Why All Quiet On The Western Front Will Win Best Picture
'Tis less than a week until the Oscars, and for the second consecutive year-- but just the third time ever! -- no less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture. The biggest award has the potential to be either one of the most anticlimactic or most surprising result in recent years. The former is true, because one film has won the vast majority of the top prizes on the awards circuit thus far, the buzzy Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, not only would the multiverse comedy with a big heart and primarily Asian cast be a wildly abnormal winner, few if any other top contenders are traditional 'Oscar bait,' and none are without its detractor.
Those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge last year all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 12th.
Our piece yesterday broke down a military-centric Best Picture nominee. Ours today will do the same! Just from a... slightly different perspective. All Quiet On The Western Front is a German epic that follows the life of a young German solider and his comrades over the course of World War I. Unlike Top Gun: Maverick (and even more unlike the original Top Gun), it's explicitly an anti-war film, as over the course of the film, young Paul Baümer gradually comes to realize the horrors of war, and hypocrisy of the warmongers themselves.
If you’re swearing you’ve heard the name All Quiet On The Western Front before, you definitely have. Not only was it an acclaimed novel by Erich Maria Remarque first, it has also already been adapted to film on multiple occasions, first in 1930, and later in 1979. The former would go on to win multiple Academy Awards, including none other than Best Picture. You might think this fact would count against the 2022 iteration’s chances, but that’s not necessarily the case. The Academy has proven to be quite fond of remakes, or “legacy films.” In recent years, A Star Is Born (2019) and West Side Story (2022) were remakes of Best Picture winners of years past that not only earned a nomination for the top award, they at one time were considered frontrunners. Neither of those would in fact go on to win, but All Quiet may represent the best chance for a ‘repeat’ champion due to its sadly evergreen theme and message. An increasingly diverse and socially liberal Academy would likely welcome the chance to recognize such an overt anti-war movie, especially in the era of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And speaking of Academy trends: foreign films have now earned a Best Picture nomination in 3 of the last 4 shows (were it not for the baffling decision to not consider Minari an international film in 2021, that number would be 4 straight). The increasing frequency shows the growing respect and admiration for international films, and Parasite's stunning win three years ago showed that a foreign film can do more than just placehold a token nomination; it can win the damn thing. Like Parasite did, All Quiet went most of the awards circuit without many notable victories until suddenly scoring a surprise major win late in the cycle (the BAFTAs in their case, whereas Parasite snagged the SAG). Also like the 2020 champions, All Quiet hasn’t just been consistently nominated on the awards circuit, but is heavily nominated on the night: their 9 noms are second only to frontrunner Everything Everywhere All At Once. No question, then, that it’s held in high esteem. High enough to score a surprise victory Sunday night? Far stranger things have happened.
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