From 'Barbenheimer' to 'Poor Things': Top 10 contenders for Oscars 2024 Best Picture
Entertainment
From ‘Barbenheimer’ to ‘Poor Things’: Top 10 contenders for Oscars 2024 Best Picture
(Web Desk) - The best picture field for Sunday's Oscar ceremony features more diverse films than in previous years, ranging from comedy about dolls and crazed reanimated corpses to tragedies about the atomic bomb and Auschwitz.
The ten films from 2023 that are competing for Hollywood's highest honour are listed below.
American Fiction pulls off an incredible achievement. It is incredibly funny and exposes ugly hypocrisy and systemic racism.
Jeffrey Wright plays a Black author who loses faith in the publishing industry after discovering that they only want his books to be about crack cocaine and deadbeat dads. The novel becomes a sensation when he says precisely that, in jest.
The sharp satire won the top prize at the influential Toronto Film Festival and is the frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Winner of the Cannes Film Festival Hollywood is enthralled by Anatomy of a Fall, a complex French legal drama about a woman suspected of her husband's death. It is the front-runner for finest script that was created. It might be in queue for more because of a creative awards marketing that highlighted the film's endearing dog hero extensively.
Can it follow in the recent footsteps of South Korea's Parasite to become just the third Palme d'Or winner to win best picture? It might be a dark horse. The Oscars have already been won by merely nominating Barbie for best picture. Greta Gerwig's feminist parody was the highest-grossing film of the year, taking in $1.4 billion, and bringing legions of pink-clad admirers to theatres. It also inspired a plethora of memes.
No film - even its unlikely release twin Oppenheimer - dominated the global conversation more than Barbie, and the movie has featured prominently in the Oscars telecast's promotional push. But can it win? High-profile snubs for its director, and its star Margot Robbie, suggest it could struggle to score prizes beyond costume design and best song.
A charming, witty, old-fashioned drama, The Holdovers follows an unlikely trio stranded together over the winter holidays at a 1970s New England boarding school. The film reunites star Paul Giamatti with director Alexander Payne. Their previous collaboration, 2004's wine-country road trip movie Sideways, is an all-time classic.
Snubbed by Oscar voters for Sideways, Giamatti has a strong claim for best actor this time, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph is a shoo-in for supporting actress honours.
If any film can stop Oppenheimer from claiming the Best Picture, it may be The Holdovers. But that is still a long, long shot. Yes, it is three-and-a-half hours long. But Martin Scorsese's sumptuous drama about the murders of Native Americans in 1920s Oklahoma was just too beautiful - and important - for Academy voters to ignore.
Aside from its A-list leading men Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon perfectly cast Indigenous star Lily Gladstone in a vital, tragic role. Her performance as a wealthy, naive wife could be the first by a Native American to earn an acting Oscar, even if the meandering film itself left many voters cold.
Perennial nominee Bradley Cooper's latest bid to woo Oscars voters, Leonard Bernstein's biopic Maestro - which he writes, directs and stars in - racked up an impressive seven nominations.
Yet the film seems likeliest to win just the Oscar for best make-up. That would be a bittersweet, if fitting, legacy for a film that made unwanted, early headlines for Cooper's giant prosthetic nose. Maestro never truly escaped the so-called Jewface controversy, despite warm reviews.
It is hard to recall an Oscars with a more dominant frontrunner than Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan's drama about the father of the atomic bomb drew critical acclaim, grossed nearly $1 billion, and has won just about every top prize Hollywood has to offer. A grand, old-fashioned blockbuster for grown-ups, shot on a $100 million budget, Oppenheimer is overwhelmingly expected to buck the recent trend of smaller, indie movies winning best picture.
It would be the biggest upset since a loss for La La Land - which was mistakenly announced as best picture in 2017 - if it did not take the night's final prize. No film had a longer journey to the Oscars than Past Lives, which reduced hardened festivalgoers to sobbing wrecks when it debuted at Sundance back in January 2023.
