What the Hell Is Happening With the Oscar Race?

On Saturday night at about 10 p.m. PT, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was clearly going to coast all the way to the Oscars, where it would be this year’s easy Best Picture winner. Less than 24 hours later, that coasting came to a screeching halt and “One Battle” was suddenly in a real dogfight with Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.” And now a romp has turned into a coin toss.

Or has it?

Let’s just say that last weekend made the Oscar race more fun and more confusing than we expected – but that it’s too easy to get carried away and put too much credence in the swings of a weekend that saw “One Battle” win the Producers Guild Award on Saturday and “Sinners” counter with the Actor Awards’ ensemble-cast prize on Sunday.

Two weeks from now, after the 98th Academy Awards has taken place, this stormy PGA/Actors weekend could be seen as a vital tea leaf, but it could just as easily be a warning not to get carried away by the last award or the loudest standing ovation.

Here are some of the lessons we can take from these latest wrinkles in the race.

The awards that “One Battle After Another” has won mean more than the ones that “Sinners” has won.

Winning the Actor Awards’ ensemble category is a great thing for a movie that has Oscar Best Picture aspirations. “Oppenheimer” did it, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” did it, “CODA” did it — and they all went on to win the Oscar. (In fact, the ensemble award has served as a canary in a coal mine for a string of Oscar surprises: “Shakespeare in Love,” “Crash,” “CODA” …)

But just as often, as recent ensemble winners and Oscar also-rans “Conclave” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7” can attest, the 150,000-plus SAG-AFTRA voters do not echo their substantially fewer, substantially more international colleagues in the Academy. Overall, half the ensemble winners at the ceremony formerly known as the SAG Awards have won Best Picture, and half haven’t.

On the other hand, several of the awards that have gone to “One Battle” – the Critics Choice Award for Best Film, the Directors Guild Award and the Producers Guild Award – have success rates on the high side of 60%, with the DGA and PGA nearing 75%. And since the Oscars and the PGA both moved from five to 10 nominees and introduced ranked-choice voting to determine the big winner, the producers have accurately predicted the Oscar winner more than 81% of the time.

In a vacuum, if you look at the major awards that each of the top two contenders have won so far, “One Battle” clearly has the lead, the Actor Awards wins for “Sinners” notwithstanding.

But the timing favors “Sinners.”

For weeks, it has looked as if “One Battle” was inevitable, with its head start courtesy of the Gotham Awards, the major critics awards , the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes. For “Sinners” to have any chance, it was going to need to get some kind of momentum, and every award that went to “One Battle” in February suggested that the momentum wasn’t happening.

But the calendar was deceptive. In February “One Battle” won the Directors Guild Award, but those ballots were cast between Jan. 8 and Feb. 6. It won BAFTA, whose members voted between Jan. 9 and Jan. 20. It won the PGA, where voting started on Jan. 16 and ended on Feb. 3, a full 25 days before the envelope was opened.

In other words, all of those “One Battle” wins mostly told us what voters were thinking back in January.  The major award that told us what they were thinking more recently was the Actor Award, which didn’t close its polls until Feb. 27, two days before the ceremony.

If you’re looking for evidence of “Sinners” momentum, that might be it.

The important win for “Sinners” wasn’t the ensemble award.

Even after “One Battle” won the PGA on Saturday, the consensus was that the Actor Awards would be the one awards show where it would lose. “Sinners” was the favorite going in, buoyed by its rich and varied cast and by a history of SAG-AFTRA voters giving the ensemble award to movies with large Black casts, even if those films wouldn’t go on to win the top Oscar: Coogler’s “Black Panther” in 2018, “Hidden Figures” in 2016, “The Help” in 2011 …

So if “Sinners” has only won the ensemble award, the pundits would have shrugged and moved on. But the fact that it also scored the night’s biggest film upset when Michael B. Jordan took the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role award, for which Timothée Chalamet was favored, gave the film an unexpected one-two punch that felt significant. And when Shrine Exhibition Hall erupted into a standing ovation for both wins, you couldn’t help but think back to 2020, when the SAG ensemble award for “Parasite” was in many ways the first tangible sign of how much Hollywood would come to love giving awards to what was then an Oscar longshot.

We might be putting too much importance on precursor awards.

Of course you have to judge the race based on history, but the last decade and a half of the Oscars has seen history precedent grow increasingly wobbly. From 1996 to 2018, you absolutely couldn’t win Best Picture without a SAG ensemble nomination, but then “The Shape of Water” did it and “Nomadland” did it again. A film not in English couldn’t win Best Picture, until “Parasite” did.

And now, you can find statistics to tell you why “One Battle After Another” can’t lose Best Picture, and stats to tell you why “Sinners” will win. Which means that there’s a time to rely on precedent, and a time to back off and understand that this is a different Academy and we can’t swing back and forth based on what’s happened in the past.

We now know everything we’re going to know until Oscar night.

Oscar voting doesn’t end until Thursday afternoon, and the show doesn’t take place until March 15. In between then and now, the Writers Guild of America will give out its annual awards, becoming the last of the four major Hollywood guilds to chime in.

But rather than helping to clarify a confusing situation, the WGA almost certainly won’t help at all. That’s because “One Battle After Another” will likely win in the Best Adapted Screenplay category and “Sinners” will do the same in Best Original Screenplay, with the “Sinners” path to victory made easier by guild rules that disqualified the Oscar-nominated screenplays for “Blue Moon,” “It Was Just an Accident” and “Sentimental Value.”

The other awards coming up between now and the Oscars won’t be much help, either. “One Battle” and “Sinners” are both nominated for the American Society of Cinematographers Awards, but the ASC winner has only predicted Best Picture once in the last decade, and three times this century. The Cinema Audio Society Awards and the Motion Picture Sound Editors’ Golden Reel Awards are in pretty much the same boat.

So as far as usable intel goes, we already have it. Good luck to all of us.  

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