This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. The drafting window for this season has closed, but you can still sign up to get the newsletter, which provides a weekly recap of box-office performance, awards nominations, and critical chatter on all the buzziest movies.
How was Tuesday? Depends who you ask. For the Oppenheimer team, it was spectacular (albeit thoroughly expected), being that they got 13 Oscar nominations. For your humble Movies Fantasy League narrator, the day was … less great … being that I got the flu. (And for Hillary Clinton, it was apparently a source of perverse social-media inspiration.)
I’m feeling better, my voice a little worse for wear, but my typing fingers are strong. As strong as this year’s Best Picture field, maybe the best of the expanded Best Picture era. What does that mean for the Fantasy League? Well, this year, 31 league-eligible movies picked up at least one Oscar nomination, which means you had to work really hard to assemble a roster that got blanked on Oscar-nomination day.
Despite the fact that everybody has spent the last few days arguing about Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie getting left out of two categories, there are plenty of angles to it when it comes to which movies emerged from Tuesday morning in the best position to benefit your roster as we enter the home stretch.
Hey Thirteen
As expected, Oppenheimer emerged as the overall leader with 13 nominations. All Best Picture nods were worth 50 points, and Acting, Directing, Screenplay, and the International/Documentary/Animated Feature nods were worth 25. Any other nomination was worth 15 points. Oppenheimer had plenty of all kinds, good enough for 280 points on the day. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things clocked in with the next-best total at 240 points, off of 11 nominations, despite the fact that Willem Dafoe was left off the Supporting Actor ballot.
Not far behind with ten total nominations was Killers of the Flower Moon, which showed up in Picture, Director, Actress, and Supporting Actor. Two crucial misses kept it from getting even more points, as Leonardo DiCaprio and the screenplay were both left off the final ballot.
And then there was Barbie. A few things about the week’s most-discussed snubee: First of all, with eight nominations good for 185 points, Greta Gerwig’s movie was still the fourth-highest tallying movie of the morning. Second of all, the Best Director and Best Actress snubs were worth a total of 50 points, which you could easily make up, either today or down the line. If you had Nyad on your roster, that scored 50 for you right there (welcome back to the Oscars, Jodie Foster!). So if you have Barbie on your roster, just chill. All is not lost.
The rest of the top points earners on Tuesday were:
Maestro: 170 points
American Fiction: 140 points
Anatomy of a Fall: 140 points
The Holdovers: 140 points
The Zone of Interest: 140 points
If you’re really in the mood to be disappointed, it helps it you’ve rostered Past Lives, May December, All of Us Strangers, Ferrari, Priscilla, or any of the other films that received few or zero noms from the Academy on Tuesday. At least Past Lives got the 50 points for a Best Picture nomination, but with only one other nomination on the day (Best Original Screenplay), it was left with an underwhelming 75 points. May December, another movie that started awards season red hot, only got one nomination in Original Screenplay and now sits stalled on the overall leaderboard in 14th place with 345 points on the season.
Other movies that got nominated but in fewer categories than anticipated included The Boy and the Heron (Animated Feature but not Score or Screenplay), The Color Purple (Supporting Actress but not Song or Costumes), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Animated Feature but not Score or Production Design), and Rustin (Actor but not Song). Each one of those movies pulled in 25 points apiece.
What about movies that overperformed, you ask? Look no further than Pablo Larrain’s black-and-white vampire alternative-history comedy El Conde, which picked up a surprise Best Cinematography nomination (+15), and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which will forever be an Oscar nominee now that it has been recognized for John Williams’s score (+15).
And, finally, the Eva Longoria–directed, Hulu-distributed Flamin’ Hot, which tells the story of the people who invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, is the vessel that has delivered us our annual Diane Warren Best Original Song nomination. (Last year, Longoria starred in Tell It Like a Woman, which gave us last year’s Diane Warren Original Song.)
Leaderboard
With 2,245 total points handed out on Tuesday morning, there was no telling how this was going to shake up the Movie Fantasy League rosters. Chaos awaited. And yet, after all those points … we have the same seven-way tie at the top that we’ve had the last two weeks. The pack is less than 40 points ahead of eighth-place “choriza may decemberâ€, so that lead is incredibly tenuous. But what’s even more fascinating is that even after Oppenheimer has spent the last few weeks chowing down on nothing but points, the Oppy rosters are still several hundred points behind. Maybe the Nolan was too cost prohibitive to surround it with good roster support. The next six weeks will tell that tale.
You can see the full leaderboard here on the main MFL landing page.
Looking Ahead
We’ve got a good couple weeks until the next set of awards, so we’re going to spend some time here in the newsletter breaking down the action so far, including the most valuable films of the season, who’s ahead in the Podcast League, and much more.
Questions? Feedback? Can’t find your team or mini-league on the leaderboard? Drop us a line at [email protected].Â