It’s Time for the Oscars, So Never Mind the Slumping Industry and the War
At the heart of this year’s Academy Awards, there’s a wonderfully suspenseful Best Picture race between two great films from remarkable filmmakers, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”
It’s all the stuff surrounding that race that has made this a messy, troubled and exhausting season.
So let’s start with the good news, OK?
“One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” appear to be locked in one of the tightest Best Picture races in many years, and both are the kind of bold, entertaining films that it’s easy to embrace and root for. Most “One Battle” fans I know would be accepting of a “Sinners” win, and vice versa; this isn’t a “The King’s Speech” vs. “The Social Network” or “Green Book” vs. “Roma” or “CODA” vs. “The Power of the Dog” battle where devotees of one frontrunner were upset at the idea of its rival winning.
And beyond Best Picture, three of the four acting races appear to be genuinely suspenseful: Michael B. Jordan, Timothee Chalamet, Wagner Moura and Ethan Hawke are all potential Best Actor winners, while the supporting races feature Sean Penn and Amy Madigan as shaky frontrunners and Stellan Skarsgard, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku and Teyana Taylor as entirely possible winners.
On the face of it, the Oscar show is likely to be a triumph for Warner Bros., which released both “One Battle” and “Sinners,” and for Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chairs and CEOs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose string of successes wiped out memories of their rocky early tenure at the studio and seems destined to culminate in triumph at the Dolby Theatre.
The studio dominated the 2025 box office with $4 billion out of the industry’s total of $8.8 billion, and a victory by either film would be the studio’s 10th Best Picture winner, making Warners the fifth studio to hit double digits after Columbia (12), United Artists (12), Paramount (11) and Universal (10). (The other WB winners were “The Life of Emile Zola,” “Casablanca,” “My Fair Lady,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Unforgiven,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “The Departed” and “Argo.”) It would be the first WB winner in 13 years, since “Argo” in 2013.
But would it be the last? Aye, there’s the rub. With Warner Bros. Discovery set to be acquired by David Ellison’s Paramount, the fate of the studio has kept Hollywood buzzing for months – and while Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav talked up the slate that De Luca and Abdy are preparing for 2026, 2027 and 2028 at the studio’s salute to its Oscar nominees on Friday night at Mother Wolf in Hollywood, uncertainty hangs over the studio even in its moment of presumed Oscar glory.
In fact, the Oscars arrive as uncertainty afflicts the entire entertainment industry, and in particular theatrical film. Which means that every reason to celebrate on Sunday night will arrive accompanied by big question marks about the art form that’s being celebrated.
And then there are those other question marks about the world that have little to do with the entertainment industry and everything to do with geopolitical turmoil. The last time the Academy Awards took place just after the U.S. had launched an attack on a country in the Middle East, it was 2003 and the war in Iraq shook the Oscars to its core.
This time, we’re at war (or whatever the administration wants to call it today) with Iran, and the effect on the show remains to be seen. Will it be mentioned from the stage of the Dolby? Of course it will. Will it dominate speeches or produce another Michael Moore “Shame on you, Mr. Bush!” moment? That probably depends on who wins, though I wouldn’t bet against it.
On the other hand, maybe people will be too exhausted to get worked up on stage, given that the awards season has been so long, ending on the third Sunday of March. If you discount 2021, when the show was delayed by two months by the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2022, when it was delayed by one month, the last time the ceremony was this late in March was 2003, that same wartime show that produced Moore’s speech.
Otherwise, the shows have typically taken place in late February, with a detour into the first week of March every four years because of the Winter Olympics.
This year’s elongated schedule, which was instituted partly to give voters more time to see all the films, has drawn a fair amount of grumbling on the awards circuit in recent weeks. “Why have we spent the last two weeks talking about ballet and cats?” scoffed one Best Picture nominee on Friday, referring to the media tempests-in-teapots over Timothee Chalamet’s dismissive remarks about ballet and opera and Jessie Buckley’s three-month-old comments about not getting along with one of her husband-to-be’s cats. “That’s what you get when the season stretches out this long.”
The real question facing the Academy and ABC, though, isn’t whether the nominees and industry figures are turned off by the endless awards season – it’s whether potential viewers will want to tune in to watch an awards show devoted to movies that for the most part haven’t been in theaters for weeks. The network’s streak of broadcasting Oscar shows, which began 51 years ago, will end in two years on the heels of the 100th ceremony, and neither the Academy nor ABC wants the impending move to YouTube to be preceded by dismal ratings.
Last year’s ceremony drew just shy of 20 million viewers. Hitting that figure would have seemed disappointing only six years ago, but now it would feel like an accomplishment, after viewership bottomed out at 10.4 million the year of COVID and has slowly climbed back up since then. As for the days that routinely brought 40 million-plus viewers, those seem to be long gone, though they were really only 12 years ago.
So that’s the big challenge as Oscar night (or, in the Pacific Time Zone, Oscar late afternoon) arrives: Will a tight race between two very good movies that have made almost $600 million between them be enough to overcome a late date, a slumping industry and a war?
In the long run, that’s a bigger and more important question than “What’s gonna win?”
Best Picture
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One Battle After AnotherProbability: 99% No change: 0%Nominations: Oscars, SAG, BAFTA, PGA, GG, Critics ChoiceWins: BAFTA, PGA, GG, Critics Choice“One Battle After Another” marks the third consecutive Best Picture nominee for director Paul Thomas Anderson following “Licorice Pizza” and “Phantom Thread.”
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SinnersProbability: 7.69% Up: 6.69%Nominations: Oscars, PGA, Critics ChoiceThis century, when a nomination leader also won Best Ensemble at the Actor Awards, it also won Best Picture 89% of the time. The only holdout was “American Hustle.” However, only two movies have won Best Picture after only winning SAG ensemble: “Crash” and “Parasite,” neither of which was a nomination leader. “Sinners” has momentum, but a Best Picture win would be a massive upset.
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HamnetProbability: 3.8% Down: -29.53%Nominations: Oscars, SAG, BAFTA, PGA, GG, Critics ChoiceWins: GG“Hamnet’s” wins and losses this season resemble three other films this century, including “Moonlight,” which won Best Picture.
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FrankensteinProbability: 3.8% Down: -10.49%Nominations: Oscars, SAG, PGA, GG, Critics ChoiceFive other films this century have gotten the same Best Picture nominations and wins as “Frankenstein.” One (“Million Dollar Baby”) won Best Picture.
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Sentimental ValueProbability: 1% No change: 0%Nominations: Oscars, SAG, BAFTA, PGA, GG, Critics ChoiceWins: SAGJoachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” picked up nominations for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay, but it was not recognized in Best Picture or any acting categories.
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Train DreamsProbability: 1% No change: 0%Nominations: Oscars, BAFTA, PGA, GG, Critics ChoiceJoel Edgerton last starred in a Best Picture nominee in 2012 (“Zero Dark Thirty”)
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The Secret AgentProbability: 1% No change: 0%Nominations: Oscars, GGLast year, “I’m Still Here” became the first Brazilian film and the first Portuguese-speaking film nominated for Best Picture. “The Secret Agent” is now the second.
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Marty SupremeProbability: 1% No change: 0%Nominations: Oscars, SAG, BAFTA, PGA, GG, Critics ChoiceOnly four films this century have won Best Actor and Best Picture: “Gladiator,” “The King’s Speech,” “The Artist” and “Oppenheimer.”
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F1Probability: 1% No change: 0%Nominations: Oscars, PGARead TheWrap’s coverage with the team behind “F1” here
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BugoniaProbability: 1% No change: 0%Nominations: Oscars, PGA, GG, Critics Choice“Bugonia” marks Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s third collaboration (following “The Favourite” and “Poor Things”) to get a Best Picture nomination.
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