Oscars 2024: What will win (and what should) in year of riches
It’s peculiar to look back at the movie year 2023, so full of gratifying work in so many directions, from the vantage point of relatively early 2024. There isn’t enough in theaters these days, certainly not enough good stuff. In the big-budget commercial realm, “Dune: Part Two” is an outlier, not a harbinger. It’s a hit right now, as opposed to its original 2023 release date, due to writers’ and actors’ strikes, and to the stonewalling of producers and streaming companies expecting employees to come to the studio definition of “their senses.”
From our vantage point, last year feels more like last century. Did it really happen? Did the Barbenheimering of the universe really happen? How did a quiet, mellow beauty of a (relatively inexpensive) A24 release, “Past Lives,” find a global audience? It was almost as if the pandemic was a bad, collective dream, and we woke up and thought let’s go to the movies! In “Once in a Lifetime,” the 1930 Kaufman & Hart satire on Hollywood, a studio mogul pines for the pre-talkie days when he was rich, on top and “even if you made a good picture, you made money.”
That was 2023. Even some good ones made money. But there’s a flip side to everything. The year that gave us the probable multi-oscar winner “Oppenheimer” (worldwide gross: $958 million) indicates that certain phenomena cannot expect an encore. Christopher Nolan’s big noise, coupled with Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” (worldwide gross: just shy of $1.5 billion), amounts to tragically little in the conglomerative debt loads blocking the movie industry’s future.
Take “Barbie.” Its profits mean little to Warner Bros. Discovery. CEO Jeff Zaslav is vexed by the “generational disruption we’re going through,” as he said on an earnings call last year, quoted in a New York Times Sunday Magazine feature. When you’re stuck with “a streaming service that’s losing billions,” he said, “it’s really, really difficult to go on offense.”
So we wait for miracles this year, and for a stronger, fuller slate in 2025.
Tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony marks Hollywood’s 96th festival of statuettes. We’re still here, some of us watching, even.
And while we’re here, if we can’t take the time to cheapen the entire medium with a few predictions, then we really have lost our way.
Best picture nominations
“American Fiction”
“Anatomy of a Fall”
“Barbie”
“The Holdovers”
“Killers of the Flower Moon” “Maestro”
“Oppenheimer”
“Past Lives”
“Poor Things”
“The Zone of Interest”
What will win: “Oppenheimer.” Made too much money to ignore; a tastefully assaultive technique kept it moving; also mostly very good.