Alright! In lieu of the recent Oscar nominations, and the impending ceremony, I thought it would be very pertinent to go through and try to predict the winners, as I did in 2020 (Which I was off by one film). But I created a system, supported by analytical facts, that can more or less accurately predict the Best Picture winner.
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To recap, there are six qualifications that a Best Picture movie should have:
- Be R-Rated. In the past 30 years, 70% (21 films) of the films that won Best Picture were R-Rated.
- Make enough money to be known but not enough to be popular ($50-$150 million. The cap is $360 million).
- Be a drama, war, epic, period piece, or thriller. Most Oscar nominees and winners include those buzzwords.
- Have a diverse cast (This is an easy way to get nominated but hard to in. Only two films starring African Americans have ever won - 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight).
- Have a nomination for Best Director. Only 5 Best Picture winners have not had nominations in that category: Wings (1927), Grand Hotel (1932), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Argo (2012), and Green Book (2018).
- Avoid controversy. Don't be Cuties. You might get a nomination, but you won't get a win.
Because Covid has really stripped this year of any normalcy, all of these check the Box Office and Controversy boxes. The highest-grossing movie, as of my writing this (3/23/21) is Promising Young Woman with $10.2 million in the bank... which's... not a good sign for the TV ratings... the only one mildly involved in "controversy" is Nomadland, which has been censored in China, but honestly, what isn't?
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| Some nifty charts I made. |
Every film also checks off the genre box. Every single one of these are dramas, with the exception being Promising Young Woman as a black comedy thriller.
The nominees are as follows:
The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Because the Oscars don't like PG-13 films, we can eliminate The Father and Minari. Because a Best Directing nod is a must have (Again, only 5 movies have won without it), we can eliminate Judas and the Black Messiah, Sound of Metal, and The Trial of Chicago 7.
These eliminations leave us with three films:
Mank
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
So, now let's take a very deep dive into which film will win the coveted Best Picture award.
Mank
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| Wouldn't be an Oscars season without Gary Oldman! |
Mank has a lot going for it: An R-Rating, the appropriate drama, minimal box office, and a nomination for best director. Mank also has the advantage of being a movie made about a movie (This movie being Citizen Kane), which always works well at the Oscars. The director, David Fincher, has even won Best Picture before! For The Social Network! Some more negative aspects of the movie are that, because it is about movies and Hollywood, the Academy may go the way of La La Land and not have it win. Can't seem too narcissistic.
The primary thing going against the movie is that it is a Netflix original. Even though Netflix has released some of the Oscar-iest Oscar movies to ever Oscar at the Oscars (Roma and The Irishman), none of them have ever won, and I find it unlikely that Mank breaks that tradition.
Promising Young Woman
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| I'm getting major Harley Quinn vibes from this one... |
Promising Young Woman has all the boxes checked out. While the genre may not be ideal (Black comedy thriller), it has been done before (Birdman). But the biggest thing going against Promising Young Woman is that, while the reviews may have been stellar, they weren't Oscar level. Plus, no one's actually heard of it... somehow I'd heard of Mank, Nomadland, Judas and the Black Messiah, but Promising Young Woman? What's that? I guess I'll substitute word of mouth for box office performance, because I don't think anyone has seen this (Despite it having the highest box office of the bunch).
Nomadland
Nomadland has more or less been an absolute monster at every awards ceremony it's been nominated at, including the Golden Globes. Every factor lines up to present Nomadland with the win.
But let me quickly gripe about this fact: The movie is R-Rated for brief full-frontal female nudity. Other than that, it has PG-13 profanity (No F-bombs!) and nothing else. Just the full-frontal female nudity in a nonsexual sense that lasts for a few seconds. In every other country, it got their equivalent of PG-13, us Americans are just touchy about nudity. And because it's a relatively "clean" flick otherwise, with no other apparent reason for the rating other than the prestige factor, I'm inclined to believe this is yet another sign that our rating system is deeply flawed.
And there you have it: Nomadland wins Best Picture, short and simple. That's it, folks.
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| May the odds be ever in your favor? |
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