Big, Happy Families Win Oscars

When Tolstoy claimed that all happy families were alike, he may have been talking about the Oscars. Call it the holiday-card theory of awards season: For three years running, the Best Picture prize has gone to the film whose cast has done the best job presenting as a heartwarming family unit.

I first noticed this trend during the season of CODA, when eventual Supporting Actor winner Troy Kotsur reliably brought the house down in every precursor ceremony. When I mentioned this to someone who worked on the film’s campaign, they noted it wasn’t just Kotsur — it was the whole family. Whenever Kotsur and his co-stars Marlee Matlin, Emilia Jones, and Daniel Durant entered a room together, voters glommed onto them. Whatever warm feelings viewers had toward their onscreen family were activated when they saw the actors together cosplaying as an actual family in real life.

The same held true the following season, when Everything Everywhere All at Once cruised to victory on the back of its own lovable family. Its ensemble may have spent much of the movie punching one another, but on the campaign trail they were a united front. With Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, and James Hong slotted into familiar familial roles while Jamie Lee Curtis filling in as the kooky aunt.

Of course, it helped that these movies were literally about families. Both CODA and EEAAO told Oscar-friendly stories of parents and children overcoming their differences to achieve an external goal (getting into music school or sorting out tax issues), cementing their bond in the process. But other films have employed the same dynamic to equal success, even without ending on a big group hug. Parasite was in many ways the forerunner of the strategy, but it featured a much more caustic family story. That didn’t stop Hollywood from embracing the actors who played the Kim and Park families when they toured America as a group; for many pundits, the sight of the actors striding onstage at the 2020 SAG Awards to accept their Best Cast trophy was the moment they realized Parasite would be a formidable contender. Last year’s Oppenheimer wasn’t about a family at all, but the onscreen camaraderie among the scientists at Los Alamos definitely translated when the “Oppenhomies” hit the awards trail, bringing a sense of fraternal affection to an otherwise austere contender.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, then, let’s turn our judgemental gaze on others. Which films might benefit most from the holiday-card dynamic this year?

On paper, The Piano Lesson looks like the obvious pick. Not only is it a film about family — a pair of siblings weighing questions of legacy and inherited trauma — but it was made by one, too. The movie was produced by Denzel Washington, part of his project adapting each play in August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh” cycle, and it features three of his children: Malcolm directs, John David stars, and Katia is an executive producer. Buzz has been quieter than Netflix might have expected, though, even after the movie hit streaming last week. The Piano Lesson is not Netflix’s No. 1 priority this season, so perhaps the Washingtons will have to take the campaign into their own hands. Is this something a family road trip can fix?

Netflix’s favored child is Emilia Pérez, which features a family dynamic even messier than Parasite’s. It’s about a trans gangster who fakes her own death, then gets into a custody battle with her former wife, who believes this new woman is her dead husband’s cousin. However, internal factors may prevent the cast from buddying up the way others do. Besides the vastly different levels of fame among the main actors, there’s also a language barrier: Half of them are native Spanish speakers, one of them was raised bilingual, and the other had to relearn Spanish for the film. At least Selena Gomez and Édgar Ramirez appear to be close!

One film that nails the holiday-card energy is the Brazilian entry I’m Still Here, which follows a family in 1970s Rio de Janeiro soldiering on after the father is disappeared by the military regime. Like The Piano Lesson, it has a real-life family connection: In the epilogue, Fernanda Torres’s matriarch is played by Torres’s mother, Oscar nominee Fernanda Montenegro. But Sony Pictures Classics is focusing on Torres’s Best Actress campaign; the film might be too far from the Best Picture conversation to make a full-family charm offensive worthwhile.

We might be better off looking at films that, like Oppenheimer, feature makeshift families. Two come to mind. There’s Sing Sing, about inmates in a state penitentiary who form their own theater troupe, many of whom are played by graduates of the actual program. Then there’s Anora, in which four squabbling strangers transform into an unofficial family unit over one wild night (and turn out to be more functional than the actual family we meet later). They both feel like campaigns that should get a boost from voters seeing everyone in the cast bounce off one another in person.

Who else? Whatever Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are doing on the Wicked press tour, family is not the word that comes to mind. While Steve McQueen’s Blitz appears to have faded a bit, any hopes it does have rest of Saoirse Ronan’s skills on the campaign trail, where the Irish actress has perfected a winning double act with her onscreen son, Elliott Heffernan. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play cousins in A Real Pain, but their vibe is less cuddly. I got to meet both actors at a dinner last week and was struck by how different they come off in public: Eisenberg is constitutionally incapable of being “on,” while Culkin can’t not be on. Anyway, there’s only two of them, which is not quite enough to sell the family-reunion vibe.

Maybe the cast everyone most wants to see together is the one that’s not playing a family at all. Wouldn’t you love to see all the cardinals from Conclave hanging out in their street clothes? (We’d finally get to see if the vaping Italian vapes in real life!) Unfortunately, per Little Gold Men, the cast are away from the trail working, leaving director Edward Berger as the face of the campaign. But with any luck, Conclave can go the distance, and all these middle-aged character actors will come together in their full glory. I’ll give thanks to that.

How to (Literally) Talk About This Year’s Oscar Contenders

We’ve all been there: You’re sitting down at Thanksgiving, wanting to have a nice, peaceful meal, but your uncle won’t stop unpacking the gender politics of The Substance. He’s trying to draw you into a confrontation over whether the film is making a point about internalized misogyny or punching down at women trying to survive in a sexist power structure — and all you’re trying to do is eat your mashed potatoes! You stumble through an argument about how director Coralie Fargeat weaponizes the male gaze, but halfway through you realize, I have no idea how to pronounce her last name.

Fear not — I’m here to help. As the festive season kicks into high gear, here’s a guide to talking about some of the Oscar race’s biggest (and most easily mispronounced) names:

Brady Corbet, The Brutalist: cor-BAY

Paul Mescal, Gladiator II: MESK-ul

Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia Pérez: gas-CON

Coralie Fargeat, The Substance: far-ZHAH

Mark Eydelshteyn, Anora: EYE-del-shtine

Halina Reijn, Babygirl: ha-LEEN-a RAIN

Fred Hechinger, Gladiator II and Nickel Boys: HECK-in-jer

Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown: BAR-ber-o

September 5: September Five

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Every week between now and January 17, when the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced, Vulture will consult its crystal ball to determine the changing fortunes in this year’s Oscar race. In our “Oscar Futures” column, we’ll let you in on insider gossip, parse brand-new developments, and track industry buzz to figure out who’s up, who’s down, and who’s currently leading the race for a coveted Oscar nomination.