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

If you are reading this on Oscar® night, I want you to know one thing first and foremost. I made this forecast 47 days ago—the very day the nominations were announced. That’s a lifetime ago. Things will have changed since then. I have not been chasing the horse race. I made my predictions immediately and then forgot about them. I can’t be bothered to keep up with the handicapping. I’ll save that for the US presidential race. Or not.

This year I’m making an effort to approach my forecasts more soberly. Now, you may think, by that, I mean seriously, solemnly, earnestly. No, I mean, this time I’m attempting to do this without being drunk. Let me try being a considered analyst rather than just typing whatever comes into my mind.

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. Both are big-budget projects made by well established and respected filmmakers and, more importantly, both have major lobbying campaigns in operation. When it comes to the Best Picture award, the current betting odds seem to be pretty tight between those two flicks with Oppenheimer having a slight edge. In the past, usually one major motion picture would dominate and get most of the awards, but in more recent times the trend has been toward splitting things up a bit more rather than having a winner-take-all result. Another thing that used to usually be true was that the movie that got Best Picture automatically also got Best Director, but again in recent times that has been less true.

So here’s my take on the horse race—reminding you that these are very early predictions which I will stubbornly stick with for a month and a half because I’m too lazy to go back and revise them. As predicted by “everyone,” Oppenheimer will be the big winner, but Christopher Nolan will be denied his first directing Oscar because the academy will have a soft spot for Martin Scorsese and they still feel bad because they waited until 2007 to give him his (so far) only directing Oscar (for The Departed). They’ll assuage their guilt over Nolan by promising themselves they will give him the helmer statuette at some unspecified date in the future.

That will still leave Oppenheimer with awards for Best Picture, Best Actors (Lead and Supporting), Adapted Screenplay, etc. I think the bookies have it right that the four acting awards will be deservedly picked up by Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer), Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon), Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer) and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers), who is best known in our house as the no-nonsense detective on Only Murders in the Building, which was cruelly robbed by the Emmys and that other globe thing ersatz awards show. Having said that, however, I am risking revocation of my Irish citizenship by noting below that, despite having sung Murphy’s praises in my Oppenheimer review, Paul Giamatti is probably a wee bit more deserving for his turn in The Holdovers. That’s a bitter betrayal coming from this blow-in immigrant, considering that—in stark contrast to Ireland’s great nominations showing last year—Murphy is really the Emerald Isle’s sole (famous) hope for Oscar glory, as his fellow touted Irish actors Barry Keoghan (Saltburn), Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal (both for All of Us Strangers) were overlooked. The only other Irish people to get noms were cinematographer Robbie Ryan and producers Andrew Lowe and Ed Guiney (all for Poor Things).

Okay, though I may have come up with these forecasts sober, that is definitely not how I will be watching the awards telecast six and a half weeks from now. I will only have to stay lucid just long enough to figure out how, in the middle of the night in my time zone, to actually watch the Oscars. After many years of viewing them on a Sky movie channel—and before that on the good old reliable BBC—this year I will have to deal with a different broadcaster. The UK’s ITV will be in charge of the telecast in this part of the world with veteran host and funnyman Jonathan Ross in charge. What will this mean for me? I don’t even know if ITV is included in my satellite subscription. Oh, the stress. Maybe I should start drinking now.