With the 97th annual Academy Awards set to air on March 2, we revisit the fearless predictions made by Brian D. Johnson, well-known Canadian film critic, cultural commentator and frequent Zoomer contributor. Johnson picks the probable winners of the major awards and discusses whether or not they align with his own personal favourites.
(Warning: Seeing all the movies doesn’t always produce accurate predictions – something to bear in mind before entering Johnson’s picks on your Oscar party ballot.)
BEST PICTURE
The only category with 10 nominees, Best Picture offers a panoramic field that ranges from Emilia Pérez, a Spanish-language musical that looks destined for Broadway, to Wicked, which followed a gold-brick road from Broadway to become the highest grossing film musical of all time. I see the race as a three-way standoff, with Emelia Pérez’s transgender gangster up against Anora’s sex worker and Conclave’s cardinal — while the Citizen Kane-scale ambition of The Brutalist looms over the field as the dark-horse spoiler.
Emelia Pérez, which has the lion’s share of 13 nominations, deserves to win. And it will, unless Academy voters feel it’s over-nominated, or if protests in the trans community over its portrayal of Karla Sofía Gascón’s character escalate. This movie is like nothing we’ve ever seen before – a musical thriller about a drug lord transitioning to a woman in a tale that’s not about drugs, crime or gender. That something so audacious can also be a crowd pleaser is uncanny. It’s as if director Jacques Audiard has split some kind of cinematic atom and blown open the arthouse.
Also nominated: A Complete Unknown, Dune Part Two, Dune Part 2, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance.
BEST DIRECTOR
Hard to call. On the one hand, we have a duel between two boldly unconventional directing feats — Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, the work of a frontier-smashing 72-year-old French auteur, and The Brutalist, a passion project from American upstart Brady Corbet, who’s exactly half his age. Both are first-time Oscar nominees. Audiard shows dazzling virtuosity, crafting a transgender and trans-genre extravaganza in a language he doesn’t speak. Corbet spent seven years and just US$10 million to make a marathon period epic about an immigrant architect who reinvents the American Dream by building a monumental folly that’s not unlike the film itself.
My vote would go to Audiard. But I’m betting on American writer-director Sean Baker to win for Anora, a crowd-pleasing comedy with a lot of indie nerve that disarms us with a dramatic surge of emotion in the final act. The underdogs are James Mangold (A Complete Unknown) and Coralie Fargeat (The Substance), who got the nomination everyone expected would belong to Conclave’s Edward Berger.
BEST ACTRESS
Speaking of comebacks, Demi Moore, 62, a Hollywood icon who found herself aged out of the A-list, is on track to win this for her role in The Substance as a washed-up actress who uses a black-market drug to replicate herself in a young body. The extreme intestinal horror in Coralie Fargeat’s sci-fi satire is way out of Oscar’s wheelhouse. But that may not matter. Awarding Moore the Oscar is like pinning a medal on the star of G.I. Jane for avenging Hollywood ageism in a firestorm of blood and guts. With the riveting candour of her speech at the Golden Globes, where she won Best Actress in a Motion Picture Music/Comedy, Moore has become the poster girl for the older women who dominate this category. The only nominee under 50 is Mikey Madison, 25, who runs the table from slapstick to heartbreak with a powerhouse performance in Anora. She’s a strong contender, though actors her age rarely win the lead acting categories. As for Karla Sofía Gascón, 52, who has made history as the first openly trans person to get an Oscar nomination, her role is strangely lacking in, well, substance.
I predict Moore will win. But my vote would go to Fernanda Torres, 59, who anchors Brazil’s harrowing non-fiction drama I’m Still Here with her epic portrayal of a family matriarch whose husband is abducted by the military dictatorship in the 1970s.
Also nominated: Cynthia Erivo, Wicked.
BEST ACTOR
After three nominations, Conclave’s Ralph Fiennes, 62, is overdue to win this for what is arguably the finest performance of his career. But it may be too good. Too subtle, and too precisely entrenched in his comfort zone. Timothée Chalamet and Adrien Brody take bigger swings. Both play inscrutable artists with unstoppable ambition who come out of nowhere to forge brilliant careers: Chalamet as the self-invented Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, and Adrien Brody as Brady’s invented architect in The Brutalist. (When I first saw it, I assumed it was a true story – the same mistake I made when I first watched Tár.)
Chalamet deserves to win. Defying the odds in a movie that Dylan fans approached with dread, then celebrated like the Second Coming, he incarnates Dylan – the character, the music and the mystique – with a fierce, hard-earned authenticity. Though Bob had a hand in the script, it’s no vanity project: Chalamet shows us both the genius and the jerk. And despite a paint-by-numbers script, what’s ground-breaking about this biopic is how the drama is propelled by fully rendered songs performed live by the actors. But I’d be surprised to see Chalamet win. His youth and pretty-boy stardom work against him. And his high-wire act as a musician seems effortless, while his dialogue scenes are a minimalist masterclass of withheld emotion.
The Academy tends to vote for the most acting. That is what Brody delivers, with an accent, as a visionary who hauls himself through the agony and ecstasy of making high art. Also Oscar loves a comeback. So expect Brody, who won Best Actor as a Holocaust survivor in The Pianist (2003), to bookend his career with a second statuette.
Also nominated: Colman Domingo, Sing Sing; Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Another clearcut category. Zoe Saldaña appears to have a lock on this prize. And she deserves to win for her blazing performance in Emilia Pérez, as a shrewd, morally dubious lawyer who finesses the disappearance and gender reassignment surgery of a Mexican cartel boss. Saldaña sings, she dances, and acts circles around everyone in sight. She is, in fact, the film’s protagonist, with more screen time than Karla Sofía Gascón, the nominee for Best Actress. The Academy sometimes uses this award to usher in a newcomer, and Saldaña has burst onto the scene like an emerging talent – but she’s 42, and has starred in the four biggest Hollywood franchises of all time! The thing is, in sci-fi blockbusters, the stars tend to get upstaged by their characters. So it seems miraculous when the blue alien princess from Avatar turns out to be an astonishingly good actor.
Saldaña’s underdog rival in this race is Isabella Rossellini, 72, for her stealth role as a mostly silent nun in Conclave. It’s Rossellini’s first nomination after some 60 films, and may be her last. A regal icon of world cinema is having her moment. And Oscar loves a good upset.
Also nominated: Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown; Ariana Grande, Wicked; Felicity Jones, The Brutalist.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Here Succession stars Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong go head to head in roles as obnoxious renegades. Culkin, whose bratty impudence is cut with his usual charm in A Real Pain, deserves to win and seems to have a lock on this award. Maybe because his role is more supported than supporting. He and the film’s director, Jesse Eisenberg, are equal co-stars, as an odd couple of squabbling cousins who embark on a Holocaust memorial tour of Poland. A compact, immaculately composed masterpiece, A Real Pain achieves a seamless fusion of comedy and drama. And Eisenberg deserves huge credit for letting Culkin steal the movie with his subversive wit.
Strong, meanwhile, does a superb job of channeling his inner psychopath as Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s oily mentor in The Apprentice. But the character’s unlikability will hurt his chances. The Academy tends to confuse actors with their characters. For the same reason, if A Compete Unknown sweep sets in, don’t count out Edward Norton for his chipper, banjo-playing, incarnation of folk legend Pete Seeger.
Also nominated: Yura Borisov, Anora; Guy Pierce, The Brutalist.
BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE
It seems inevitable that Emilia Pérez will win this, and it deserves to. But given Emilia’s glut of nominations, Academy voters may use this opportunity to honour an unsung gem of world cinema. The two nominees that pop out are both potent political thrillers that revolve around a single family: Brazil’s I’m Still Here and Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
The former has the best chance of outflanking Pérez, in light of Fernanda Torres’ nomination – and the pedigree of director Walter Salles, 68, known for his Oscar-winning Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and the twice-nominated Central Station (1998). Recently I served on the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) jury at the Palm Springs film festival, which awarded I’m Still Here Best Film from a field of 36 international features. Our jury cited it for “conveying the horror of encroaching dictatorship from the intimate perspective of a mother defending not just her family of five, but her dignity. Evoking the severity of the violence without resorting to melodrama . . . Salles captures a critical moment of history in scrupulous and compelling detail.”
The Seed of a the Sacred Fig is fictional drama about a family in Tehran that is torn apart as the father, a judge in Iran’s Revolutionary Court, becomes suspicious of his wife and daughters. It was shot secretly in Iran by director Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled into exile after the regime banned the film and gave him an eight-year prison sentence. Submitted to the Oscars as a German co-production, this spartan thriller lacks the complexity and depth of I’m Still Here, but Oscar voters may by mobilized by its political urgency. Other nominees are The Girl With the Needle, a lurid true-crime period piece from Denmark; and Latvia’s animated marvel Flow, an animal odyssey that may win its nomination for Best Animated Feature, but is an odd fit for this category – under the award’s previous title, Best Foreign Language Film, Flow likely wouldn’t have qualified there’s not a word of dialogue in any language.
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