Why American Fiction Will Win Best Picture
'Tis the week before the Oscars, and 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 gargantuan Oppenheimer. However, not only would the 3+ hour, half black-and-white, half color biopic be a wildly abnormal winner, few if any other top contenders are traditional 'Oscar bait,' and none also are without its detractors.
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 in 2022 all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 10th.
On Oscar nomination morning, despite Oppenheimer, Poor Things and Killers of the Flower Moon all getting nominations in the double digits, it was American Fiction that ended up having the best morning of all the nominees. Reason for that being, it overperformed, landing even in categories nobody thought it had a shot in. On the surface, this is one of those movies that gets a Screenplay nomination, one actor being recognized, and then as a result squeaks by into Best Picture as one of those “this is nice that it’s here, but it has no shot at winning.” But when Sterling K. Brown’s name was called in the nominations announcement, I thought “oh wow.” Then, American Fiction was called for Best Original Score and I thought “OH WOW!.” A movie everybody thought would be nominated for 2-3 Oscars at most ended up with 5. Yes, something like The Holdovers also has 5, but I’d argue that underperformed and got in everywhere it was expected to. This haul of nominations (especially in the mind boggling Score category) shows just how much the voting bodies loved this movie beyond just the writing.
Gone are the days in which you NEED to be the most nominated movie to win Best Picture. In recent years we’ve seen Spotlight win with just one other award (Original Screenplay), and Green Book and CODA wins with just a screenplay and Supporting Actor win elsewhere. Argo was in a similar boat (winning just Adapted Screenplay and Editing). What do all of these movies have in common? They all had a Screenplay win in order to win Best Picture. Cord Jefferson is currently the frontrunner in the Adapted Screenplay category. So if he wins there, even if American Fiction lost everything else it was up for (which it will), it is not an impossible feat for this movie to pull one of the bigger upsets in Oscar history.
It also doesn’t hurt that the movie is ABOUT writing, with a little pinch of Hollywood thrown in there.
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