Tonight we will hear from the Editors Guild. Then it’s the Producers Guild and the SAG/AFTRA. There are only two endings to this story. It’s Argo, or it’s not. Argo swept all of the awards, from the Globes to the BAFTAs to the guilds. There is no other film in the expanded ballot era that has done that.
Granted, the Globes aren’t the Globes anymore. They have expanded to roughly 300 new members in just the past few years and aren’t the lifers we’d all gotten used to over the past decades. They’re also owned by Penske Media et al, which also owns Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Indiewire, Gold Derby, and Rolling Stone.
The BAFTAs aren’t the BAFTAs (although they remain the most constant). They’ve changed their voting around since around 2012 to be more like the Oscars (branches choose nominees, entire membership chooses winners).
And the Oscars aren’t the Oscars. They are no longer only those industry figures who seemed to want to support the studios. There are about 3,000 wild cards in total who were invited to join, largely to shake up the old white male demo in the Academy, and many of them are international voters.
SAG/AFTRA is now roughly 150,000 members, though only 2,000 randomly chosen voters are selected to choose the nominees. We don’t know from year to year how they will go.
But heading into this weekend, we have a record-breaker. One Battle After Another is the only film besides American Beauty and Slumdog Millionaire to win NBR, Critics Choice, DGA, and BAFTA since SAG was formed (1994) and would be the first to win in the expanded ballot era (2009–present). So there is no reason to expect a juggernaut like that to derail here in the final act. It would be largely unheard of unless there was some kind of disturbance in the force (like La La Land and Moonlight, 1917, Parasite, Power of the Dog, and CODA).
I mean, you’re talking about a movie that has won more precursors, at least so far, than Oppenheimer. Can Sinners make a last-minute rally and disrupt the streak with SAG? Even so, no film has won the NBR, the Globes, and the Critics’ Choice in the expanded-ballot era.
Let’s look at how the awards have split in the expanded ballot era:
2009–Avatar wins the Globe, Hurt Locker wins PGA/DGA/BAFTA, not SAG, then Oscar Picture+Director+Screenplay
2010–The Social Network wins the Globe, The King’s Speech wins PGA/DGA/SAG/BAFTA then Oscar Pic+Director+Screenplay
2011-The Artist wins Globes but not NBR or SAG.
2012–Argo sweeps, but it doesn’t win NBR.
2013 – a split year with Gravity and 12 Years a Slave splitting things up.
2014 – Birdman doesn’t win NBR or Globe but sweeps the rest.
2015 – a split all over the place, Spotlight wins Critics Choice, SAG and Oscar. The Revenant could not win on a preferential ballot. That was the problem. It was divisive.
2016 – It was Moonlight vs. La La Land in one for the ages. Moonlight only won the Globe before winning the Oscar.
2017 – it was Three Billboards which, like La La Land, was derailed by (false) accusations of “racism.”
2018 – Green Book was seen as an apocalypse, which sent the industry into mass hysteria over it. The movie won anyway.
2019 – 1917 seemed like it couldn’t lose, but it, like so many other defector frontrunners, became a movie the Academy did not want to vote for. Parasite felt exciting and modern, and they could also escape all the white winners that night. It was also a make-good from ROMA losing the year before.
2020 — COVID and the Great Awokening brought Hollywood to its knees. That year is when it seemed like Mass Formation took hold, and things started to get really weird. Nomadland couldn’t lose.
2021 was even more weird. It looked like Jane Campion and The Power of the Dog would win, but the scrappy little movie that could, CODA, which was released directly to streaming and made just $1 mil, had only three Oscar nominations but was a heart-warming film about a hearing woman who wants to be a singer but doesn’t want to leave her deaf parents behind.
2022 – people were coming back to the theater once Top Gun Maverick hit, but no way was that movie winning Best Picture (though it should have). Instead, Everything Everywhere All At Once became the juggernaut that united the people in a common purpose. Like One Battle, it seemed to be the living embodiment of the Woketopia we’d all built online.
2023 – things were getting dicey. It seemed like people weren’t returning to the movie theaters after COVID and the Great Awokening. But then Barbenheimer happened. More importantly, Oppenheimer happened but even that hasn’t on the same number of awards as One Battle has, though it comes close:
2024 – this will go down as my favorite Oscar year because it was the year I was canceled by all of my peers, most studios and the industry I helped build. But it was also the year that I got to be right when almost no one else was in predicting Anora to take the PGA, DGA and Best Picture.
And finally, here we are in 2025. Most likely, One Battle sweeps the season, like Oppenheimer just did. There is only a small possible path for a movie like Sinners to win, unless something other than One Battle wins the PGA.
It will be quite astonishing if it pulls it off, a clean sweep of these awards. Sinners has 16 nominations and it’s a crushing blow to the industry that one of their most successful films of the year isn’t running away with Best Picture. But the stats are the stats and we’ve never seen anything like this before. Call it whatever you must but I will see it as the last gasp of the Left’s empire just before the whole came tumbling down. And no film is better suited to represent the era we’ve just lived through than One Battle After Another. Why, because it’s a movie for white people. Sinners is not. That’s just the bottom line.
At the moment, I am making a long shot bet that Sinners pulls a Parasite or a Crash and wins ACE, SAG and Best Picture. While that will still be in keeping with the pattern of awarding the film by a Black director but not the director, it will at least help explain to future historians why a movie with 16 nominations had to win Best Picture.
Then there is always a wildcard like Hamnet somehow winning the PGA and throwing a wrench in the works. But we’ll know for sure after this weekend what kind of a race it is. For now, I’ll predict as though it is Argo, Oppenheimer, Birdman, The King’s Speech, etc where it wins DGA/PGA/SAG and from thence to Oscar.
Best Picture
1. One Battle after Another (Warner Bros.) (FRONTRUNNER)
2. Sinners (Warner Bros.) (would take a miracle)
3. Hamnet (Focus Features) (wild card)
4. Marty Supreme (A24)
5. Frankenstein (Netflix)
6. Bugonia (Focus Features)
7. F1 (Apple)
8. The Secret Agent (Neon)
9. Sentimental Value (Neon)
10. Train Dreams (Netflix)
Best Director
1. One Battle after Another, Paul Thomas Anderson (FRONTRUNNER)
2. Sinners, Ryan Coogler (would take a miracle)
3. Hamnet, Chloé Zhao (wild card)
4. Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie
5. Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier
Best Actor
1. Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme
2. Michael B. Jordan in Sinners
3. Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle after Another
4. Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent
5. Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon
Best Actress
1. Jessie Buckley in Hamnet
2. Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
3. Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue
4. Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value
5. Emma Stone in Bugonia
Best Supporting Actor
1. Delroy Lindo in Sinners
2. Sean Penn in One Battle after Another
3. Stellan Skarsgård in Sentimental Value
4. Benicio Del Toro in One Battle after Another
5. Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein
Best Supporting Actress
1. Teyana Taylor in One Battle after Another
2. Amy Madigan in Weapons
3. Wunmi Mosaku in Sinners
4. Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value
5. Elle Fanning in Sentimental Value
Best Adapted Screenplay
1. One Battle after Another
2. Hamnet
3. Train Dreams
4. Bugonia
5. Frankenstein
Best Original Screenplay
1. Sinners
2. Marty Supreme
3. Sentimental Value
4. It Was Just an Accident
5. Blue Moon
Best Editing
1. One Battle after Another
2. F1
3. Sinners
4. Marty Supreme
5. Sentimental Value
Best International Feature
1. Sentimental Value
2. The Secret Agent
3. It Was Just an Accident
4. Sirāt
5. The Voice of Hind Rajab
Animated Feature
1. KPop Demon Hunters
2. Arco
3. Elio
4. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
5. Zootopia 2
Best Animated Short Film
1. Butterfly
2. Retirement Plan
3. Forevergreen
4. The Girl Who Cried Pearls
5. The Three Sisters
Best Casting
1. Sinners
2. One Battle after Another
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. The Secret Agent
Best Cinematography
1. One Battle after Another
2. Sinners
2. Frankenstein
3. Marty Supreme
5. Train Dreams
Best Costume Design
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. Avatar: Fire and Ash
Best Documentary Feature
1. The Perfect Neighbor
2. The Alabama Solution
3. Come See Me in the Good Light
4. Cutting through Rocks
5. Mr. Nobody against Putin
Best Documentary Short
1. All the Empty Rooms
2. Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud
3. Children No More: Were and Are Gone
4. The Devil Is Busy
5. Perfectly a Strangeness
Best Live Action Short
1. Two People Exchanging Saliva
2. Butcher’s Stain
3. The Singers
4. A Friend of Dorothy
5. Jane Austen’s Period Drama
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Kokuho
4. The Smashing Machine
5. The Ugly Stepsister
Original Score
Sinners, Ludwig Goransso
One Battle after Another, Jonny Greenwood
Bugonia. Jerskin Fendrix
Frankenstein. Alexandre Desplat
Hamnet. Max Richter
Best Original Song
1. I Lied To You from Sinners
2. Golden from KPop Demon Hunters
3. Train Dreams from Train Dreams
4. Dear Me from Diane Warren: Relentless
5. Sweet Dreams Of Joy from Viva Verdi!
Best Production Design
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. One Battle after Another
Original Sound
1. F1
2. Sinners
3. Sirāt
4. One Battle after Another
5. Frankenstein
Best Visual Effects
1. Avatar: Fire and Ash
2. Sinners
3. F1
4. Jurassic World Rebirth
5. The Lost Bus
