You know the old rules of Oscars season: Never bet against a biopic, especially when there’s makeup involved. Twenty-something actresses can get nominated, but their male counterparts usually can’t. Children always run in Supporting, even when they’re the lead of the movie. But the past few years have brought critical changes to the Oscars ballot as well as hundreds of additional AMPAS members — and with this new Academy comes new rules. So, as we stand on the precipice of another awards season, here are four crucial lessons to remember about the way things work in the Oscars’ tenth decade.
1. The Best Ability Is Likability
After CODA’s Best Picture victory, I spoke to a veteran awards strategist who gave me their theory of the race. When there were only five Best Picture nominees, the trophy usually went to the film voters considered the most outstanding artistic achievement. But once the Academy expanded the category and introduced ranked-choice voting, the standard shifted toward plain old likability. You can poke holes around the margins of this hypothesis — was Shakespeare in Love winning in 1999 not also a victory for likability? — but on the whole, it seems a clear and concise accounting of the shift we’ve seen over the past decade of the Oscars, which has seen warm-hug movies like CODA and The Shape of Water triumph over more imposing competition. Note, though, that likability is never solely about what’s onscreen: Parasite, our most acidic Best Picture winner, was nevertheless able to campaign as a lovable underdog in the Oscars race, especially in comparison to its biggest rival, the special-effects juggernaut 1917.
2. Nomination Totals Don’t Mean What They Used To
At the Numlock Awards Supplement, Walt Hickey frequently writes about under-the-radar changes to AMPAS membership in the wake of #OscarsSoWhite. It isn’t just that new voters as a whole are less white, less male, and less American than the old guard. They’re also more likely to belong to branches that don’t have a corresponding trophy, like casting directors or the elusive “members at large.†During nominations, these members only vote for one category: Best Picture. As a result, the old theory that a Best Picture win is built branch-by-branch holds less sway than before. Films like The Favourite, Joker, Mank, and The Power of the Dog all racked up double-digit nomination totals, but those were Oscars fool’s gold; the films that triumphed in those years all had six or fewer nominations, with CODA’s three being the least for a Best Picture winner since the 1930s. It’s likely that these big wins were powered at least in part by voters who were basically invisible during the nomination process.
3. In the Supporting Races, Coattails Beat Standouts
Spare a moment for those acting contenders who scored at the precursors, only to miss the mark on nomination morning. In the Supporting races, one factor often unites those left out in the cold: They were their film’s only shot at Oscars love. Last season saw two different would-be lone nominees supplanted at the last minute, and in both cases, the replacement was drafting off of Oscars-nominated co-stars: Ruth Negga of Passing got pushed out by Jessie Buckley of The Lost Daughter, who made a matching set with Olivia Colman in Best Actress, while The Tender Bar’s Ben Affleck was replaced by The Power of the Dog’s Jesse Plemons, who became the western’s fourth acting nominee. (That Buckley and Plemons have the same first name is apparently a coincidence, as is the fact they once played a couple in a Charlie Kaufman movie.) The “coattails over standouts†factor is also why Beautiful Boy’s Timothée Chalamet saw his seat taken by Vice’s Sam Rockwell in 2019, and how the fifth Supporting Actor spot in 2020 went to Anthony Hopkins of The Two Popes over Jamie Foxx of Just Mercy. And it goes halfway to explaining Jennifer Lopez’s snub for Hustlers, though unfortunately it still does not reveal why in the world her replacement had to be Kathy Bates for Richard Jewell.
4. A Best International Film Nom Is the Floor for a Foreign-Language Hit, Not the Ceiling
We talk a lot about how AMPAS’s new international members are shaking up the Oscars race, but it bears repeating: Since 2019, every single Best Picture slate has included a non-English language film. (With the asterisk that 2021’s Minari was an American production.) In Best Director, auteurs like Paweł Pawlikowski and Thomas Vinterberg have been recognized even as their films missed Best Picture. Screenplay looks like the next place the international wave will break: Last season, both Drive My Car and The Worst Person in the World cracked the final five of their respective writing categories. The takeaway is that a well-regarded foreign film doesn’t just have to settle for a solitary Best International Film nomination anymore. They can compete all over the ballot, a development that makes every race more competitive and more surprising. Who, besides the actual worst person in the world, could argue against that?
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