Will 'Sinners' Prevail at the Oscars?
And six other urgent questions about Hollywood's biggest night
The ballots have been cast, the limos have been booked, and the Botox has been injected.
On Sunday night, the 98th Academy Awards will take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, with Sinners and One Battle After Another both expected to win big.
Hosted by Conan O’Brien and airing on ABC, the awards come at a moment of profound uncertainty in the film business — and the world as a whole. This volatility has seeped into the Oscars themselves; many key categories, particularly on the acting side, seem almost ridiculously wide open.
Only a few things seem certain. Jessie Buckley will win best actress for her gut-wrenching performance as a grieving mother in Hamnet, no matter how much she dislikes cats. Host Conan O’ Brien will be self-deprecating and hilarious, reminding us all why we loved having him on late-night TV. And none of us will be able to get “Golden,” the Oscar-nominated earworm from KPop Demon Hunters that will be performed Sunday, out of our heads.
Every Oscar season brings its fair share of scandals and this year is no different, with a late-breaking controversy involving a certain actor’s feelings about other art forms throwing more chaos into the mix.
Here are the biggest questions about this year’s Oscars. Follow the show with me on Sunday night in The Contrarian subscriber chat.
Will last-minute momentum propel Sinners past One Battle After Another?
The race for best picture has two clear frontrunners, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Though one is a Gothic horror tale about vampires in the Jim Crow South and the other a darkly comic political thriller about a burned-out ex-radical on the run from white supremacist goons, the films have a lot in common. Both speak powerfully to the current moment and confront the pernicious influence of racism on American life. Both were produced by Warner Bros., a studio that’s about to get swallowed up in yet another corporate merger. And both were made by visionary writer-directors who broke out as twentysomething wunderkinds and have since established themselves as cinematic elder statesmen.
One Battle After Another has been the odds-on favorite since September, when it opened to ecstatic reviews and solid box office returns. It has won many precursor awards, including the Producers Guild Award and the BAFTA. But in recent weeks, momentum for Sinners and its stars has been building momentum. It earned a record-setting 16 Oscar nominations — to OBAA’s 13 — and picked up an award from the Screen Actors Guild for outstanding ensemble. A rare box office smash that isn’t part of an established franchise or based on existing IP, Sinners is exactly the kind of film that the industry should support in this uncertain moment, and Coogler an unusually versatile filmmaker equally adept at big-budget superhero movies and Sundance dramas. At a time when Republicans are openly embracing white supremacist rhetoric, the Academy could send a powerful message by honoring a crowd-pleasing film that was directed by a Black man, features a predominantly Black cast, and is a thrilling celebration of Black culture.
Will Timothée walk away emptée-handed?
The award for “most unpredictable category of the year” easily goes to the race for lead actor. In early January, Timothée Chalamet clinched the Golden Globe and appeared to be cruising to an Oscar for his performance as a wildly annoying, pockmarked ping-pong player in Marty Supreme. (An award he hoped to win last year for his work in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.)
Then came a bunch of boastful press tour soundbites that made everyone wonder if Chalamet was really just playing himself in the movie, followed by a series of upsets at precursor awards. At the BAFTAs, he lost to Robert Aramayo, the little-known star of I Swear. A week later, the Screen Actors Guild honored Michael B. Jordan for his compelling turn as twin brothers in Sinners. As voting closed last week, Chalamet was in the news again for making dismissive comments about ballet and opera during a town hall conversation with Matthew McConaughey (a sentence I can’t believe I just wrote). The slow-burning Chalamet backlash exploded into a full-blown inferno, with everyone from Nathan Lane to Misty Copeland lobbing criticism at Kylie Jenner’s boyfriend.
All this chaos means the best actor category is surprisingly wide open. While Jordan is now narrowly favored to win, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which Chalamet gets his long-awaited Oscar anyway, or even in which Wagner Moura, Ethan Hawke, or Leonardo DiCaprio prevails. Each nominee is plausible for different reasons: Hawke is widely beloved and has been nominated four previous times, twice for acting; Wagner Moura is quietly brilliant in The Secret Agent, and is likely to do well with international voters; and Leonardo DiCaprio delivers his funniest, most vulnerable performance in years in OBAA. While my personal favorite is Moura (and not just because he looks so good in bellbottoms), I wouldn’t complain about any of these nominees winning. Even — deep sigh — Chalamet.
Will Paul Thomas Anderson finally nab an Oscar? Or three?
In a career spanning 30 years, Paul Thomas Anderson has made multiple modern classics, including Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and Magnolia. He is responsible for some of the most indelible cinematic moments in recent memory, and is such an enthusiastic cineaste that he shot OBAA in VistaVision, a widescreen format that hadn’t been used in 60 years, and made it all the rage in Hollywood.
Yet owing to a combination of bad luck and the Academy’s fickle taste, Anderson has yet to win an Oscar, despite 11 previous nominations. In all likelihood, that will change on Sunday night, when Anderson is up for three Oscars for writing, directing, and producing One Battle After Another. He seems all but certain to take home gold for OBAA’s screenplay, which was loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. But in the Director category, he faces stiff competition from Coogler, and for reasons outlined above, Best Picture could easily go to Sinners. For the sake of the film bros in our lives, let’s hope that Anderson’s losing streak is over, and that he doesn’t become the Susan Lucci of the Oscars.
How much will Hollywood’s merger anxiety affect the evening?
One of the most painfully ironic things about this year’s Oscars is that two leading best picture contenders, Sinners and One Battle After Another, hail from a studio, Warner Bros., that is about to get swallowed whole by Paramount, a far less successful rival that just so happens to be controlled by the son of a MAGA-friendly billionaire. In October, Warner Bros. Discovery, the giant conglomerate that was formed via merger just four years ago, was officially put up for sale. This sparked a contentious and highly politicized bidding war between Netflix and Paramount that overlapped almost perfectly with an awards season dominated by Warner Bros. Netflix scored an early victory in negotiations but abruptly backed out of the running a few weeks ago amid mounting political scrutiny, enabling Paramount to acquire WBD.
When/if the merger goes through, thousands of people will likely lose their jobs in an industry that has already faced devastating cuts. And David Ellison, the man who put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News, will have control over CNN as well as entertainment properties like Warner Bros. Will an Ellison-run studio support provocative projects like One Battle After Another, a politically charged thriller in which the undisputed villain is a white supremacist military officer; or Sinners, a Gothic horror story set in the Jim Crow South that uses vampires as a symbol for racism and Black cultural appropriation? It is far from certain.
A media watchdog group has plans to skewer Ellison with a mobile billboard outside the Dolby Theatre Sunday. But the real question is whether anyone onstage will meaningfully address the $111-billion elephant in the room, and what it means for the business — and the art — of filmmaking.
What about the war in Iran, ICE, the Epstein files and everything else going on in the world?
During Trump’s first term in office, celebrities frequently spoke out against the MAGA agenda at industry awards shows and other red carpet events. But since he returned to the White House last year, Hollywood has — on the whole — been much more muted in its criticisms of the president. Aside from a few ICE OUT pins and a barb about CBS News, the Golden Globes in January were almost bizarrely devoid of political jokes. But that was two months and at least one haphazard war ago.
At the Grammys last month, artists like Bad Bunny seemed more willing to voice dissent. Hopefully, this will embolden their peers in the film business. Many of the leading contenders this year are overtly political in nature and offer depictions of people living under authoritarian rule that feel eerily relevant to life under Trump 2.0.
The villain of One Battle After Another is Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a Greg Bovino-esque white supremacist military officer who hunts down immigrants with glee. Best picture nominee The Secret Agent revisits the Brazilian military dictatorship, while It Was Just An Accident was inspired by dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s time in an Iranian prison. It would be hard to imagine some of the predicted winners — like Penn — not using the stage to say something about, well, everything going on in the world. But we’ll see.
Who will win the new Oscar for casting?
This year brings the first new category added to the Oscars in a quarter-century. For the first time in its history, the Academy will hand out an award for achievement in casting. The move has thrilled many casting professionals, whose job is poorly understood by the general public and even by industry peers. (For great insight into the work that casting directors do, check out the documentary Casting By.) Most prognosticators think that Francine Maisler is likely to win for her work on Sinners, but it’s a brand-new category, and anything can happen.
Will this be the most devastating “In Memoriam” ever?
The last year has been a brutal one for celebrity deaths. Over the last 12 months, we’ve lost internationally beloved stars including Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, Rob Reiner, Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd, and Catherine O’Hara. The annual “in Memoriam” segment is always heavily scrutinized by viewers, who are hyper-sensitive to omissions and perceived slights. Producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan have already said they plan to have an extended In Memoriam this year. “We’ve had an incredibly tough year of losses,” Mullan told Variety. “So many cinema titans have passed away, and there are so many people who care so deeply for a lot of the people we’ll be tributing and honoring.” Barbra Streisand was also reportedly in talks to perform during the segment in tribute to Redford, her co-star in The Way We Were. So have your Kleenex ready.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian. Follow her Live commentary of the Oscars Sunday night within The Contrarian Chat.
I saw Sinners, OBAA, Hamnet and The Secret Agent in cinemas, and each movie was worth seeing.Ditto for Sentimental Value
In light of what's going on in this country right now, I hope "Sinners" wins, just to piss the orange dumpster off. I haven't seen it yet, but from everything I read it would be well worth it.