Oscar Seasoning: A Horribly Premature Look at Films to Expect in the 2024 Awards Race!
It's never too early... Okay, it's definitely too early, BUT STILL!
The Oscars are done for another year, so it’s time to think about 2024! Sorry, I know it’s early and we’re all still reeling from the madness of “I’m Just Ken”. Lily Gladstone’s loss will sting for quite some time, not gonna lie (you can read my post-Oscars piece on Pajiba.) But hey, the future is bright.
The thing about the Academy Awards is that, in some ways, they’re depressingly predictable, but they’re also far more capable of surprises than we often give them credit for. Who would have predicted that Everything Everywhere All at Once would be a Best Picture winner when it was announced? Sure, Oppenheimer felt like a safe bet months before we saw it, but did Barbie? So, predicting the 2024 nominees the same week that the 2023 winners were announced is clearly a clown’s endeavour, and I am nothing if not foolish and optimistic. Still, I think there’s worth in at least noting how these narratives are formed, why they attract certain kinds of films, and how the business of winning an Oscar is an all-year-round occupation. So, here are a few films I think will, if not be nominees in 2025, attract the phrase “awards buzz.”
A Different Man
Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a troubled and isolated man excluded from the world due to his facial difference caused by neurofibromatosis. After undergoing extensive surgery to become a hot dude, he becomes fixated on being in a play inspired by his life. Surely the lead role is his for the taking? But then Oswald turns up, a man with the same condition, and everyone loves him. A Different Man seems like the kind of film that could be tedious or problematic. Reviews out of Sundance and Berlin, however, suggest it to be a far pricklier and funnier effort. Stan won the Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance out of Berlin, so he's automatically in the race (I'm a big fan of hot dudes who embrace their inner goblin, and Stan channelling his best Willem Dafoe is catnip for me.) I'm also excited to see Adam Pearson in the spotlight, since he's a charming and talented dude and it's so rare to see disabled actors get great roles worthy of their abilities.
Sing Sing
I saw Sing Sing last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, and I knew immediately that it had the potential to be a very big deal. It was the only time I’d ever attended a public screening at TIFF where the audience got to its feet for a five-minute standing ovation. And boy, it deserved it. Colman Domingo, fresh off his Best Actor nomination for Rustin, is even better here, playing a prisoner who is part of an acting programme where they are encouraged to put on plays and find solace in the arts. It’s based on a real initiative, and aside from Domingo and Paul Raci from Sound of Metal, the entire cast is made up of men who participated in it. Sing Sing is riveting, fiercely political, and also rousing in a way that could be enticing to wider audiences. A24 acquired the movie and they sure know how to mount an awards campaign. I can’t wait to see this one again.
Dune: Part Two
(If you want to read about my love for Austin Butler’s murderous space pervert, you can do so on the Daily Beast!)
There’s this general assertion that blockbusters don’t fare well with the Academy, but we have so many examples from the past two decades that refute this. Example one: Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, which won a ton of Oscars and received a Best Picture nomination. Released while COVID-related lockdown issues still hindered the box office, the film was a commercial success, but its sequel, which was released last month, is extremely close to overtaking that intake in less than four weeks. Dune: Part Two is a grand undertaking, both aesthetically and thematically riveting. It’s a minor miracle that Villeneuve and company pulled it off, so I fully expect it to make waves with the Academy next year. They may not wholeheartedly embrace the vast mainstream but they’re also not niche weirdos. When a film is good and it makes money, they pay attention.
Blitz
Hey, remember when Widows didn't get a single Oscar nomination? I do. The pain, it's still with me. Steve McQueen won Best Picture with 12 Years a Slave, and since then, he's shown no interest in adhering to what Hollywood demands or expects. Last year, he released Occupied City, a 266-minute documentary about Amsterdam under Nazi occupation during WW2. Before that, we had the five-part anthology Small Axe, which focused on stories about the lives of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the '80s. Up next is Blitz, a drama about the Second World War. Very little is known about this project, but the presence of McQueen, plus actors like Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, and the iconic Kathy Burke mean it will be much-discussed for many months.
Joker: Folie à Deux
Okay, look, I know this paragraph is making a lot of my dear readers roll their eyes. I get it. Joker was a lot to deal with. The Discourse almost destroyed us. I thought the film was fine – it wasn’t dangerous incel bait but it wasn’t the second coming of Scorsese either – but I was exhausted by its presence by the time it won two Oscars. I’m a Joaquin Phoenix fan and I’m always going to be a bit sad that this is what he won Best Actor for (this is what the Academy deserves after not acknowledging the existence of You Were Never Really Here.) But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of excited for the sequel. Look, when a filmmaker takes a $55m movie and gets a billion dollar box office gross from it, what they should do is go totally insane with the sequel. And Todd Phillips, to his credit, has decided to make a Joker movie that is also a $200m musical starring Lady Gaga. How could I not be, at the very least, charmed by that? Warner Bros. apparently want Folie à Deux to play at the Venice Film Festival, where the first one premiered and won the Golden Lion. I saw the first film at Toronto and it went down an absolute storm there. They’re going to push this hard. Also, I’ll be in total sicko mode watching a Gaga-Phoenix press tour. I deserve this.
The Nickel Boys
It’s curious how often adaptations of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels just straight-up suck. Remember The Goldfinch? Or A Thousand Acres? Or All the Light We Cannot See? These examples seem to outnumber the good ones, like The Age of Innocence or To Kill a Mockingbird, but one cannot help but highly anticipate this next adaptation: The Nickel Boys. RaMell Ross, the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is taking on the weight of a very tough novel by Colson Whitehead. Based on true events, the book details the abusive treatment of a young Black boy sent to a reform school after being falsely accused of a crime. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is in a leading role and Amazon is distributing it. Let’s hope they do a better job here than they did with the other Whitehead adaptation they released, the truly brilliant and sinfully underseen The Underground Railroad.
Queer
Sure to be the most discoursed title of the year, Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of a William Burroughs novel won’t be an easy sell. It's a barely veiled memoir about Burroughs' time in Mexico where he was trying to get off heroin and became obsessed with a young American he meets there. The book is a fascinating read, an often troubling one that has not necessarily been embraced as part of the queer literary canon. Any adaptation will need to be a tonal and thematic tightrope walk, but Guadagnino is no stranger to that. The star of the piece is Daniel Craig, whose post-Bond career continues to be delightfully weird and fruity.
A Real Pain
Another Sundance movie, this one seems destined to stick around all year and then some. Jesse Eisenberg directs, writes, produces, and stars in this dramedy about two cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their grandmother. Reviews were effusive out of Sundance, where in won an award for its screenplay, and it also stars everyone's favourite short king, Kieran Culkin. Fresh from his Emmy-winning role on Succession, he's ready for a return to the big screen. A film like this could also be a big test of Emma Stone's mettle as a producer. Now a two-time Best Actress winner (#justiceforlily), she and husband Dave McCary's production company Fruit Tree is making a real name for itself with esoteric indie film and TV.
Conclave
Austrian director Edward Berger was a surprise success of 2022 thanks to All Quiet on the Western Front's Oscar run, and any follow-up to a filmmaker's awards triumph is guaranteed to attract Oscar buzz. Berger's next film doesn't seem like traditional awards fare, certainly not when compared to a WW1 drama, but it does sound highly intriguing. Conclave is based on a Robert Harris novel and is a thriller set inside the world of the Vatican's papal conclave. Ralph Fiennes is in it. So is Stanley Tucci (hot priest Tucc? Yes please), John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini. The weak link here is Peter Straughan, the screenwriter who worked on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (that's good), The Snowman (that's bad), Wolf Hall (that's good), and The Goldfinch (that's bad.) A spotty CV, to be sure, but an intriguing mix. I feel like Fiennes is overdue a strong awards-y role. I’m still sad he didn’t get a nomination for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Maria
Pablo Larrain has become the go-to director for non-traditional biopics about famous women of the 20th century who have been turned into unknowable icons of our time. It’s a niche, but he’s proven himself to be excellent at it, thanks to the one-two punch of Jackie and Spencer. It’s almost too fitting that his next entrant into this saga is centred on Maria Callas. Steven Knight, the screenwriter of Spencer (and co-creator of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire!?), is on screenplay duties here, and the one and only Angelina Jolie shall play the legendary diva. Jolie is a true movie-star and undeniable talent but her filmography is also weirdly spotty. She hasn't had a ton of truly meaty roles to sink her teeth into. Over the past few years, post-Brad (fuck that guy), she's pulled back from acting to focus more on activism, directing, and her latest fashion venture, Atelier Jolie. Frankly, the camera misses her, and I want to see her given a moment to shine. Jackie and Spencer earned Best Actress nominations for their leads. Let’s make it three in a row, Pablo!
Nosferatu
I love vampire movies. I love Nosferatu (both the original and the Werner Herzog remake). And I love Robert Eggers. So, of course this is one of my most anticipated films of 2024. Eggers hasn’t been an Academy favourite, and they don’t tend to notice horror cinema except in very rare circumstances. I’m not sure the Oscars even knows what a vampire is. Yet there’s something undeniable about this combination. If nothing else, I expect it to be sumptuous on a pure craft level. Whether or not it breaks out of the horror bubble remains to be seen (I’m still salty that neither Us nor Nope was nominated for a single Oscar.) Trivia time: Did you know that Willem Dafoe, who will be playing a particularly maniacal Van Helsing in Nosferatu, is the only actor to have been Oscar-nominated for playing a vampire?
Evil Does Not Exist
Another one I have actually seen, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest drama is further testament to his genius. After winning Best International Feature for Drive My Car, for which he also received nominations for Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, he’s become one of the depressing handful of non-English language directors who the Academy remembers exists outside of one category. It’s hard to talk about accessibility with a Hamaguchi film because Drive My Car was a three-hour slow-burn drama centred on a multi-language production of Uncle Vanya and it mesmerized voters far beyond its expected demographic. Usually, I would see Evil Does Not Exist, about a small town’s opposition to developers’ plans for a glamping spot, and think the Academy will reject it outright. It’s also got a far more ethereal quality than Drive My Car or Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (the latter of which made me sob hysterically for about two hours. Seriously, I was a mess. I’ve never been like that with a film before.) Still, I was enthralled, and I can’t wait for more people to see it.
Forget awards stuff: which 2024 films are you most excited to see? Let me know in the comments!