picture can go ahead and throw in the towel. A different winner there (A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Emilia Pérez, and Wicked are also in the running) will keep this lively season afloat.
For now, take a listen to this week’s Little Gold Men episode below to hear more about how all those awards shows have unfolded, and what their results mean for some of the other races.
We Have a Best-Picture Front-Runner. Now What?
The Awards Insider team discusses if Anora—which swept the PGA, DGA, and Critics Choice—has this all locked up, or if we’re in for more surprises.
R E A D M O R E »
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