Welcome to Statue Season! Each week leading up to the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, we’ll be checking in on the closest races, the winningest narratives, and the plain old movie magic that will decide who’s taking home the gold on March 15. This week, we’re celebrating the art of the last-minute Oscar surge as we enter an important stretch of precursor awards.
I’ll admit it—Oscar season has hit a slow stretch. After a fun Golden Globes ceremony followed by a historic slate of Academy Awards nominees, there has been a multi-week break from major precursor awards (outside of the Directors Guild Awards, whose top prize predictably went to One Battle After Another’s Paul Thomas Anderson). As a result, it’s felt like the tightest Oscar races have been put on pause, with no indication that momentum is swinging one way or another. (It doesn’t help that this year’s Oscar races don’t really contain anything completely batshit like Emilia Pérez to keep us occupied in the meantime.)
But worry not! We’re about to enter the hottest stretch of Oscar precursors: The BAFTAs are this Sunday, followed by the Producers Guild Awards next week and the Actor Awards (formerly the SAG Awards) on March 1. This is an extremely pivotal period in the run-up to the Oscars, when the front-runners that haven’t faced stiff competition thus far could get usurped by a dark horse contender experiencing a late push. Is anyone challenging Timothée Chalamet for Best Actor? How close is the Best Supporting Actress race between One Battle’s Teyana Taylor and Weapons’ Amy Madigan? And can Sinners finally take a bite out of One Battle’s dominant campaign? This is the time when the answers to those questions start coming into focus.
But how, exactly, do we know if an aberrant precursor award is a fluke or indicative of an incoming Oscar upset? Well, just as the Academy Awards are a celebration of the art of film, we’re now going to recognize the art of the last-minute Oscar surge. Not all upsets are good ones—I don’t think anyone would argue that Crash’s buzzer-beater Best Picture win over Brokeback Mountain in 2006 has aged well—but no one wants the Oscars to be completely chalk. That’s just no fun! Last-minute surges have led to some of the most exciting moments in Academy Awards history, and there are a few different avenues to make one happen.
Take last year, for instance. Demi Moore was collecting trophy after trophy on the awards circuit—and delivering some sweet acceptance speeches along the way—for The Substance. This was pretty unexpected, considering that Moore’s performance was frankly nasty, effects-driven body horror that screamed everything but Oscar bait. But the film also served as the comeback vehicle for a culturally significant actor who remade herself for the role. It seemed like she had the Oscar locked (stitched?) up—until Anora’s Mikey Madison danced her way to the BAFTA. This was a genuine shock after Moore’s narrative had strengthened so immensely over the course of the Best Actress race. Even still, oddsmakers weren’t convinced by Madison’s surprise win, and Moore was still the favorite heading into the Oscar ceremony—but Madison ultimately took home the statuette.
More on Statue Season
Even for the most dedicated Oscar obsessives, Madison’s win was difficult to predict. One major precursor win doesn’t automatically catapult you to the front of an Oscar race. Just look at what happened in the Best Actor race the very same year: The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody won the Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Critics Choice Award but ceded the SAG Award to Chalamet for A Complete Unknown. Brody remained the Best Actor favorite and indeed walked away with the Oscar. You could’ve easily argued that Chalamet was more likely to upset Brody than Madison was to upset Moore—Brody had won before, and it’s quite hard to win a second Oscar, while Chalamet, who’s reviving a dying breed of movie stars, is still seeking his Oscar coronation. Moore had never even been nominated and was appealing to the Academy because of her career reinvention—something it often loves to reward.
But despite easily craftable narratives that would curry Moore and Chalamet favor with the Academy, its ultimate decisions were in line with an Oscar maxim that’s held true for decades: Statuettes are most often given to younger women and older men. I mean, the youngest Best Actor winner is older than all of the top 10 youngest Best Actress winners! (Which is—guess who—Brody, for The Pianist.) This tendency is something that could come into play as this stretch of precursors plays out. And our old—well, young—pal Timmy is at the center of it once again. He’s currently a heavy favorite to win Best Actor for his role in Marty Supreme—FanDuel has his odds at –370—which would make him the second-youngest Best Actor winner ever. But let me reiterate: The Academy could’ve given Chalamet an Oscar last year, and it didn’t! And not only did he not win, but he lost to someone who had already won before! I’m not saying Chalamet doesn’t have a far better chance to win this year than he did last year—he absolutely does—but the Academy’s track record with young Best Actor hopefuls has me wary of guaranteeing him the win. And if he loses a key precursor over the next few weeks, the Best Actor race could get a lot more interesting. The Academy’s favor toward younger women could also come into play in the Best Supporting Actress race; if Madigan and Taylor split the SAG and the BAFTA, the Academy could fall back on its old maxim.
That’s not to say that the Academy doesn’t break its own rules from time to time. Brody’s first Best Actor win in 2003 comes to mind—that year, he was up against four heavy hitters, and the precursors were largely split between Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York) and Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt). Brody won only a few other prizes before taking home the Oscar statuette and making history. It was totally unpredictable! (As was his infamous smooch on Halle Berry as he took the stage—the man has never been able to accept an Oscar in a normal way.) In hindsight, Brody probably benefited from a split vote between Day-Lewis and Nicholson. Plus, although The Pianist lost the top award that year to Chicago, the fact that the two films split Best Picture and Best Director indicates that Roman Polanski’s film was probably in close competition for the former trophy, and the film’s reputation with the Academy could have boosted Brody’s campaign. That win was certainly an anomaly, but it did signal how a seemingly two-horse race doesn’t always tell the full story of a particular category. We’ve seen a version of that play out this year already, when One Battle’s Sean Penn kicked off awards season as the Best Supporting Actor front-runner, only for his costar Benicio del Toro to emerge as a legitimate threat, and then the split between the two of them allowed Sentimental Value’s Stellan Skarsgard to emerge as the favorite. Trading precursors back and forth clearly indicates a divide among voters and could spell opportunity for a contender on the fringes.
Brody’s first Academy Award also proved that winning major precursors isn’t always necessary to an Oscar campaign—his last-minute surge isn’t the only one that happened without those earlier victories. I’m assuming you remember the La La Land–Moonlight wars of 2017 that ended in very memorable fashion. Obviously, that result was shocking for reasons beyond what the Academy voted for—Warren “I wasn’t trying to be funny” Beatty, you will always be famous—but that would have gone down as one of the most surprising Best Picture winners even if the announcement had gone smoothly. Moonlight had lost the top prizes at the BAFTAs, Critics Choice Awards, and, critically, the PGA Awards to Damien Chazelle’s musical. The only major precursor it won was the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture—Drama, and La La Land won the equivalent award for Musical or Comedy on the same night. The same thing happened with 1917 and Parasite in 2020; the former won most of the key trophies on the awards circuit, but Bong Joon-ho’s thriller came away with the Best Picture Oscar despite a scant résumé. Again, those results were pretty historic outliers, but if One Battle continues the pace it’s been on over the next few weeks only for Sinners to snag the Best Picture Oscar at the last second, it wouldn’t be unprecedented.
There are a ton of ways for the Oscars to surprise us, and, especially lately, they’ve been quite difficult to predict in certain categories. The BAFTAs and the SAG Awards, for example, have differed on Best Actress for five years in a row. Even as the campaigning has cooled down—as evidenced by Chalamet’s measured public appearances and general decrease in rapping since the Marty Supreme press tour wrapped up—these next few weeks could allow select races to take some unexpected left turns and make the Oscar ceremony that much more exciting. It’s not like F1 will all of a sudden zoom into a Best Picture trophy (OK, but, like … what if it did?), but these Oscar campaigns are far from over—let’s hope for a little chaos.
Stock Watch
To paraphrase one of cinema’s great stockbrokers: Nobody knows if an Oscar stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in circles. In this section, we’ll evaluate who’s on the up-and-up and whose momentum is sputtering out as the competition across categories heats up.
Stock up: Frankenstein and Sinners both landed top awards from the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild over the weekend, with the former remaining the favorite for the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar. Guillermo del Toro’s film also snagged a key trophy at the Costume Designers Guild Awards last week, alongside Wicked: For Good. (One Battle also won an award at the ceremony for its costumes but, alas, is not nominated for an Oscar in that category. I’m begging the Academy to start recognizing contemporary costume design!)
Stock down: Train Dreams is making some noise in Gold Derby’s Best Editing odds after a strong showing at the Indie Spirit Awards—could that be one fewer trophy for Sinners? Meanwhile, Stellan Skarsgard’s Best Supporting Actor odds have slipped a bit as Jacob Elordi fever has swept the nation. Speaking of, is it too early to assess the 2027 Oscars? Because I sincerely hope we won’t be seeing Wuthering Heights’ skin room in the Best Production Design category.
