Oscar Predictions 2024: What Will Win This Year

Normally this is the part where we take you on a brief temperature check on—if not philosophical flight of fancy over—the state of the movie industry and how that will factor into what’s occupying most of the real estate in Oscar voters’ heads. We usually delve into why in fact the whole annual spectacle serves just about anything but the purported task of rewarding the previous year’s best cinematic work. How does Parasite represent the best-case scenario for a more international AMPAS? Does Tár surgically unpack our anxieties about representation, or does it just exploit them? Why Green Book, why now? But seeing how Mark Harris, in this weekend’s New York Times, pretty thoroughly wrapped up that legwork this go-around, and recognizing that there’s only so many angles we can take to argue the functional utility that Oppenheimer has market-cornered in this year’s race, we may as well just light it up and acquiesce to the inevitable all-consuming blast. Eric Henderson

Best Picture

American Fiction
Anatomy of a Fall
Barbie
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
Maestro
WINNER: Oppenheimer
Past Lives
Poor Things
The Zone of Interest

I’ll be as brief as Christopher Nolan’s behemoth is unwieldy: Oppenheimer will win the best picture Oscar. Hopefully Nolan’s legion of fanboys will find it within themselves to be nearly as brief about their hero’s triumph on social media. Henderson

Best Director

Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
WINNER: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things
Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest

The moment we’re looking forward to the most on Oscar night is when Christopher Nolan wins this award, possibly his second of the night, and the camera slowly zooms in on Bradley Cooper, showing us the precise moment in which a Joker is born. Gonzalez

Best Actor

Bradley Cooper, Maestro
Colman Domingo, Rustin
Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
WINNER: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction

First up, you can’t say that Bradley Cooper isn’t going all-in. We didn’t see “mentions being unsure of loving newborn daughter for the first few months of her life” showing up on our Bingo card of campaign subplots. While Film Twitter (Film X?) can’t seem to get enough of the slow-motion train derailment that’s been Maestro’s Oscar journey, it’s but a mere sideshow against the now-undeniably inevitable nuclear warhead that is Oppenheimer in this Oscar race. It took my partner-in-prediction some effort to convince me that Paul Giamatti isn’t more beloved in L.A. than Cillian Murphy, and frankly, he still hasn’t convinced me on that count. (In other words, I’ve already watched Giamatti’s Criterion Closet raid twice on YouTube.) But as previously drilled, this year’s Oscars find the industry feeling far less sentimental about its business than usual, and certainly less ambiguous about its marching orders than (allegedly) was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Henderson

Best Actress

Annette Bening, Nyad
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall
Carey Mulligan, Maestro
WINNER: Emma Stone, Poor Things

Another year where predicting this category has us feeling like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Who loses more votes in the presence of Sandra Hüller? Who gains more in the absence of Margot Robbie? How do we even begin to factor in BAFTA and SAG results given that Lily Gladstone wasn’t nominated for the former and Hüller wasn’t nominated for the latter? Was Emma Stone hurt more by Poor Things not getting a SAG nomination for its ensemble than Gladstone was for winning her SAG trophy after many Oscar voters had already cast their final ballots? We could also factor in tolerance levels for Killers of the Flower Moon’s depiction of systemic theft and Poor Things’s sex scenes, but their combined 22 Oscar nominations tells us that those levels will likely cancel each other out. Right now, as we step back and gaze upon our blackboard, we take guarded comfort in the fact that our wild calculations bring to mind nothing less than the Frankensteinian visage of one Bella Baxter. Gonzalez

Best Supporting Actor

Sterling K. Brown, American Fiction
Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon
WINNER: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Ryan Gosling, Barbie
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things

Oscar bloggers will deny it until the day after the envelopes are opened, but Robert Downey Jr.’s win here is every bit the fait accompli that (spoiler for the next paragraph) Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s is in supporting actress. He’s his film’s chief antagonist—aside from, you know, Oppenheimer himself—in a category that often defaults toward rewarding unambiguous heavies (e.g., Heath Ledger’s Joker, Christoph Waltz’s Landa, and Jared Leto’s existence). Paul Giamatti’s post-Globes animal-style snack aside, Downey is winning this year’s awards circuit derby, albeit juggling the brio with the humility a little less breezily than we’d have predicted. And he can claim the “overdue” narrative without simultaneously bearing the burden of shouldering the industry’s clearly mixed feelings about the big, pink elephant in the room, specifically the grim possibility of limiting the biggest pop feminist crossover’s major Oscar wins to…just Ken. Henderson

Best Supporting Actress

Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer
Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple
America Ferrera, Barbie
Jodie Foster, Nyad
WINNER: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

In the absence of Penélope Cruz from this category, which frees us of having to make a case for an upset unseen since Marcia Gay Harden won in this category, there’s absolutely nothing to see here. Voters will give this to Da’Vine Joy Randolph as much for how effortlessly her sneakily moving performance in The Holdovers commands your attention from the moment she walks on screen as for the chance to elevate a virtual unknown. Gonzalez

Best Original Screenplay

WINNER: Anatomy of a Fall
The Holdovers
Maestro
May December
Past Lives

Best original screenplay is the ultimate Oscar consolation prize. Some of the greatest films of all time had to settle for just this one award, and in 10 out of the last 13 Oscar ceremonies, the film that won here was also nominated in the best director category. The advantage of being the writer of the film you directed cannot be underestimated, and there’s exactly one nominated director this year who’s also nominated here: Justine Triet, whose Anatomy of a Fall also has the distinction of surging at just the right time, as well as being a water-cooler movie par excellence. Gonzalez

Best Adapted Screenplay

American Fiction
Barbie
WINNER: Oppenheimer
Poor Things
The Zone of Interest

Here’s where we feel compelled to talk serious about Barbie and its industry reputation, for this is the most conspicuous category many predict that AMPAS will take a pause in its otherwise unadulterated Oppenheimer coronation. The path by which Barbie (as clearly an “original” screenplay as Logan, Before Midnight, and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm before it) got slotted here is settled history, and less germane to the discussion than Greta Gerwig’s director snub, which, alongside Margot Robbie’s own in best actress, has been fueling the film’s underdog narrative.

There’s no doubt that the as-yet Oscarless Gerwig has been putting in extra shifts campaigning for this win (as has her co-writer and husband, Noah Baumbach, visibly under duress). But you’d have to be willfully ignoring the vast difference between how one half of Barbenheimer has been performing this awards season compared to the other if you think there’s any kind of race here. If, indeed, the underdog narrative for Barbie has been making inroads, frankly we’d be seeing evidence of that, um, anywhere that doesn’t involve trophy magnet Billie Eilish.

Speaking of that Eilish song, Harris pointed out in the New York Times piece mentioned earlier that Hollywood’s specific kink in this moment is obsession over exactly how to move forward and not lose its soul. Oppenheimer made $950 million worldwide seemingly outside of its artistic ambitions, the proverbial gamble that paid off in ways Hollywood simply doesn’t see anymore. Barbie’s quasi-meta overtures don’t hide the fact that it made $1.4 billion worldwide exclusively because it was engineered to do exactly that, and at a time where many in the business find themselves attached to far more artistically hollow variations carrying the same mission statement.

When Werner Herzog joked that the price of a ticket to Barbie offered spectators the chance to witness “sheer hell, or as close as it gets,” his jab likely cut closer to what sentiment lingers just under the skin of so many creatives in this era of content than many would admit. So, yes, consider us unconvinced that this one’s going to break pink up against Christopher Nolan’s un-Xeroxable red manuscript pages. Henderson

Best International Feature

Io Capitano
Perfect Days
Society of the Snow
The Teacher’s Lounge
WINNER: The Zone of Interest

France no doubt would like a do-over, but the country’s submission of Taste of Things over Anatomy of a Fall for this category wasn’t as surprising as reported, given Oscar’s fondness for food-themed films and the undeniable quality of Tran Anh Hung’s delectable food drama. Indeed, back in September of last year, Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner didn’t seem like it could go the distance in this category, let alone any other, by comparison. Flash forward five months and the truly surprising absence of Taste of Things here guarantees that the only film in this category nominated for best picture walks away with the prize in broad daylight. Gonzalez

Best Documentary Feature

Bobi Wine: The People’s President
The Eternal Memory
Four Daughters
To Kill a Tiger
WINNER: 20 Days in Mariupol

Just shy of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 20 Days in Mariupol premiered at Sundance, where it would eventually win the documentary audience award. Ukrainian photojournalist and war correspondent Mstyslav Chernov’s film bears harrowing witness to the atrocities that had been committed during the early weeks of the invasion in the titular eastern Ukrainian port town. Chernov’s film is searing and worthy of this award, and Oscar voters will not pass up the opportunity to give him the platform to further protest Russia’s atrocities. Gonzalez

Best Animated Feature

The Boy and the Heron
Elemental
Nimona
Robot Dreams
WINNER: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

To date, Spirited Away is the only Studio Ghibli film to win this award. Miyazaki Hayao’s latest, The Boy and the Heron, won the Globe and BAFTA, and its impressively raked up more at the domestic box office than Spirited Away. Sentiment, too, is also on its side—that is, if you believe that it’s truly going to be Miyazaki’s swan song. But in terms of precursors, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has it beat, entering this race with Annie, PGA, and ACE trophies in hands, suggesting that misgivings about the film being a sequel will not weigh on the minds of very many voters. It’s a nail-biter, for sure, and if anything tips the scales in favor of Across the Spider-Verse, it may be the voters who don’t have the option to throw their weight behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, our favorite animated film of last year that just so happens to coast on very similar vibes. Gonzalez

Best Cinematography

El Conde
Killers of the Flower Moon
Maestro
WINNER: Oppenheimer
Poor Things

Rodrigo Prieto would be a deserving winner here, and simply for his camera’s delicately evocative dance with sunlight throughout Killers of the Flower Moon. It certainly helps his chances that he also lensed another best picture nominee this year, and last year’s highest-grossing film, Barbie. But it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where this award doesn’t go to Hoyte van Hoytema for how he worked to achieve Christopher Nolan’s vision on Oppenheimer. From Kodak creating a 65mm black-and-white film stock for the production, to a custom-made 40mm lens being used for close-ups, a book could be written about the film’s cinematographic advances, as well as van Hoytema’s efforts to transcend any number of technical hindrances, and the proof of his success is in the immersive, visceral power of the film’s images. Gonzalez

Best Costume Design

Barbie
Killers of the Flower Moon
Napoleon
Oppenheimer
WINNER: Poor Things

Only five times in Oscar history, including this year, have the nominees for best production design and costuming lined up. In three of the previous four times they’ve boasted identical slates, the spoils in both categories have gone to the same film. It’s a battle royale in both categories between two films that, thematically, are eerily similar: Barbie and Poor Things. Both enter this race having won CDGA awards in their respective categories, and as AMPAs almost always rewards a period film here, we’re calling it for Poor Things. Giving us pause is that Black Panther took this prize over another Yorgos Lanthimos period film, The Favourite, but, then again, the marvelous Afrofuristic designs of the former, for the way they at once represent a fantasy in a reality, remind us in more ways than one how Poor Things straddles all sorts of lines, and more than just ones of genre. Gonzalez

Best Documentary Short

“The ABCs of Book Banning”
“The Barber of Little Rock”
“Island in Between”
WINNER: “The Last Repair Shop”
“Nai Nai & Wài Pó”

AMPAS is prone to touting its progressive bona fides, especially in the shorts categories, which makes Sheila Nevins’s “The ABCs of Book Banning” a serious contender here. But the short, which centers the very precocious voices of those impacted by book-banning practices across the United States in the last few years, is so cloyingly structured and scored that it tips over into the condescending. That leaves the door very wide open for “The Last Repair Shop,” a conventionally made but sweetly moving celebration of not just the skilled workers of all stripes who fix musical instruments for Los Angeles’s public school students, but of the meaning and deliverance made possible by art-making, another favorite Oscar subject matter. Gonzalez

Best Film Editing

Anatomy of a Fall
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
WINNER: Oppenheimer
Poor Things

As heartening as it is to see the whipcrack-tight momentum of Anatomy of a Fall (whose two and a half hours make Oppenheimer’s three and Killers of the Flower Moon’s three and a half feel positively Lav Diaz-ian) slip in here over the ostentatious chronologies of Maestro or the sitcom-derived beats of Barbie, one only wishes the grim death march of The Zone of Interest could’ve found its way in alongside them all. Ultimately, though, there’s no way this one doesn’t swing first-time nominee Jennifer Lame’s way, for sustaining Christopher Nolan’s seemingly impossible feat of turning a biopic centered around possibly the genre’s most inward-turned figure into what feels like the longest movie trailer ever. Henderson

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Golda
Maestro
Oppenheimer
WINNER: Poor Things
Society of the Snow

It’s hard to think of any notable recent examples of AMPAS surveying a very-online backlash-cum-attempted cancellation and being swayed by the brouhaha. If anything, its recent track record is littered with such cases as Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Jojo Rabbit, whose Oscar wins suggest controversy only accelerates retrenchment. All of which is to say that it’s not impossible to imagine the most glaringly, um, on-the-nose of Maestro’s many offenses somehow perversely winding up at the center of its only win. But it’s even easier to imagine Yorgos Lanthimos’s relentless maximalism running the table among Oscar’s visual craft categories. Henderson

Best Original Score

American Fiction
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Killers of the Flower Moon
WINNER: Oppenheimer
Poor Things

The headline here is, of course, the oops-no-longer-retired John Williams adding a 54th nomination to his insurmountable tally for a film virtually no one respects (which many argue only comes to life when utilizing the themes that he’s been endlessly recycling for four decades now), and in the process sidelining relative newcomers like Daniel Pemberton (Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse) and Mica Levi (The Zone of Interest) along with under-heralded veterans like Joe Hisaishi (The Boy and the Heron). This category, which like most of the techs seems increasingly tethered to whatever’s in play in best picture, will again inevitably fall Oppenheimer’s way for, among other reasons, composer Ludwig Göransson largely for taking the baton from Williams’s propensity for filling every available space with symphonic import. Henderson

Best Original Song

“The Fire Inside,” Flamin’ Hot
“I’m Just Ken,” Barbie
“It Never Went Away,” American Symphony
“Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People),” Killers of the Flower Moon
WINNER: “What Was I Made For?,” Barbie

You have to hand it to a branch that manages to make room for, on one hand, the artistic collectivism and unabashed representation of the Osage tribe’s “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” and, on the other, Diane Warren’s now 15th career nomination for a song about spicy Cheetos. As for which of the two Barbie songs will win, “I’m Just Ken” has garnered all the headlines and is the bigger meme engine, but Billie Eilish doesn’t generally lose awards, and to the point that it’s borderline disingenuous for her to even ask her own song’s central question. Henderson

Best Production Design

Barbie
Killers of the Flower Moon
Napoleon
Oppenheimer
WINNER: Poor Things

A “more is better” mentality clearly informs how many of the craft categories shake out year after year. By that logic, this is another two-way race between Barbie and Poor Things, but we give the edge the latter given that it enters this race having won this prize over the latter at both the BAFTAs and the Art Directors Guild. Gonzalez

Best Animated Short

“Letter to a Pig”
“Ninety-Five Senses”
“Our Uniform”
“Pachyderme”
WINNER: “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko”

Not a single nominee here isn’t touched by the ugly realities of the adult world, which makes for a less whimsical slate than usual for a category that frequently favors such wholesome offerings as “Bao,” “Hair Love,” or last year’s insufferable winner, “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse,” which took the time-honored Academy tradition of virtue-signaling to an almost pathological extreme. And yet, if there’s a film in the running here that’s at least an emotional quotient match with those previously honored, it may well be “War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” which hedges no bets from its title on down. A wartime short aimed at those whose perception of geopolitical discord never advanced beyond whether we all can just get along, it also boasts the only remotely Disney-esque anthropomorphized critter and the year’s most eye-rolling needle-drop. Held against the compelling ambiguities of the Holocaust-invoking “Letter to a Pig” (its closest competitor), the insulated literal-mindedness of “War Is Over!” feels like voter catnip. Henderson

Best Live Action Short

“The After”
“Invincible”
“Knight of Fortune”
WINNER: “Red, White and Blue”
“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”

There’s no real respite from in this short category either, though that’s certainly par for the course in the live action race, whose recent winners include “The Long Goodbye,” “Two Distant Strangers,” and “Skin,” In that vein, we’re half tempted to pair our prediction for “War is Over!” with a vote of confidence in favor of “The After,” a stultifyingly clumsy vehicle that coasts on the star power of David Oyelowo and a climactic resolution that carries the rhetorical water of someone declaring “I’m cured” after a single therapy session. Red, White and Blue is arguably no less blunt but also lays the welcome mat out for voters to make an unambiguous post-Dobbs protest statement in defense of abortion rights, which should be enough to surmount the auteurist star power of Wes Anderson. Henderson

Best Sound

The Creator
Maestro
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
WINNER: Oppenheimer
The Zone of Interest

Among the few viable upsets against Oppenheimer is the one seemingly brewing here. Many argue the sound of the gut-churning, inhuman machinery of death humming at the periphery of The Zone of Interest’s Auchwitz house is the nominee here that unambiguously makes the biggest impact in service of its film. No arguments in my corner. It’s also true that the presence of the latest Mission: Impossible and The Creator could cleave a few of the votes for “respectable bombast” away from Oppenheimer’s constituency. But it’s rare, if nearly impossible, for this award to go to the candidate that’s also arguably the field’s most subtle, so we’re sticking with the odds-on favorite. Henderson

Visual Effects

The Creator
WINNER: Godzilla Minus One
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Napoleon

It wasn’t exactly a viral moment, but for those who follow these sorts of things, and we imagine that most Oscar voters do, the team behind Godzilla Minus One really did have the best reaction to receiving an Oscar nomination this year. That show of unbridled joy may be all that the film needs to seal the deal here, though it certainly helps that its box office numbers here in the States exceeded those of what many see as its stiffest competition, The Creator, and that its visual effects wizardly is so unforgettably haunting. Gonzalez