My 2024 Academy Award Predictions (for movies released in 2023)

“The people who study these things more conscientiously than I do tell us that the competition is mainly between Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.” Some serious, knowledgeable analyst wrote that weeks ago when the Oscar® nominations first came out. Ha! Just kidding! It was me. I wrote that. Well, it wasn’t much of a competition. The final score on Oscar night was Oppenheimer 7, Flowers of the Killing Moon 0. In wins-to-nominations percentage terms, the result was Oppenheimer 54 percent (of 13 nominations), Flowers of the Killing Moon 0 percent (of 10 nominations).

The funny thing is that, on the night, people pretended the competition was actually between Oppenheimer and Barbie because, you know, Barbieheimer. (Did that marketing meme pay off handsomely or what?) That was the basis for well delivered banter (actually witty and entertaining unlike much of the other banter) between co-presenters Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling. Barbie, of course, won at the box office and got 8 nominations, but nobody actually thought that it was likely to win in most of its categories, especially the top ones. In the end it got only Best Song.

Strangely, as far as my own predictions are concerned, my list of preferred winners actually turned out to be a better indicator than my fruitless (and early) exercise of checking the betting odds and listening to the buzz, bearing in mind that two of my picks (the two supporting actor categories) overlapped. Only one of the winners in the 10 categories I bother with did not appear on either of my lists—and I couldn’t be happier. Writer/director Cord Jefferson’s adapted screenplay for American Fiction was a worthy winner.

My biggest blind spot was in overestimating how sentimental academy voters would feel about 81-year-old filmmaker legend Martin Scorsese. Given all the praise that Killers of the Flower Moon was getting from all sides, I thought it quite likely that they would give the old man one more gong rather than honoring a Brit whose movie was certain to get lots of other prizes. Also, I was at a disadvantage in not having managed to see Scorsese’s movie myself before making my predictions. The strange thing was that, by Oscar night, the praise for Flower Moon had kind of dried up. The chat about how important and moving it was had evolved into comments about it being overlong and a bit unfocused. Even the excitement over the possibility of the first Native American Best Actress winner had shifted to awe over Emma Stone’s work in Poor Things. So there you go.

In the end academy voters had no trouble handing out awards to Brits and other non-Americans. As the local UK telecast panel (cf. my review of the show) noted during the breaks as the evening and early morning went on, the pattern seemed to be Americans presenting gongs and Brits (and notably, one gifted Irishman) showing up to collect them. Yes, all the acting winners, aside from Cillian Murphy, were Yanks, but in many of the other categories the honorees were non-Yanks—thanks to the dominance of Oppenheimer and a French couple that won for writing Anatomy of a Fall.

So, there isn’t much basis for me to indulge in my penchant for self-righteous kvetching about the Oscar results. In the end, these award shows really aren’t worth losing sleep over. Except that’s exactly what happens in my time zone.

Total Scores

Color Key to Actual Results:
Winners who got the Oscar
“Winners” who did not get the Oscar