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.
It doesn’t happen this way every year, but it almost certainly will in 2024: Oppenheimer is poised to steamroll the Academy Awards, from Best Picture, down through the acting awards, and right into a good many of the craft awards. That doesn’t mean the Oscars will be without its delights — there remain some significant toss-up categories, and, anyway, if you would have said two years ago that Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. would be on the brink of winning acting Oscars, that would’ve sounded like a wild little fantasy. Throw Lily Gladstone and Da’Vine Joy Randolph into the mix and it’s a real party.
Still, the omnipresence of an awards-season juggernaut can start to feel tedious. That’s why it’s nice that Oppenheimer is a big ol’ studio movie, leaving the Independent Spirit Awards open to a few films that have had to smile and clap at Christopher Nolan’s name getting called again and again. Last year at this time, Everything Everywhere All at Once was busy sweeping the SAG Awards and the Indie Spirits. This year, Oppenheimer has to make do with dominating just the former, freeing up the spotlight for a few other worthy contenders.
Enter the Cinematrix
Before we get into the awards-season nitty-gritty, there’s a major development on the Vulture-games front — one that could help stave off withdrawal symptoms when the MFL wraps up in a couple weeks. Yesterday, Vulture launched the Cinematrix, a grid-style game that gives you nine guesses to identify nine films that match intersecting clues. A new Cinematrix comes out every weekday, meaning you’ll have more movie-game opportunities in your life — and more of me since I’m programming each grid. You can go check out today’s Cinematrix, and if you like it, sign up for the daily alert to get an email with each day’s game.
Box Office: A Perfect Taste
Full disclosure: If, when Dune: Part Two got pulled from the release schedule last fall, we suspected that it was going to reemerge in time for the last two weeks of the fantasy league, we would have kept it up on the board and let the box-office chips fall where they may. But since we removed it from the list of draftable movies midway through the sign-up window, it’s out of contention for points. My most heartfelt apologies for that, since Dune surfacing at the last minute to unleash two weeks of box-office carnage would have been incredible. We live. We learn. We drink the Water of Life.
Anyway, what we do have in this box-office update — aside from the immaterial detail that Bob Marley: One Love led the box office for the second straight week with a $13.5 million weekend haul — is a pair of foreign-language films tipping over the $1 million mark: The Taste of Things, which seemed poised to make a run at the Best International Feature Film Oscar but wasn’t even nominated, and Perfect Days, Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-set film about a man who cleans toilets and listens to American classic rock. Both movies absolutely rule, and if you have the opportunity to see them in a theater, you should absolutely go. Juliette Binoche! Koji Yakusho! Anyway, they each now have one (1) box-office point.
SAG Awards: How Many Acting Awards Are Sewn Up?
It’s tempting to look at the SAG Award winners and pencil them all in to win at the Oscars. It’s the last major precursor award where all the major contenders are eligible, and that late momentum counts for a lot. (It also helps that the ceremony falls right smack in the middle of the Oscar voting window.) So will the Oscars simply carbon-copy the quartet of Murphy, Gladstone, Downey, and Randolph? There’s a decent chance: The SAG winners have matched the Oscar winners four for four in three of the past four years with the only exception being the 2021 awards that we have all agreed was a no-rules Rumspringa anomaly that has about 14 asterisks attached to it. The last regular year in which SAG and the Oscars differed when it came to the acting categories was 2019, when SAG was seduced by the beguiling charms of Glenn Close in The Wife and somehow didn’t even nominate eventual Oscar winner Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk) in Supporting Actress. There are no weird nomination snubs to consider here, nor is there anything quite so light-bending as the Glenn Close Oscar Narrative at play, so I’d bet on the four SAG winners to repeat.
MFL-wise, Oppenheimer picked up 120 points via wins for Murphy, Downey, and the ensemble cast. Killers of the Flower Moon and The Holdovers held their own with 35 points apiece for Gladstone and Randolph, respectively. And Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning picked up ten points for a win in the Stunt Ensemble category.
Indie Spirits: Past Lives Comes Full Circle
More than a year after making its debut at Sundance 2023, Past Lives enjoyed the apex of its awards-season journey, winning Best Feature and Best Director for Celine Song at the Independent Spirit Awards. With its 50-point haul, Past Lives is up to 670 points in the season, making it the seventh-most-successful film in the fantasy league this year.
One of the six films ahead of Past Lives in the standings is The Holdovers, which took home three awards (+60 points) on the afternoon: Randolph for Best Supporting Performance, Dominic Sessa for Best Breakthrough Performance, and Eigil Bryld for Best Cinematography.
American Fiction tied Past Lives for second-most awards (+50 points) with two wins: Jeffrey Wright for Best Lead Performance and Cord Jefferson for Best Screenplay.
The Producers
And finally, the Producers Guild of America had only three categories upon which to heap awards points, but heap it did! Oppenheimer’s Nolan, Emma Thomas, and Charles Roven won for producing the best film of the year, while Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and American Symphony took the awards for Best Animated and Best Documentary, respectively. Thirty points heaped on them all!
Leaderboard
The seven-way first-place tie that has dominated the past few months of the league is holding on by the tips of Dick Feynmans Bongoes. (Oh, grow up — that’s the name of one of the teams.) Currently, a mere 23 points separate the front seven from the two teams trailing them: Bernstein Bear Biopic metaverse (solid name!) and Anatomy of a Swiftie (interesting name!), which both rode the Past Lives wave to get into the second-tier spot. And then those Oppenheimer rosters are now even closer with the top Oppy rosters around only 200 points shy of first place with plenty of Oscars points to be had. We may be in for a photo finish.
You can see the full leaderboard here on the main MFL landing page.
Looking Ahead
We all get one weekend to rest up and then it’s Oscar Time, baby! March 10! Jimmy Kimmel! Ryan Gosling performing “I’m Just Kenâ€! The First Wives Club reuniting onstage to present Best Picture! (Manifesting — we’re manifesting.) See you then!
Questions? Feedback? Can’t find your team or mini-league on the leaderboard? Drop us a line at [email protected].