The scarcity of American films, which was on display when Cannes announced its official selection last week, continued into Critics’ Week, or La Semaine de la Critique. None of the seven competition films or four special screenings come from U.S. filmmakers, with almost 20 countries represented but France dominating just as it did in the main lineup.

The opening film will be Vietnamese filmmaker Phuong Mai Nguyen’s animated “In Waves,” a first for Critics’ Week. The sidebar will close with Felix de Givry’s “Adieu monde cruel.”

Both the opening and closing films come from first-time directors. Other first-timers in Critics’ Week are Sara Ishaq, Zou Jing, Bruno Santamaria Razo, Julien Gaspar-Oliveri and Pierre Le Gall.

Critics’ Week is its 65th year as Cannes’ oldest independent sidebar. It was the section that brought the Cannes debuts of Guillermo del Toro, Julia Ducournau, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jacques Audiard, Ken Loach and Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

Last year’s Critics’ Week selections included Shih-Ching Tsou’s “Left-Handed Girl,” which made the Oscars international shortlist as the Taiwanese Oscar entry, as well as Sven Bresser’s Dutch Oscar entry “Reedland” and Pauline Loques’ Cesar Award winner “Nino.”

New initiatives this year include Sony funding a 4,000 Euro prize for the winner of Critics’ Week’s Discovery Prize for Short Film and the Institut français partnering with the Critics’ Week and the Marché du Film for a program of conferences, panels and workshops.

This year’s Critics’ Week will begin on May 13, the day after Cannes kicks off, and run through May 21. The festival’s other major independent sidebar, Directors Fortnight, is scheduled to announce its lineup on Tuesday.

The lineup:

Opening film:
“In Waves,” Phuong Mai Nguyen

“A Girl Unknown,” Zou Jing
“The Station,” Sara Ishaq
“Dua,” Blerta Basholli
“Seis meses en el edificio rosa con azul,” Bruno Santamaria Razo
“La Gradiva,” Marine Atlan
“Tin Castle,” Alexander Murphy
“Viva,” Aina Clotet

Closing film:
“Adieu monde cruel,” Felix de Givry

Special screenings:
“Stonewall,” Julien Gaspar-Oliveri
“Flesh and Fuel,” Pierre Le Gall

The post Cannes Critics Week Reveals International Lineup, No U.S. Films appeared first on TheWrap.

At a press conference in Paris, Cannes general delegate Thierry Frémaux and president Iris Knobloch unveiled 21 films that will screen in the main competition, along with additional titles in the Un Certain Regard section and in various out-of-competition sections.

The festival announced fewer films than it usually does, particularly in UCR, but Frémaux promised additions to the lineup in coming days, saying that some deals had yet to be finalized.

Past winners of the Palme d’Or returning to Cannes include Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won for “Shoplifters” in 2018 and is back with “Sheep in the Box”; and Cristian Mungiu, a winner for 2007’s “4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days” who this year has the Norwegian-language film “Fjord,” starring the Oscar-nominated “Sentimental Value” actress Renate Reinsve.

Kore-eda’s film will be distributed in the United States by Neon, the company that has released the last six Palme d’Or winners. The company also has the competition selection “The Unknown” from Arthur Harari, the co-writer of the Palme winner “Anatomy of a Fall.”

The lineup also includes the previously announced “Propellor One-Way Night Coach,” the directorial debut of actor John Travolta; and “The Electric Kiss,” a French film by Pierre Salvadori that will be the opening-night attraction.

While the lineup has a smaller-than-usual contingent of American films and an absence of major-studio movies, U.S. directors with films in the official selection include Gray; Ira Sachs, with “The Man I Love”; Howard and Soderbergh, with the documentaries “Avedon” and “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” respectively; Jane Schoenbrun, the indie director of “I Saw the TV Glow” who has the Hannah Einbinder/Gillian Anderson slasher film “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” in Un Certain Regard; comedian/filmmaker Jordan Firstman, also in UCR with “Club Kid”; and actor-turned-director Andy Garcia with “Diamond.”

Other notable international auteurs in the selection are Andrey Zvyagintsev (“Leviathan”) with “Minotaur,” Laszlo Nemes (“Son of Saul”) with “Moulin,” Ryuske Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”) with “Sudden” and Asghar Farhadi (“A Separation”) with “Parallel Tales.”

Actors with films in the official selection include Sandra Huller with “Fatherland,” Javier Bardem with “El Ser Querido,” Sebastian Stan with “Fjord,” Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart with Quentin Dupieux’s “Full Phil,” Charles Melton with Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Her Private Hell,” Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander with Na Hong-jin’s “Hope.”

This year’s announcement comes after an impressive seven-year streak in which at least one film from the Cannes official selection has gone on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture every year, with a high of three nominees in 2024 and 2022. Over the last 10 festivals, 51 Cannes films have been nominated for Oscars, 16 have been nominated for Best Picture and two, “Parasite” and “Anora,” have won Best Picture, the first to turn that double play since “Marty” in 1955.

The festival previously announced that director Peter Jackson and actress/singer/director Barbra Streisand will receive Honorary Palme d’Or awards.

Additional selections will be announced in the coming weeks. The 79th annual Cannes Film Festival will begin on Tuesday, May 12 and run through Saturday, May 23, with South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook serving as the president of the main competition jury.

The Directors Fortnight and Critics Week sidebars are expected to announce their lineups next week.

Here is the 2026 official selection.

Main Competition

“Bitter Christmas” (“Amarga Navidad”), Pedro Almodovar
“Parallel Tales,” Asghar Farhadi
“Minotaur,” Andrey Zvyagintsev
“The Beloved” (“El Ser Querido”), Rodrigo Sorogoyen
“A Woman’s Life,” Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
“The Man I Love,” Ira Sachs
“Fatherland,” Pawel Pawlikowski 
“The Birthday Party,” Lea Mysius
“Moulin,” Laszlo Nemes
“Fjord,” Cristian Mungiu
“Gentle Monster,” Marie Kreutzer
“Notre Salut,” Emmanuel Marre
“Nagi Notes,” Koji Fukada 
“Hope,” Na Hong-jin
“Sheep in the Box,” Hirokazu Kore-eda
“Another Day,” Jeanne Herry
“The Unknown,” Arthur Harari
“All of a Sudden,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi
“The Dreamed Adventure” (“Das Getraumte Abenteuer”), Valeska Grisebach
“Coward,” Lukas Dhont
“The Black Ball” (“La Bola Negra”), Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo

Un Certain Regard

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” Jane Schoenbrun (opening film)
“Elephants in the Fog,” Abinash Bikram Shah
“Iron Boy,” Louis Clichy
“Ben’imana,” Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo
“Congo Boy,” Rafiki Fariala
“Club Kid,” Jordan Firstman
“Ula,” Viesturs Kairiss
“La mas dulce” (“Strawberries”), Laila Marrakchi
“The Meltdown” (“El Deshielo”), Manuela Martelli
“Forever Your Maternal Animal” (Siempre Soy tu Animal Materno”), Valentina Maurel
“Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep,” Rakan Mayasi
“I’ll Be Gone in June,” Katharina Rivilis
“Words of Love,” Rudi Rosenberg
“Everytime,” Sandra Wollner
“All the Lovers in the Night,” Sode Yukiko

Out of Competition

“The Electric Kiss,” Pierre Salvadori (opening night film)
“Diamond,” Andy Garcia
“Her Private Hell,” Nicolas Winding Refn
“L’Abandon,” Vincent Garenq
“Karma,” Guillaume Canet
“Crescendo,” Agnes Jaoui
“La Bataille de Gaulle: L’Age de fer,” Antonin Baudry

Cannes Premiere

“Propellor One-Way Night Coach,” John Travolta
“Kokurojo” (“The Samurai and the Prisoner”), Kiyoshi Kurosawa
“Visitation” (“Heimsuchung”), Volker Schlondorff
“The Third Night” (“La Troisieme Nuit”), Daniel Auteuil
“The Match,” Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco

Special Screenings

“Rehearsals for a Revolution,” Pegan Ahangarani
“Les Matins Merveilleux,” Avril Besson
“L’Affaire Marie-Claire,” Lauriana Escaffre and Yvo Muller
“Avedon,” Ron Howard
“The Survivors of Che,” Christophe Reveille
“John Lennon: The Last Interview,” Stephen Soderbergh
“Cantona,” David Tryhorn and Ben Nicolas

Midnight Screenings

“Colony” (“Gun-Che”), Yeon Sang-ho
“Full Phil,” Quentin Dupieux
“Roma Elastica,” Bertrand Mandico
“Sanguine,” Marion Le Coroller
“Jim Queen,” Nicolas Athane, Marco Nguyen

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It might not have been a great Oscar show, with plenty of awkward moments and a trigger-happy approach to playing winners offstage. But in many ways, it was a richly satisfying one in the choices that voters made, which honored great and underappreciated filmmakers and spread the wealth just enough that fans of “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners,” “Hamnet,” “KPop Demon Hunters,” “Frankenstein,” “Sentimental Value” and others could all be happy.

The main message sent by the 98th Oscars was that the Academy finally decided it was time to recognize Paul Thomas Anderson. After going 0-for-11 in previous Oscar nominations for his first nine movies, PTA barreled through Sunday’s show with his freewheeling drama about a couple of generations of revolutionaries winning one award after another.

The key came an hour into the show, when the first-ever Oscar for casting went not to the favorite in the category, “Sinners,” but to longtime PTA collaborator Cassandra Kulukundis for “One Battle.” It wasn’t the first of the record 11 categories in which those two films went head-to-head (that was Best Supporting Actress, in which the nominees from both films lost to Amy Madigan), but it was a significant moment that “One Battle” might have had the upper hand in the showdown between the two frontrunners.

Twenty minutes later, Sean Penn’s victory over Delroy Lindo in the Best Supporting Actor category was another big step for “One Battle,” and the momentum began to seem inexorable – though when “Sinners” cinematographer Autumn Durald Akapaw became the first woman to ever win in her category, it was possible to feel a bit of suspense creep back into the ceremony.  

That suspense mostly dissipated when Anderson won for Best Director to go with the award he’d already won for his adapted screenplay — but before he got a chance to win his third award and give his third speech at the end of the night, “Sinners” star Michael B. Jordan got one of the most emotional moments of the ceremony when he won Best Actor, which gave “Sinners” three clear highlights after the previous wins for Coogler’s original screenplay and Autumn David Arkapaw’s cinematography, which made her the first woman ever to win in the category.

The wins for “One Battle” were a sign that maybe precedent does matter after all. After years in which the expanded and international Oscar voters consistently made choices that went against all the time-honored rules of what can and cannot win, this Oscars went back to the old truths, and suggested that if a movie wins all the things it’s supposed to win along the road to Oscar, it is indeed going to win Best Picture.

That’s what “One Battle” did. It won the most important precursor awards, the Directors Guild Award and the Producers Guild Award, along with a whole bunch of others. And then it shrugged off losing to “Sinners” at the Actor Awards, a loss that in many circles caused a massive shift in prediction that Coogler’s film would be the big winner.

But if “Sinners” had the kind of late surge that was indicated at the Actor Awards, it wasn’t enough in a year where Oscar voters may have finally decided that the 12th time was the charm for PTA. “You make a guy work hard for one of these,” he said when he won his second award.

Warner Bros., which released both “One Battle” and “Sinners,” studiously avoided playing favorites, and the four awards won by the latter film were all so significant that it’s hard to view the results as a disappointment for Camp Coogler.

Meanwhile, “Sentimental Value” and “Hamnet” only won a single award each, but their categories — Best International Feature Film and Best Actress — were so significant that it’s hard to feel as if the films were slighted. And while Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” didn’t cash in its above-the-line nominations, it cleaned up in three crafts categories, as it should.

So the show had a tie, a landmark Oscar to a female cinematographer, a nicely varied slate of winners, a few barbed political speeches, a no-show winner who became the butt of a joke and a couple of overdue auteurs taking home statuettes. Plenty of qualms aside, that’s pretty much what you want from an Oscar show.

And then there was the beautifully moving and super-sized In Memoriam sequence, which reacted to a year of enormous losses in the only way you could – by giving it the time, the words and the images it deserved, from the line of people paying tribute to Rob Reiner to the appropriately tremulous voice of Barbra Streisand singing “The Way We Were.”

Looking back at the end of a strong year for cinema (artistically if not financially), this show wasn’t a bad way to sum up the way we were.

The post Is Everybody Happy? ‘One Battle After Another,’ ‘Sinners’ Trade Awards at Satisfying Oscars appeared first on TheWrap.

It’s all the stuff surrounding that race that has made this a messy, troubled and exhausting season.

So let’s start with the good news, OK?

“One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” appear to be locked in one of the tightest Best Picture races in many years, and both are the kind of bold, entertaining films that it’s easy to embrace and root for. Most “One Battle” fans I know would be accepting of a “Sinners” win, and vice versa; this isn’t a “The King’s Speech” vs. “The Social Network” or “Green Book” vs. “Roma” or “CODA” vs. “The Power of the Dog” battle where devotees of one frontrunner were upset at the idea of its rival winning.

And beyond Best Picture, three of the four acting races appear to be genuinely suspenseful: Michael B. Jordan, Timothee Chalamet, Wagner Moura and Ethan Hawke are all potential Best Actor winners, while the supporting races feature Sean Penn and Amy Madigan as shaky frontrunners and Stellan Skarsgard, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku and Teyana Taylor as entirely possible winners.

On the face of it, the Oscar show is likely to be a triumph for Warner Bros., which released both “One Battle” and “Sinners,” and for Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chairs and CEOs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose string of successes wiped out memories of their rocky early tenure at the studio and seems destined to culminate in triumph at the Dolby Theatre.

The studio dominated the 2025 box office with $4 billion out of the industry’s total of $8.8 billion, and a victory by either film would be the studio’s 10th Best Picture winner, making Warners the fifth studio to hit double digits after Columbia (12), United Artists (12), Paramount (11) and Universal (10). (The other WB winners were “The Life of Emile Zola,” “Casablanca,” “My Fair Lady,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Unforgiven,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “The Departed” and “Argo.”) It would be the first WB winner in 13 years, since “Argo” in 2013.

But would it be the last? Aye, there’s the rub. With Warner Bros. Discovery set to be acquired by David Ellison’s Paramount, the fate of the studio has kept Hollywood buzzing for months – and while Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav talked up the slate that De Luca and Abdy are preparing for 2026, 2027 and 2028 at the studio’s salute to its Oscar nominees on Friday night at Mother Wolf in Hollywood, uncertainty hangs over the studio even in its moment of presumed Oscar glory.  

In fact, the Oscars arrive as uncertainty afflicts the entire entertainment industry, and in particular theatrical film. Which means that every reason to celebrate on Sunday night will arrive accompanied by big question marks about the art form that’s being celebrated.

And then there are those other question marks about the world that have little to do with the entertainment industry and everything to do with geopolitical turmoil. The last time the Academy Awards took place just after the U.S. had launched an attack on a country in the Middle East, it was 2003 and the war in Iraq shook the Oscars to its core.

This time, we’re at war (or whatever the administration wants to call it today) with Iran, and the effect on the show remains to be seen. Will it be mentioned from the stage of the Dolby? Of course it will. Will it dominate speeches or produce another Michael Moore “Shame on you, Mr. Bush!” moment? That probably depends on who wins, though I wouldn’t bet against it.

On the other hand, maybe people will be too exhausted to get worked up on stage, given that the awards season has been so long, ending on the third Sunday of March. If you discount 2021, when the show was delayed by two months by the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2022, when it was delayed by one month, the last time the ceremony was this late in March was 2003, that same wartime show that produced Moore’s speech.

Otherwise, the shows have typically taken place in late February, with a detour into the first week of March every four years because of the Winter Olympics.

This year’s elongated schedule, which was instituted partly to give voters more time to see all the films, has drawn a fair amount of grumbling on the awards circuit in recent weeks. “Why have we spent the last two weeks talking about ballet and cats?” scoffed one Best Picture nominee on Friday, referring to the media tempests-in-teapots over Timothee Chalamet’s dismissive remarks about ballet and opera and Jessie Buckley’s three-month-old comments about not getting along with one of her husband-to-be’s cats. “That’s what you get when the season stretches out this long.”

The real question facing the Academy and ABC, though, isn’t whether the nominees and industry figures are turned off by the endless awards season – it’s whether potential viewers will want to tune in to watch an awards show devoted to movies that for the most part haven’t been in theaters for weeks. The network’s streak of broadcasting Oscar shows, which began 51 years ago, will end in two years on the heels of the 100th ceremony, and neither the Academy nor ABC wants the impending move to YouTube to be preceded by dismal ratings.

Last year’s ceremony drew just shy of 20 million viewers. Hitting that figure would have seemed disappointing only six years ago, but now it would feel like an accomplishment, after viewership bottomed out at 10.4 million the year of COVID and has slowly climbed back up since then. As for the days that routinely brought 40 million-plus viewers, those seem to be long gone, though they were really only 12 years ago.

So that’s the big challenge as Oscar night (or, in the Pacific Time Zone, Oscar late afternoon) arrives: Will a tight race between two very good movies that have made almost $600 million between them be enough to overcome a late date, a slumping industry and a war?

In the long run, that’s a bigger and more important question than “What’s gonna win?”

The post It’s Time for the Oscars, So Never Mind the Slumping Industry and the War appeared first on TheWrap.

The song lurches through a few different rhythms even before the out-of-tune voices of three young women come in and struggle (but fail) to mesh as they obliterate any and all considerations of good and bad in pop music.

It was (and still is) jaw-dropping music, fascinating and oddly compelling even if it is totally inept by any normal standard. And even before I would explain that it was made by three teenage girls whose father took them out of school so that they could concentrate on the music career he was sure would make them stars, the biggest kick for me would come from watching people’s faces as they first encountered the Shaggs and tried to figure out if what they were listening to was appalling, transfixing or some ungodly combination thereof.

And now, many years later, a documentary called “We Are the Shaggs” premiered at the South-by-Southwest Film Festival on Friday. It starts with an absolutely perfect first two minutes, as about two dozen different people listen to “My Pal Foot Foot” for the first time and try to figure out what the hell they’re hearing. It’s not a great opening sequence because it pretty much duplicates what I used to do; it’s a great opening sequence because if you’re gonna make a movie about the Shaggs, you simply must begin it by sitting people down and playing them “My Pal Foot Foot.” It’s the only way.

Fortunately, director Ken Kwapis (“The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” “The Office”) knows that. He would, because he’s been listening to the Shaggs since 1980, when he bought a copy of the first reissue of the uber-indie 1969 album “Philosophy of the World,” a slab of rudimentary and misshapen bashing and bleating that somehow manages to be both tuneless and timeless, baffling most listeners while it attracted fans as diverse as Frank Zappa, NRBQ’s Terry Adams and, later, Kurt Cobain.   

But the Shaggs – Dorothy (“Dot”), Helen and Betty Wiggin, from Fremont, New Hampshire – didn’t make music to impress Frank or Terry or Kurt or you or me. They made it because their dad told them to. Austin Wiggin Jr. was determined to fulfill a palm reading from his mother, who prophesied that he’d marry a strawberry blonde (he did) and have three girls who’d form a band (they did) and become successful and famous (well…). He enrolled his daughters in a mail-order home school, prevented them from having any kind of social life and designed a draconian schedule of  rehearsal and calisthenics.

The result was songs like “Who Are Parents?” (“Who are parents? / Parents are the ones who really care”), which “Philosophy of the World: The Shaggs” playwright Joy Gregory describes as “a hostage message.”

As the movie makes clear, the story doesn’t get any more normal from there. Austin Wiggin took his daughters into a small studio and paid for a one-day session to make a record, where the engineer told him their guitars were out of tune. “I got these guitars at Sears Roebuck,” Wiggin insisted. “They’re guaranteed. They don’t need to be tuned.”

One thousand copies of “Philosophy of the World” were pressed, and 900 of them promptly disappeared. A 45 rpm single of “My Pal Foot Foot” was pressed and misspelled their name. (“The Shags.”) Helen got married but was afraid to tell her father, so she continued living at home for three months until he found out. The band ended when their father died of a heart attack at the age of 47, then occasionally played again after a 1999 New Yorker story by Susan Orlean told the full story for the first time.

“We Are the Shaggs” tells the story, too, but Kwapis is after more than a biography, as entertaining as that might be. Beyond the befuddled listeners at the beginning of the film, he’s assembled a group of insiders, admirers and zealots to not only flesh out the tale, but also testify as to how awesome the Shaggs are and make the case for them as exemplars of outsider art.

Jesse Krakow, a “Shaggs absolutist” who recreates their songs with his Shaggs tribute band, testifies as to how difficult their music can be to play: “It’s like hieroglyphics. It never gets easier.” Composer Eric Lyon insists that the song “Philosophy of the World” (“Oh the rich people want what the poor people’s got / And the poor people want what the rich people’s got…”) is “if anything, a call to arms for anybody who thinks more empathy would make things better in the United States.” Musicologist Susan Rogers puts a feminist spin on the Shaggs conversation: “The knee-jerk assumption is we assume they don’t know what they’re doing, and that’s why this turned out like this,” she says. “And I wonder, if they had been brothers and not sisters, would we make the same assumption? Maybe we’d think, they’re punk. They know better. They’re just being contrarians. They’re being rock ’n’ roll.”

Are they reading too much into the music? The Wiggin sisters might think so. In Orlean’s article and in interviews done for the film, the surviving Shaggs, Dot and Betty, seem a little embarrassed by the attention they’ve gotten, and dismissive of any notion that the primitive genius some devotees have unearthed in their music was in any sense deliberate or even genuine. In the New Yorker article, Betty responded to Orlean listening to “Philosophy of the World” by saying, “God, it’s horrible.” And in the movie, when Kwapis asks her about her fondest memory of the Shaggs, she quietly says, “I don’t have a real lot of fond memories of it.”

But even if the film sometimes seems to overplay the Shaggs worship, it never loses sight of how weirdly fascinating this story is, and how strangely entertaining. “We Are the Shaggs” is also pretty persuasive in making the case that conventional definitions of quality are useless when you’re talking about this music, which Kwapis refers to as “the most head-scratching music ever committed to vinyl.”

So go ahead, pull up a chair, put on “My Pal Foot Foot” and keep an eye out for “We Are the Shaggs.” It’s got a bad beat and you can scratch your head to it.

The post ‘We Are the Shaggs’ Review: The Band Is Awful, but the Movie Isn’t appeared first on TheWrap.

There are dramatic differences between the two years, of course. In 2003, the war began only three days before the Oscars, prompting immediate talk of canceling the show and leading to a decision to eliminate the red carpet lined with fans and press; in 2026, there was no outcry to cancel or delay the ceremony. When the war in Iraq started in 2003, it was the main – in fact, the only – topic of conversation in Academy Awards circles. But on the weekend when hostilities began in Iran this year, the big awards news was that “Sinners” had beaten “One Battle After Another” at the Actor Awards.

But a few of the same people were involved with both shoes: Kate Hudson was a presenter then and is nominated now, and Joe Letteri won the visual-effects Oscar in 2003 for “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” and is nominated again in 2026 for “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” And above all, both shows have raised qualms about celebrating entertainment at a time when bombs are falling, and both raised obvious security concerns, this year’s focusing on a threat of Iranian drone strikes on California, something far beyond the scope of Oscars security.

In that atmosphere, it seemed to be a good time to take a look back at how the 2003 show played out behind the scenes.

In the fall of 2002, as producer Gil Cates got to work on what would be the 11th Academy Awards show of the 14 he would produce, the administration of George W. Bush had been talking about removing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power, forcibly if necessary. The president spoke of ties between Hussein and the Al Qaeda terrorist organization responsible for the previous year’s 9/11 attacks on America, of the dictator’s record of brutality and violence within his own country, of the likelihood that he had or was preparing weapons of mass destruction. 

After the first of the year, as Oscar voters produced a slate of nominations headed by Rob Marshall’s “Chicago,” Martin Scorsese’s “The Gangs of New York” and Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” military action seemed increasingly likely. On March 6, two and a half weeks before the Oscars were scheduled to take place on March 23, President Bush gave a press conference in which he pushed for a United Nations vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. 

The same day, about 100 Oscar staffers met for a production meeting at which Cates promised the show would go on. Then the Oscars’ longtime security chief, Kirk Smith, delivered some final advice for the room. “Security will be tighter than ever this year,” he said. “We ask that you tell your folks, please empty out your trunks before you come to the theater. We will be searching cars, and we don’t want to have to go through your vacation stuff every time you drive into the building.”

A week later, Cates did a series of radio interviews to promote the show, then shook his head when an ABC staffer asked him what he thought the chances of war were. “I think we’re going to war,” he said. “I only hope — and I know this sounds awful — I hope it either starts Monday the 17th, or March 24th.  If it starts anytime between the 20th and the 23rd, we’re f—ed. We are f—ed.”

On Monday the 17th, Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to relinquish power and leave Iraq. On Tuesday, Hussein rejected Bush’s ultimatum. Inside the production, fears grew that if the war began Thursday or later, blanket news coverage would make televising the show impossible. 

Backstage at the Kodak Theatre, Cates hung a sign on his door that read, “WHEN THIS DOOR IS CLOSED, PLEASE DO NOT COME IN.” Danette Herman, the show’s longtime talent booker, who had been working for weeks to persuade former winners to return for a 75th anniversary reunion, hung one on her door that read simply, “THE BUNKER.”

Midweek, Will Smith’s publicist called to say that the actor no longer felt it was appropriate for him to be on the show as a presenter. Herman quickly replaced Smith with Brendan Fraser. Increasingly, Cates and Herman fielded phone calls from reps for actors who were uncertain about walking the red carpet, who said they’d rather quietly slip in the back way. 

“These were intense times,” Danette Herman said. “As Gil and I quickly learned from our many phone calls with participants, they had sensitivities about what was going on in another part of the world and the impact it could have here. Keeping that in mind was at the forefront of our discussions.  And there were many.”    

At lunch on Wednesday, a group of production and Academy staffers met at a restaurant in the Hollywood & Highland complex to go over their options. The idea of hanging onto the theater for an extra week was discussed but eliminated; it would have entailed buying out the run of an incoming Scooby-Doo musical, an expensive proposition. Cates suggested doing away with the fans along the red carpet, saying that it wouldn’t be appropriate for celebrities to run that shrieking gauntlet. 

“If you do that but keep the press there,” his press aide Chuck Warn said, “they’re just going to keep asking about the lack of fans.”

“Well,” Cates said, “then maybe we should get rid of the press, too.”

A couple of hours later, Cates and Academy president Frank Pierson gave a small press conference. “For some months now, Gil and his crew have been preparing for our show on Sunday while the clouds of war were gathering around us,” read Pierson from a page in front of him. “We always knew there were some changes we would make if we needed to … We need the show to reflect a kind of soberness and seriousness we are all confronted with.”

Cates then announced the changes that would be made: The portion of the red carpet that ran along Hollywood Boulevard between bleachers filled with press and fans would be eliminated. Interviews on the red carpet would not be permitted, and only a few crews would be allowed to photograph arriving stars. The pre-show broadcast would be scaled back, and its tone changed to reflect events in the world.

Privately, they ordered a brown carpet to replace the red carpet, but then decided that red would be OK without the fans and the press.

In the production office inside the Kodak, five laminated, blown-up pages went up on the wall. Three of the pages deal with the protocol on handling bomb threats, two with handling suspicious mail. A film sequence originally planned to open the telecast – a satellite photo that started in space, then zoomed in on North America, then on the west coast, on Southern California, on Los Angeles and on Hollywood, all the way down to a tight shot of the roof of the Kodak – was quietly eliminated, because it was disturbingly similar to aerial reconnaissance photos and to shots seen during the first Gulf War of “smart bombs” taking out specific targets.

On Thursday, the war began in earnest. Rehearsals went on as usual, but the monitors inside the Kodak that normally showed show footage were turned to CNN and ABC News. Jim Carrey, Cate Blanchett and Angelina Jolie joined the quiet stream of presenters who pulled out.   

At one point, Cates walked to the production table in the orchestra section of the theater, sat down and sighed. “It’s been a very strange year,” he said softly. “Very strange. I was literally on the phone with Annette Bening, and the second I hung up the phone it rang again, and somebody was calling me to say, ‘Did you hear Annette Bening cancelled?’ I do not know where the rumors come from, but you cannot control them.” (Eventually, Bening did cancel.)

Host Steve Martin and his writers kept adjusted the opening monologue – but in truth, most of his cuts were to save time, not to reflect the stormy times.

By Saturday, bombs were continuing to drop as the “Shock and Awe” campaign picked up, and most of the networks kept up their nonstop coverage of the hostilities. But in the Kodak, with dress rehearsal looming, staffers no longer gathered to watch CNN and see if events would affect the show; instead, they glanced at it as they worked, assuming that the Oscars would take place as scheduled.

The performers of the nominated songs – Paul Simon, U2, Queen Latifah and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Lila Downs and Caetano Veloso — were asked not just to dress as they would on the night of the show, but to be in full makeup at the dress rehearsal as well. If they asked why, stage manager Garry Hood was honest with them: “It’s so that we have it in case something happens.”

Before dress rehearsal, Cates took part in a conference call with ABC executives to discuss how to handle the war coverage during the Oscars. ABC’s news division asked for four minutes of time in the show to update viewers on any developments from Iraq. In addition, Alex Wallau, the president of ABC Networks, wanted a hotline phone installed at his seat in the twelfth row of the Kodak, so that he could be notified in the case of events so momentous that the show would have to be taken off the air. The production was growing frustrated with the network’s requests, but they agreed.

The afternoon of the show, the scene was markedly different than the usual Oscar day. Stars who arrived on Hollywood Boulevard would pass one small bleacher with a dozen camera crews but no interviewers, while most guests would enter off Highland Avenue, through the back of the mall and well out of the way of any cameras. Both paths led to metal detectors, and to tables where photo I.D. was checked. 

Upstairs at lunch, Cates tried to relax.  “The only way I’d call it off now,” he said, “is if a nuke goes off.”

He turned to director Louis J. Horvitz.  “Just one comment,” he said. “If someone makes a speech that’s very political, cover both sides. Like you did with the Elia Kazan [when the controversial director received an honorary Oscar in 1998], so we don’t get accused of favoring one side. If somebody says something political, show both sides.”

For the first couple of hours of the show, politics didn’t intrude much. ABC took its newsbreaks, but there wasn’t any real news and they didn’t even use the full four minutes they’d asked for. Best Supporting Actor winner Chris Cooper (“Adaptation”) ended his speech by saying, “In light of all the troubles in this world, I wish us all peace,” and Gael Garcia Bernal introduced a performance from the movie “Frida” with some lines that weren’t on the TelePrompTer: “The necessity for peace is the world is not a dream, it is a reality, and we are not alone. If Frida was alive, she would be on our side, against war.”

But then came Michael Moore, who won the feature documentary award for his incendiary “Bowling for Columbine.” The audience greeted the filmmaker with a standing ovation as he launched into a denunciation of the U.S. policy in Iraq. “We like non-fiction,” he said, “and we live in fictitious times. We live in a time when we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president.” 

Cheers for Moore continued, but one audience member shouted, “no!” and a smattering of boos began to come from the back of the theater. 

“We have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons!” Moore shouted, as the boos grew to about the same volume as the cheers. “We are against the war, Mr. Bush!  Shame on you, Mr. Bush!”

In the wings of the stage, stagehands began shouting at Moore.  “That’s bulls—!” yelled one. 

“Get him off!” shouted another. 

Standing nearby, show writer Bruce Vilanch looked at the angry stagehands and made an immediate beeline for the other side of the stage, where he’d huddle with Martin in a small writers’ room when the host wasn’t onstage. A few minutes later, Martin returned to the stage with the line that had just been crafted in the wings. “It was so sweet backstage, you should see it,” he said.  “The teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo.”

(In truth, Moore was back there posing for photos with Diane Lane, who’d approached him to say she was inspired by what he said.)

Later in the show, U2’s Bono changed the final verse of the nominated song “The Hands that Built America,” which initially ended with lines about September 11. Instead of “a dark cloud on the New York skyline,” he introduced a timelier image: “Late in spring,” he sang softly.  “Yellow cloud on a desert skyline/Some father’s son/Is it his or is it mine?”

Not long after U2’s performance, the Best Actor and Best Actress winners both addressed the conflict. Adrien Brody won for “The Pianist” and gave the longest acceptance speech of the night (though not nearly as long as the one he gave last year after winning for “The Brutalist”), culminating when he decried “the sadness and the dehumanization” of war and then said, “Whether you believe in God or Allah, may he watch over you, and let’s pray for a peaceful and swift resolution.” Nicole Kidman then won for “The Hours” and said, “Why do you come to the Academy Awards when the world is in such turmoil?  Because art is important, and because you believe in what you do and you want to honor that.” Then she came into the wings with a dazed look and said, “I don’t know what I said.”

The acting awards were followed immediately by the reunion of past winners. Before the 95th Academy Awards in 2023, Danette Herman wrote a piece for TheWrap that covered a few highlights of her long history with the Oscars. Part of that piece focused on the reunion of past winners and the effect of the war:

We all watched [the war] on monitors in our Kodak backstage dressing room offices. Music director Bill Conti and the orchestra were on stage rehearsing the songs that would be used as entrance music for our presenters. One of the songs was “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which was quite ironic …

The phones never stopped ringing and Gil and I encouraged participants to “stick with us.” After getting exactly 70 past winners on stage at the 70th anniversary show, we really wanted 75 for the 75th. We didn’t get there, but it was a stellar group and I’ve always been a firm believer that whomever is on the show is meant to be there.    

Among those who did attend were five strong, courageous women who traveled long distances to honor their commitment. One was [Olivia] De Havilland, who would be traveling from Paris. I called her after the war began and she recognized my voice immediately. “Danette, I know why you’re calling,” she said. “I’ve been through war. Nothing is going to stop me from being there. I’ll look forward to giving you a hug when I see you”.  (She did.) 

Luise Rainer traveled from London, alone. Nothing was going to stop her, either. (She was seated on stage next to Julia Roberts, who was very gracious with her). Celeste Holm, Patricia Neal and Teresa Wright also traveled alone from various parts of the U.S.  

When Ms. De Havilland returned to Paris, she sent me a beautiful typed letter on very thin blue paper, thanking me. I still have it. 

At the end of the show, Best Director went to the absent Polanski and Best Picture went to “Chicago.” Then Martin returned to the stage. “To our young men and women who are watching overseas, we are thinking of you,” he said. “We hope you enjoyed the show, it was for you.”

The ratings, though, were not good.  The average viewership was just over 33 million, the smallest audience ever recorded for an Oscar show and a drop of more than 20% over the previous year’s lackluster totals. (For the record, the last nine shows in a row have all been lower.)  The numbers were attributed largely to the war, which had given CNN and Fox News almost four times their usual number of viewers.

Still, it had to sting that the Oscars, which even in down years had always remained the most-watched entertainment show of the year, couldn’t even beat the numbers from the final episode of Fox’s tawdry reality show “Joe Millionaire.” 

Much of this is adapted from my 2005 book “The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards” (Faber and Faber, 2005).

The post Remember When a War in the Middle East Completely Disrupted the Oscars? appeared first on TheWrap.

And it’ll be one battle after another between “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” as those two films face off in a record 11 different categories.

The numbers are ridiculous.  “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending rampage that looks at race relations through the lens of a vampire story, has a record-shattering 16 nominations; “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild look at revolutionary fervor over decades, has 13, only one shy of the previous high. Besides the 11 categories in which they’re both nominated, there’s one category in which only “One Battle” is nominated but not “Sinners,” and five in which “Sinners” is nominated but not “One Battle.”  

And in the categories open to all narrative films, there’s only one category, Best Actress, in which neither film is nominated.

They’ll be facing off in picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, casting, cinematography, film editing, original score, production design and sound. That’s a record for head-to-head contests on one Oscar show, beating the 10 categories in which “Oppenheimer” and “Poor Things” competed in 2024. (For the record, “Oppenheimer” won in six of those categories, “Poor Things” won in three and “American Fiction” beat both of them in Best Adapted Screenplay.)  

According to our best guesses, “One Battle” will win four of the head-to-head contests (plus one category in which its main opponent isn’t nominated), “Sinners” will win four (ditto) and three others will go to neither of them. But those are just guesses, because this is one of the most confounding Oscar races in years, with a lot of categories – definitely including Best Picture – still up in the air.

It’s an epic battle between two great films and two accomplished filmmakers who to all appearances like and admire each other. Here’s what we think for now.

Best Picture

Nominees:
“Bugonia”
“F1”
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet” 
“Marty Supreme” 
“One Battle After Another” 
“The Secret Agent”
“Sentimental Value”
“Sinners” 
“Train Dreams” 

Unless the ranked-choice voting system somehow helps “Hamnet” score an all-time upset, this is No. 1 on the list of tight races between “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners.” You can use precedent to explain why “One Battle” can’t lose (nothing that’s won the Directors Guild, Producers Guild, Writers Guild and ACE Eddie Awards has ever lost), and to explain why “Sinners” can’t lose (no film has ever won the Actor Awards ensemble, WGA and ACE and lost) – which is to say, precedent might be pretty meaningless this year.

But while “Sinners” feels as if it picked up momentum at exactly the right time, and part of me really wants to pick it, I just can’t ignore the fact that apart from the Actor Awards, which is only 50/50 as a Best Picture predictor, “One Battle” has won pretty much everything it could have won on the road to the Dolby Theater stage.

Predicted winner: “One Battle After Another”

Best Director

Nominees:
Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”
Josh Safdie, “Marty Supreme”
Joachim Trier, “Sentimental Value” 
Chloé Zhao, “Hamnet” 

The Paul Thomas Anderson narrative – he’s the greatest working filmmaker to have never won an Oscar – has been a part of this awards season since “One Battle” first screened in September. Even the people who’ve understandably jumped on the “Sinners” train tend to think that PTA will win this award, just as Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón, Damien Chazelle and Alejandro G. Iñárritu did for films that didn’t win Best Picture over the last 11 years. But if Ryan Coogler wins, and he just might, you’ll know exactly where the best-pic race is going.

Predicted winner: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”

Best Actor in a Leading Role 

Nominees:
Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme” 
Leonardo DiCaprio, “One Battle After Another”
Ethan Hawke, “Blue Moon”
Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”
Wagner Moura, “The Secret Agent”

Can one award on one March night turn an Oscar race upside down? Maybe. For months, Timothée Chalamet had been the odds-on favorite, winning at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards. But when Chalamet lost to Michael B. Jordan at the Actor Awards on March 1, the room exploded and it immediately felt as if we had a new frontrunner. (It didn’t help Chalamet that he had lost at the BAFTAs a week earlier, though his loss to a British actor who wasn’t even eligible for the Oscar was far less damaging than his loss to Jordan.)

Wagner Moura and Ethan Hawke remain dark-horse possibilities, and Chalamet still has the most precursor wins – but unless we’re attributing too much power to SAG-AFTRA voters (which we might be), this category’s theme song has become Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.”

Predicted winner: Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Nominees:
Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”
Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Kate Hudson, “Song Sung Blue”
Renate Reinsve, “Sentimental Value”
Emma Stone, “Bugonia”

Once we got past the early critics-group wins for Rose Byrne, this category has belonged to Jessie Buckley. Her performance is the best shot for “Hamnet” to win an Oscar, and it’s all but a lock – though the well-liked Kate Hudson, who went to the Oscars 25 years ago as the supporting-actress favorite for “Almost Famous” but lost to Marcia Gay Harden, has the slightest of chances to pull off a big upset.

Predicted winner: Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Nominees:
Benicio del Toro, “One Battle After Another”
Jacob Elordi, “Frankenstein”
Delroy Lindo, “Sinners”
Sean Penn, “One Battle After Another”
Stellan Skarsgård, “Sentimental Value”

The supporting categories feel completely up in the air. Sean Penn, Jacob Elordi and Benicio del Toro have all won precursor awards, with Penn the favorite given his BAFTA and Actor Award victories. But the two richly deserving veterans and first-time nominees, Stellan Skarsgård and Delroy Lindo, are real wild cards. I’m tempted to say that the international vote will tip the scales for Skarsgård, but on a complete hunch I’m going for Lindo, who wasn’t even nominated by Golden Globe, Critics Choice, BAFTA and Actor Award voters.

His Oscar nomination carries the same “he’s overdue!” feeling as Skarsgård’s, but “Sinners” also feels historic in a way “Sentimental Value” doesn’t. Still, if Penn wins, as most people expect him to, I’ll feel dumb about following my hunch.

Predicted winner: Delroy Lindo, “Sinners”

Best Actress in a Supporting Role 

Nominees:
Elle Fanning, “Sentimental Value”
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, “Sentimental Value”
Amy Madigan, “Weapons”
Wunmi Mosaku, “Sinners”
Teyana Taylor, “One Battle After Another”

This is another category that could go in a number of different directions, with Wunmi Mosaku and Teyana Taylor strong possibilities if “Sinners” or “One Battle” gets on a roll with voters. But everybody loves Amy Madigan, whose only other nomination was 40 (!) years ago. (Weren’t we just talking about actors who are overdue?) Her narrative might be irresistible, even if the numbers are discouraging: Only eight times in Oscar history has an actress won in this category as her film’s only nominee.   

Predicted winner: Amy Madigan, “Weapons”

Best Adapted Screenplay

Nominees:
“Bugonia”
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet”
“One Battle After Another”
“Train Dreams”

The two writing categories seem pretty cut-and-dried – which makes sense, since the Best Picture winner has also won a writing Oscar 16 times in the last 20 years. One of the best-pic frontrunners is in each of the two screenplay categories, with “One Battle” facing a formidable adapted-screenplay contender in “Hamnet.” But it won at the Writers Guild Awards against the same lineup of fellow nominees, and it’s likely to do the same thing at the Oscars.

Predicted winner: “One Battle After Another”

Best Original Screenplay

Nominees:
“Blue Moon”
“It Was Just an Accident”
“Marty Supreme”
“Sentimental Value”
“Sinners”

The other Best Picture favorite, “Sinners,” is in this category, where its toughest competition might be “Sentimental Value.” “Sinners” won at BAFTA, Critics Choice and the Writers Guild Awards and isn’t expected to have much trouble winning here, too.

Predicted winner: “Sinners”

Best Animated Feature Film

Nominees:
“Arco”
“Elio”
“KPop Demon Hunters”
“Little Amélie or the Character of Rain”
“Zootopia 2” 

Last year, the small European film (“Flow”) beat the big, expensive epics (“Inside Out 2” and “The Wild Robot”). This year, two small European films (“Arco” and “Little Amélie”) may split the vote, and both they and the two Disney/Pixar films (“Elio” and “Zootopia 2”) will likely do what they’ve been doing all season long: watch while the Netflix/Sony Animation juggernaut “KPop Demon Hunters” picks up the award. “Zootopia” has an outside chance to pull off an upset, but as the song says, things are “Golden” for “KPop.”

Predicted winner: “KPop Demon Hunters”

Best International Feature Film

Nominees:
Brazil, “The Secret Agent”
France, “It Was Just an Accident”
Norway, “Sentimental Value”
Spain, “Sirât”
Tunisia, “The Voice of Hind Rajab”

In awards circles, a new rule of thumb is to never underestimate Brazil – witness the Golden Globes, where “The Secret Agent” scored upset wins in the Best Actor and Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language categories. But even with an increasingly international Academy, there is nowhere near as high a percentage of Brazilian voters for the Oscars as for the Golden Globes. And while “The Secret Agent” received an impressive four Oscar nominations, “Sentimental Value” earned nine, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and four for acting, tying “One Battle” for the most acting noms.

One baffling question: Given the recent events in Iran and the fact that writer-director Jafar Panahi received a one-year jail sentence in absentia for making “It Was Just an Accident,” why didn’t his film get more traction in the race? Or maybe it did, and we just won’t know that until Sunday evening.

Predicted winner: “Sentimental Value”

Best Documentary Feature Film

Nominees:
“The Alabama Solution”
“Come See Me in the Good Light”
“Cutting Through Rocks”
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin”
“The Perfect Neighbor”

The humanity of “Come See Me in the Good Light” or the good humor of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” make those films contenders, and there’s a chance that the large international contingent of voters could coalesce around one of the two non-U.S. films, “Mr. Nobody” or “Cutting Through Rocks.” But “The Perfect Neighbor,” a damning portrait of race in America built mostly from security-cam and police bodycam footage, has had the feel of a winner throughout the season.

Predicted winner: “The Perfect Neighbor”

Best Casting

Nominees:
“Hamnet”
“Marty Supreme”
“One Battle After Another”
“The Secret Agent”
“Sinners”

In the first year for the new casting category, the nominees are mostly the top Best Picture contenders, with the Brazilian drama “The Secret Agent” being the only surprise. Like many categories, this will probably come down to “One Battle” vs. “Sinners.” The latter film seems to have the edge, given its wins at the Critics Choice Awards and the Casting Society’s Artios Awards – but it’s worth noting that it didn’t go up against “One Battle” at Artios, because its casting director isn’t a member of the CSA so the film wasn’t eligible.   

Predicted winner: “Sinners”

Best Cinematography

Nominees:
“Frankenstein”
“Marty Supreme”
“One Battle After Another”
“Sinners”
“Train Dreams”

As fun as it might be to imagine an upset win for “Train Dreams,” this is most likely another “One Battle”/“Sinners” showdown. While Autumn Durald Arkapaw once seemed destined to become the first-ever female and first-ever Black cinematography winner for “Sinners,” recent awards have been going to Michael Bauman for “One Battle” – including the key prize from the American Society of Cinematographers, which has gone to the Oscar winner six times in the last 10 years. (And when the ASC gives its award to a Best Picture nominee, as it did this year, the match is even stronger.)

Predicted winner: “One Battle After Another”

Best Film Editing

Nominees:
“F1”
“Marty Supreme”
“One Battle After Another”
“Sentimental Value”
“Sinners”

The American Cinema Editors’ ACE Eddie Awards didn’t help clarify this race, because ACE gave its comedy award to “One Battle” and its drama award to “Sinners.” Then there’s “F1,” the likely winner in the sound category, which might be a real threat in editing because of the odd correlation between those two categories that resulted in eight matches in nine years between 2014 and 2022. Then again, editing and sound haven’t matched for the last three years, in which the editing Oscar has always gone to the Best Picture winner.  

Predicted winner: “One Battle After Another”

Best Production Design 

Nominees:
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet”
“Marty Supreme”
“One Battle After Another”
“Sinners”

Even people who didn’t embrace Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” conceded that the movie looks amazing, and it’s likely that Academy voters will do the same. From its laboratory to its majestic ship stuck in the Arctic wastes, del Toro’s film has a scale and grandeur that seems impossible not to celebrate – in this category, and in two other visual categories as well.

Predicted winner: “Frankenstein”

Best Costume Design

Nominees:
“Avatar: Fire and Ash”
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet”
“Marty Supreme”
“Sinners”

Production design and costume design go to the same film less than half the time, but “Frankenstein” is the kind of massively detailed film that has pulled off the twofer in the past: “Poor Things,” “Black Panther,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel” … Costume design might be the shakiest of the three predicted “Frankenstein” wins, but it’s not very shaky.

Predicted winner: “Frankenstein”

Best Makeup and Hairstyling 

Nominees:
“Frankenstein”
“Kokuho”
“Sinners”
“The Smashing Machine”
“The Ugly Stepsister”

Films that win production and costume design don’t usually feature bravura makeup, but “Frankenstein” does. For a while, this award went consistently to the artists who transformed actors into real people (Winston Churchill, Dick Cheney, Megyn Kelly, Tammy Faye Bakker … ) but it’s more recently swung back to bravura showcases for prosthetics (“The Whale,” “Poor Things,” “The Substance”), and it should continue in that vein this year.

Predicted winner: “Frankenstein”

Best Original Song

Nominees:
“Dear Me” from “Diane Warren: Relentless”
“Golden” from “KPop Demon Hunters”
“I Lied to You” from “Sinners” 
“Sweet Dreams of Joy” from “Viva Verdi!”
“Train Dreams” from “Train Dreams”

Will the pop songs split the vote and give a win to the operatic aria, “Sweet Dreams of Joy?” Will Diane Warren finally win in her 17th nomination now that a rule change has put songwriters’ names on the Oscar ballot? Will “Sinners”’ status as a Best Picture favorite give the big song that backs its most memorable scene a boost? Well, no. Because “Golden” is a pop-culture sensation that was nominated for four Grammys, including Song of the Year. Plus, the recent Winter Olympics blasted the song at every opportunity. Resistance is futile.   

Predicted winner: “Golden” from “KPop Demon Hunters”

Best Original Score

Nominees:
“Bugonia”
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet”
“One Battle After Another”
“Sinners”

Here’s where the music of “Sinners” will register most strongly. Ludwig Goransson’s blues-based score serves as the heartbeat of the film and has given it an edge over its competitors – though there’s bold, adventurous and moving music in the category from a quartet of European composers: Jerskin Fendrix (“Bugonia”), Alexandre Desplat (“Frankenstein”), Max Richter (“Hamnet”) and Jonny Greenwood (“One Battle After Another”).

Predicted winner: “Sinners”

Best Sound

Nominees:
“F1”
“Frankenstein”
“One Battle After Another”
“Sinners” 
“Sirât”

This could be another “Sinners” victory, since that film did win an award from the Motion Picture Sound Editors on Sunday. But the other major sound organization, the Cinema Audio Society, honored “F1” the previous night, and that Formula One drama is likely to become the second recent racing movie (after 2019’s “Ford v Ferrari”) and the second recent Joseph Kosinski movie (after 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick”) to win.  

Predicted winner: “F1”

Best Visual Effects

Nominees:
“Avatar: Fire and Ash”
“F1”
“Jurassic World Rebirth”
“The Lost Bus”
“Sinners”

Here’s one germane precedent: In the last 53 years, only one film not nominated for Best Picture has beaten a best-pic nominee in the category. (That would be 2016’s “Ex Machina,” which beat “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Martian” and “The Revenant.”) But here’s another germane precedent: No “Avatar” movie has ever lost in this category, with the original taking the award in 2010 and its sequel doing the same in 2023. Can James Cameron’s saga become the first franchise since “The Lord of the Rings” to go three-for-three? “Sinners” and “F1” stand in its way, with the former being a particular threat if the third “Avatar” feels like a case of been-there-done-that. On the other hand, it’s freakin’ “Avatar.”

Predicted winner: “Avatar: Fire and Ash”

Best Documentary Short Film 

Nominees:
“All the Empty Rooms”
“Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud”
“Children No More: ‘Were and Are Gone’”
“The Devil Is Busy”
“Perfectly a Strangeness”

The three Oscar shorts categories can be maddening; for every time I nail the winners, there’s another instance in which the film I think is least likely to succeed takes home the statuette. This year’s doc-short lineup consists of serious films about school shootings, conflict journalism, killings in Gaza and abortion, plus a magnificently odd mood piece in which donkeys wander around an abandoned observatory in Chile.  

The winner may depend on the mood of the voters who devote a couple of hours to watching all the films – but “All the Empty Rooms,” which follows CBS News reporter Steve Hartman as he visits the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings, is particularly wrenching in its quiet way.    

Predicted winner: “All the Empty Rooms”

Best Animated Short Film 

Nominees:
“The Butterfly”
“Forever Green”
“The Girl Who Cried Pearls” 
“Retirement Plan”
“The Three Sisters”

Voters in this category sometimes go for the most ambitious or artistic nominee, sometimes to the punchiest and most commercial, sometimes for the most personal. This year, it feels like a tossup: “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” is the most visually distinctive and the only stop-motion nominee, “Retirement Plan” is the simplest and funniest (particularly to viewers of advancing years), “Forevergreen” might be the most commercial and “Butterfly” tells a story set in pre- and post-World War II Germany through animated paintings.  The last of those might tick the most boxes for voters, but that’s just a guess.

Predicted winner: “Butterfly”

Best Live Action Short Film

Nominees:
“Butcher’s Stain”
“A Friend of Dorothy”
“Jane Austen’s Period Drama”
“The Singers”
“Two People Exchanging Saliva”

This is one of the strongest lineups of live-action shorts nominees in years, a varied collection of work that for the most part balances social commentary with the right amount of humor. The Israeli-set “Butcher’s Stain” is the timeliest and “Jane Austen’s Period Drama” is the funniest, but the three that have a real shot of winning are probably “A Friend of Dorothy,” a touching story with a beautiful performance by British acting legend Miriam Margolyes; “The Singers,” a richly shot Netflix film set in a bar where the grizzled patrons turn out to be unexpectedly great singers; and “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” a black-and-white French film set in a world where kissing is banned and money has been replaced by slaps in the face. Any of them would be winners worth celebrating, but the way in which an entire world is created and fleshed out in “Two People” might push it to victory.

(But remember my caveat at the beginning of the shorts discussion.)  

Predicted winner: “Two People Exchanging Saliva”

The post Oscar Predictions: It’s ‘One Battle After Another’ vs. ‘Sinners’ in One Battle for the Ages appeared first on TheWrap.

Or has it?

Let’s just say that last weekend made the Oscar race more fun and more confusing than we expected – but that it’s too easy to get carried away and put too much credence in the swings of a weekend that saw “One Battle” win the Producers Guild Award on Saturday and “Sinners” counter with the Actor Awards’ ensemble-cast prize on Sunday.

Two weeks from now, after the 98th Academy Awards has taken place, this stormy PGA/Actors weekend could be seen as a vital tea leaf, but it could just as easily be a warning not to get carried away by the last award or the loudest standing ovation.

Here are some of the lessons we can take from these latest wrinkles in the race.

The awards that “One Battle After Another” has won mean more than the ones that “Sinners” has won.

Winning the Actor Awards’ ensemble category is a great thing for a movie that has Oscar Best Picture aspirations. “Oppenheimer” did it, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” did it, “CODA” did it — and they all went on to win the Oscar. (In fact, the ensemble award has served as a canary in a coal mine for a string of Oscar surprises: “Shakespeare in Love,” “Crash,” “CODA” …)

But just as often, as recent ensemble winners and Oscar also-rans “Conclave” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7” can attest, the 150,000-plus SAG-AFTRA voters do not echo their substantially fewer, substantially more international colleagues in the Academy. Overall, half the ensemble winners at the ceremony formerly known as the SAG Awards have won Best Picture, and half haven’t.

On the other hand, several of the awards that have gone to “One Battle” – the Critics Choice Award for Best Film, the Directors Guild Award and the Producers Guild Award – have success rates on the high side of 60%, with the DGA and PGA nearing 75%. And since the Oscars and the PGA both moved from five to 10 nominees and introduced ranked-choice voting to determine the big winner, the producers have accurately predicted the Oscar winner more than 81% of the time.

In a vacuum, if you look at the major awards that each of the top two contenders have won so far, “One Battle” clearly has the lead, the Actor Awards wins for “Sinners” notwithstanding.

But the timing favors “Sinners.”

For weeks, it has looked as if “One Battle” was inevitable, with its head start courtesy of the Gotham Awards, the major critics awards , the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes. For “Sinners” to have any chance, it was going to need to get some kind of momentum, and every award that went to “One Battle” in February suggested that the momentum wasn’t happening.

But the calendar was deceptive. In February “One Battle” won the Directors Guild Award, but those ballots were cast between Jan. 8 and Feb. 6. And it won the PGA, where voting started on Jan. 16 and ended on Feb. 3, a full 25 days before the envelope was opened. (The one exception was BAFTA, which conducted its final voting from Jan. 28 through Feb. 17.)

In other words, most of those “One Battle” wins mostly told us what voters were thinking back in January.  The major award that told us what they were thinking more recently was the Actor Award, which didn’t close its polls until Feb. 27, two days before the ceremony.

If you’re looking for evidence of “Sinners” momentum, that might be it.

The important win for “Sinners” wasn’t the ensemble award.

Even after “One Battle” won the PGA on Saturday, the consensus was that the Actor Awards would be the one awards show where it would lose. “Sinners” was the favorite going in, buoyed by its rich and varied cast and by a history of SAG-AFTRA voters giving the ensemble award to movies with large Black casts, even if those films wouldn’t go on to win the top Oscar: Coogler’s “Black Panther” in 2018, “Hidden Figures” in 2016, “The Help” in 2011 …

So if “Sinners” has only won the ensemble award, the pundits would have shrugged and moved on. But the fact that it also scored the night’s biggest film upset when Michael B. Jordan took the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role award, for which Timothée Chalamet was favored, gave the film an unexpected one-two punch that felt significant. And when Shrine Exhibition Hall erupted into a standing ovation for both wins, you couldn’t help but think back to 2020, when the SAG ensemble award for “Parasite” was in many ways the first tangible sign of how much Hollywood would come to love giving awards to what was then an Oscar longshot.

We might be putting too much importance on precursor awards.

Of course you have to judge the race based on history, but the last decade and a half of the Oscars has seen history precedent grow increasingly wobbly. From 1996 to 2018, you absolutely couldn’t win Best Picture without a SAG ensemble nomination, but then “The Shape of Water” did it and “Nomadland” did it again. A film not in English couldn’t win Best Picture, until “Parasite” did.

And now, you can find statistics to tell you why “One Battle After Another” can’t lose Best Picture, and stats to tell you why “Sinners” will win. Which means that there’s a time to rely on precedent, and a time to back off and understand that this is a different Academy and we can’t swing back and forth based on what’s happened in the past.

We now know everything we’re going to know until Oscar night.

Oscar voting doesn’t end until Thursday afternoon, and the show doesn’t take place until March 15. In between then and now, the Writers Guild of America will give out its annual awards, becoming the last of the four major Hollywood guilds to chime in.

But rather than helping to clarify a confusing situation, the WGA almost certainly won’t help at all. That’s because “One Battle After Another” will likely win in the Best Adapted Screenplay category and “Sinners” will do the same in Best Original Screenplay, with the “Sinners” path to victory made easier by guild rules that disqualified the Oscar-nominated screenplays for “Blue Moon,” “It Was Just an Accident” and “Sentimental Value.”

The other awards coming up between now and the Oscars won’t be much help, either. “One Battle” and “Sinners” are both nominated for the American Society of Cinematographers Awards, but the ASC winner has only predicted Best Picture once in the last decade, and three times this century. The Cinema Audio Society Awards and the Motion Picture Sound Editors’ Golden Reel Awards are in pretty much the same boat.

So as far as usable intel goes, we already have it. Good luck to all of us.  

The post What the Hell Is Happening With the Oscar Race? appeared first on TheWrap.

“One Battle” has now won at the Critics Choice Awards, Golden Globes (in the comedy category), Directors Guild Awards and BAFTA Film Awards, among others, giving it enormous Oscar momentum even if “Sinners” takes the ensemble-cast prize at the Actor Awards on Sunday.

And in the “rich get richer” category, Anderson also was one of the winners of four days with a new McLaren automobile, a perk that was randomly put in cards at 20 PGA attendees seats.

One minor caveat: PGA voting ended on Feb. 5, almost a full month ago, which means that the results show us what the producers were thinking back in late January and early February. Oscar voting didn’t begin until Thursday and will continue through late next week.

“The Studio” won the award for comedy television, capping a stretch of the ceremony in which two of its stars, Seth Rogen and Ike Barinholtz, served as presenters. “The Pitt” won in the drama series category, just as it’s been doing at almost every awards show since the Emmys, while “Adolescence” continued its own winning streak in the limited series category.

“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” won in the live entertainment, variety, sketch, standup and talk television category — its first win after 10 years on the air, and one that comes three months before CBS will be taking the show off the air.

Three nonfiction films or series about show-business figures won awards: “Pee-wee as Himself” for nonfiction television, “John Candy: I Like Me” for televised or streamed motion picture and “My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay” for documentary feature. That last film won over three Oscar doc nominees, “The Perfect Neighbor,” “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” and “The Alabama Solution.”

“The Traitors” won for game and competition TV.

The Producers Guild Award has been a reliable predictor of the Oscar for Best Picture over the years, with the two awards matching 26 times in 36 years. It took on particular significance in 2009, when the Academy expanded its category from five to 10 nominees and instituted ranked-choice voting to determine the winner; the guild followed suit on both counts, making it the only other major film award to use that system. Since then, the PGA winner has gone on to win the top Oscar 13 times in 16 years, including the last five years in a row.

(The only exceptions came when “The Big Short” won the PGA and “Spotlight” won the Oscar; when “La La Land” won the PGA and “Moonlight” won the Oscar; and when “1917” won the PGA and “Parasite” won the Oscar.)

The Producers Guild Awards are the second of the four major guild awards handed out on the road to Oscar. Paul Thomas Anderson won the Directors Guild Award for “One Battle After Another” on Feb. 7, while the Actor Awards (formerly the Screen Actors Guild Awards) will take place on Sunday and the Writers Guild Awards on March 8.

In addition to the competitive categories, honorary Producers Guild Awards are being given to Amy Pascal (the David O. Selznick Achievement Award for Theatrical Motion Pictures), Jason Blum (the Milestone Award) and Mara Brock Akil (the Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television).  

Presenters include Amy Madigan, Delroy Lindo, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Jacob Elordi, Jessie Buckley, Kate Hudson, Paul Mescal, Seth Rogen, Teyana Taylor and Wagner Moura.

Winners in the childrens, sports, short form and innovation categories were previously announced at the PGA’s West Coast Celebration in Hollywood on Thursday.

Here is the list of nominees. Winners are indicated by *WINNER.

Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures
“Bugonia”
“F1”
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet”
“Marty Supreme”
“One Battle After Another” *WINNER
“Sentimental Value”
“Sinners”
“Train Dreams”
“Weapons”

Award for Outstanding Producer of Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures
“The Bad Guys 2”
“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle”
“Elio”
“KPop Demon Hunters” *WINNER
“Zootopia 2”

Norman Felton Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television – Drama
“Andor”
“The Diplomat”
“The Pitt” *WINNER
“Pluribus”
“Severance”
“The White Lotus”

Danny Thomas Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television – Comedy
“The Bear”
“Hacks”
“Only Murders in the Building”
“South Park”
“The Studio” *WINNER

David L. Wolper Award for Outstanding Producer of Limited or Anthology Series Television
“Adolescence” *WINNER
“The Beast in Me”
“Black Mirror”
“Black Rabbit”
“Dying for Sex”

Award for Outstanding Producer of Televised or Streamed Motion Pictures
“Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”
“The Gorge”
“John Candy: I Like Me” *WINNER
“Mountainhead”
“Nonnas”

Award for Outstanding Producer of Non-Fiction Television
“aka Charlie Sheen”
“Billy Joel: And So It Goes”
“Mr. Scorsese”
“Pee-wee as Himself” *WINNER
“SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night”

Award for Outstanding Producer of Live Entertainment, Variety, Sketch, Standup & Talk Television
“The Daily Show”
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” *WINNER
“Saturday Night Live 50: The Anniversary Special”

Award for Outstanding Producer of Game & Competition Television
“The Amazing Race”
“Jeopardy!”
“RuPaul’s Drag Race”
“Top Chef”
“The Traitors” *WINNER

Award for Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures
“The Alabama Solution”
“Cover-Up”
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin”
“My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay” *WINNER
“Ocean with David Attenborough”
“The Perfect Neighbor”
“The Tale of Silyan”

Award for Outstanding Sports Program
“100 Foot Wave”
“Big Dreams: The Little League World Series 2024”
“Formula 1: Drive to Survive” *WINNER
“Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Buffalo Bills”
“Surf Girls: International”

Award for Outstanding Children’s Program
“LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy – Pieces of the Past”
“Phineas and Ferb”
“Sesame Street” *WINNER
“Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical”
“SpongeBob SquarePants”

Award for Outstanding Short-Form Program
“Adolescence: The Making of Adolescence” *WINNER
“The Daily Show: Desi Lydic Foxsplains”
“Hacks: Bit By Bit”
“Overtime with Bill Maher”
“The White Lotus: Unpacking the Episode”

PGA Innovation Award
“ASTEROID”
“Big Wave: No Room for Error”
“D-Day: The Camera Soldier”
“territory”
“The Wizard of Oz at Sphere” *WINNER

David O. Selznick Achievement Award for Theatrical Motion Pictures: Amy Pascal
Milestone Award: Jason Blum
Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television: Mara Brock Akil

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It’s a fait accompli, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” seemingly coasting to inevitable Best Picture and Best Director wins and “Hamnet” star Jessie Buckley doing the same in the Best Actress category.

And it’s a complete mystery, with the Best Supporting Actor and Actress categories completely up in the air, with pundits going for Stellan Skarsgard and Teyana Taylor, betting sites making Sean Penn and Taylor the favorites and TheWrap’s Awards Tracker giving the top spots to Jacob Elordi and Wunmi Mosaku.

It’s a sprint, with the Academy using the time constraints of their ABC broadcast as a reason to eliminate performances of three of the Best Original Song nominees.

And it’s a marathon, with 35 days between the nominations announcement and the beginning of final voting and 10 more days between the end of final voting and the Oscar show, stretching out a season that began before Labor Day and won’t end until the Ides of March.

It’s a ritual, with all the usual signposts along the way: Governors Awards, shortlists, nomination voting, giddy, reaction statements, Nominees Luncheon, interview, campaign stop, rinse, repeat…

And it’s an experiment,  thanks to what the Academy called “a procedural change” when it was announced in a press release last April: “Academy members must now watch all nominated films in each category to be eligible to vote in the final round for the Oscars.”

All of those things come together on Thursday, Feb. 26, as eight days of final voting begin. Let’s look at where we stand and what it means.

The New Rule

The Academy always wanted voters to watch every film before voting, but they never made it an official requirement, except in certain categories. (More on that in a minute.) But this year, with the rise of the members-only Academy Screening Room as the main viewing portal for nominated films, AMPAS is tracking what its members watch and insisting that they see every nominee in a category before they can vote in that category. And the organization hasn’t been subtle about it: In recent weeks, members have been getting a steady stream of emails reminding them of what they’ve seen and what they still need to see, listing the categories in which they’ve qualified to vote and the ones in which they haven’t.

Most members we’ve talked to support the new rule while also being annoyed by all those emails – but then, the Academy has been known for being on the nagging side as voting approaches.

Where voting in some preliminary categories requires members to identify where and when they’ve seen a film outside the ASR, final voting is essentially on the honor system. The Academy knows when a member streams a film on the platform, but voters also have the option of clicking on a “Mark Watched” button to certify that they’ve seen the film elsewhere.

Assuming that voters are honest and they do see all the nominees before voting in any category, one big question is whether that will affect the outcomes. More than a decade ago, the international and documentary categories had rules in place that restricted voting to people who’d seen all five nominees in a theater, which simultaneously reduced the number of voters in those categories and led to some major upsets: “The Lives of Others” over “Pan’s Labyrinth” in international, “Born Into Brothels” over “Super Size Me” in documentary …

With movies more accessible on the site and the theatrical viewing requirement eliminated, the potential for upsets like those is reduced. But it can’t be discounted.

The Best Picture Race

Here’s a question I’ve been hearing a lot out on the circuit: “It’s over, isn’t it?”

It, in this case refers to the Best Picture category, and my answer is generally along the lines of “Well, it feels like it is.” “One Battle After Another” has won pretty much everything there is to win – from the Critics Choice Awards, where it was thought to be neck-and-neck with “Sinners,” to BAFTA, where “Hamnet” seemingly had home-court advantage.

Conventional wisdom says that it can seal the deal on Saturday by winning at the Producers Guild Awards, the only other major awards show that uses the same ranked-choice voting system that the Oscars uses for Best Picture. There is one thing to keep in mind, though: For some reason, PGA voting ended a full 25 days before the results are being announced. So if there’s been any kind of recent, underground momentum in favor of  any of the rivals to “One Battle,” it won’t be reflected in the Producers Guild results, which will show us how those voters were feeling a month ago, not how they’re feeling now.

I keep mulling over alternate scenarios to see if any of them make sense. Since ranked-choice voting eliminates the films with the fewest No. 1 votes and redistributes those ballots to other films ranked near the top of those voters’ ballots, could “Hamnet” get a surge from voters whose first choices were, say, “Train Dreams” and “Sentimental Value?” Could the wildness of “Sinners” appeal more to voters whose ballots were topped by “Bugonia” and “Frankenstein?”

Those scenarios aren’t impossible, I suppose, but “One Battle” feels as if it’s the kind of film that’ll have a nearly insurmountable lead after all the No. 1 votes are counted. To paraphrase Bob Dylan’s “It’s Not Dark Yet,” it’s not over yet…but it’s gettin’ there.  

The Crazy Acting Categories

Our Awards Tracker maven Casey Loving will have more to say about this on Friday, but it really is remarkable how jumbled the supporting actor and actress races have gotten. I can easily see a scenario in which each one of the five Best Supporting Actor nominees can win, and one in which four out of the five Best Supporting Actress nominees take the trophy.

In a way, I kind of hope that SAG-AFTRA voters throw a huge monkey wrench into these categories by giving Sunday’s Actor Awards to Miles Caton and Ariana Grande, who aren’t nominated for Oscars. That would be the piece de resistance in two wild and wooly races.

The Damn Calendar

I know the Winter Olympics are thought to make things difficult for the Oscars, which don’t want to go up against the closing ceremony. But really, why is the season stretched out so long this year? Is that month-long gap between nominations and final voting there because the Academy thinks its members need that much time to catch up with the movies they just nominated? And what about the supersized gap between the end of voting and the Oscar show? The accountants at PwC definitely don’t need that much time to tally the votes.

I’ve heard that the longer gap after voting is popular with nominees because it gives them more time to rest and not worry about campaigning, and popular with ABC because it frees the network up to run ads that can favor the better-known nominees in a way that would be untoward while voting was still going on. But it also makes the season feel endless, and it leads to other oddities.

For instance: Do members of the American Society of Cinematographers really need 51 days in which to cast their final ballots? Does the Producers Guild really want its members to vote by Feb. 3 and then wait until Feb. 28 to find out who won? And will anybody, anywhere, feel anything but relief when the final envelope is opened at the Dolby Theatre on, appropriately enough, the Ides of March?

I mean, I make my living writing about awards season, and I would be delighted if there were less of it.

Anyway, it’s time to vote. Let’s wrap up yet another odd awards season.

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