The Academy Awards are a strange affair. Last year, they ignored Tár, a brilliant film that will be remembered as long as cinema exists, in favor of Everything Everywhere All At Once, an over-excitable picture that barely deserves to linger in the memory as long as you can recite its unmemorable name. But the nature of awards is that its directors — the Daniels! — are now Oscar-winning filmmakers, and so score above Hitchcock, Kubrick, Fincher and the rest.
Anyway, we are now in that brief period where Christopher Nolan, the most significant director of the past two decades, is not an Oscar winner, yet soon, that will no longer be the case. Which is richly deserved; Oppenheimer was the outstanding film of 2023, a rich extravaganza of sound and vision that suggested that, even in these dog days of streaming and TikTok, the big screen has a future. There were other superb pictures, in the best year for cinema in more than a decade, and it seems a shame that something as accomplished as Killers of the Flower Moon will go home largely empty-handed. But that is the nature of competition, so here are The Spectator World’s picks for winners on the night — as well as those that should have been in with a shout.
Best Film
Predicted winner — Oppenheimer
Deserved winner — Oppenheimer
This one isn’t very hard. An astonishingly constructed epic that, more importantly for the industry, made a shedload of money, it will deservedly sweep the board and be the first blockbuster since The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King to take the title. Were it not to do so, it would be the greatest upset in Oscar history.
Best Director
Predicted winner — Christopher Nolan
Deserved winner — Christopher Nolan
Spielberg had Schindler’s List; Nolan has Oppenheimer. I would literally bet my house on this award. Scorsese, in another world, would deservedly be in with a shout, but not this year.
Best Actor
Predicted winner — Cillian Murphy
Deserved winner — Murphy/Paul Giamatti
This is a tough one. Films about schoolmasters usually appeal to the Academy, but Robin Williams lost Best Actor for Dead Poets Society to Daniel Day Lewis, giving it his best acting in My Left Foot. The Williams performance endures; Day Lewis does not. Anyway. Giamatti is also playing a teacher at an exclusive private school, à la Williams, but he is a curmudgeon who suffers from hemorrhoids and hates his students. Less “O Captain, My Captain,” and more “O ass! My ass!” Nevertheless, Giamatti is fabulous — rich and moving and complex. But Murphy will probably win it partly because of the Oppenheimer sweep and partly because he gives a unorthodox performance in a Bowie-esque manner; less the man who sold the world, more the man who all but destroyed it.
Best Actress
Predicted winner — Emma Stone
Deserved winner — Emma Stone/Lily Gladstone
This is a very tough one. Emma Stone in Poor Things, especially in the first third, draws attention to her technique, and I was often annoyed by Yorgos Lanthimos’s direction of her. (I may be alone in not finding her delivery of the line “I must go punch that baby” all that funny.) But by the end she has warmed into the delivery of her favorite screenwriter Tony McNamara’s dialogue and is firing off brilliant one-liners like a latter-day Bette Davis. Lily Gladstone, in Killers of the Flower Moon, is more poignant, and as a Native American actress would be a more significant win. But she’s not in the film all that much — Best Supporting would have been a cinch — and so my money is on Stone. Wild card? Sandra Hüller for Anatomy of a Fall. Not a blockbuster, but Oscar voters are very enthusiastic for it.
Best Supporting Actor
Predicted winner — Robert Downey Jr.
Deserved winner — Robert Downey Jr.
Robert Downey Jr. is one of those actors who has been through the mill, and then some. Now, he’s due his Oscar. Whatever you make of his superhero films, Tony Stark brought in billions, and his fascinatingly unstarry performance as Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss reminded us all that he can act. He’ll do a great speech; case closed.
Best Supporting Actress
Predicted winner — Da’Vine Joy Randolph
Deserved winner — Penélope Cruz
A very thin field this year, which is odd because it was a vintage year for film. Emily Blunt has one standout scene in Oppenheimer, hence the nomination, and Jodie Foster comes back in for Nyad because she is Hollywood royalty. Da’Vine Joy Randolph will win for her poignant performance in The Holdovers, and few would carp at that, but I can’t help feeling that Penélope Cruz’s extraordinary work in Michael Mann’s Ferrari has been somewhat overlooked on the grounds that the film isn’t great and so she has struggled to get the recognition — and nominations — for her fiery, nuanced turn that she deserves.
Other potential surprises or shocks
Oppenheimer is going to sweep the board, barring the most unexpected of shocks. Cinematography, Editing, Score, Sound and possibly a few others should be firmly in its grasp. Expect American Fiction to take Best Adapted Screenplay, Anatomy of a Fall to get Best Original Screenplay, Zone of Interest to win Best Film Not in the English Language and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse to swing away with Best Animated Feature. Any room for maneuver? Perhaps. But this is, from our perspective, the most predictable and least surprising ceremony in years. Let’s hope for a Will Smith-esque explosion, because that will shake things up considerably.
