Why Anatomy of a Fall Will Win Best Picture
'Tis the 10 days 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.
At this time in 2019, no foreign film had ever won Best Picture at the Oscars. That year, Mexico's Roma was pipped as the favorite to end that streak, and although that didn't come to fruition as Green Book took top honors in a massive upset, its nomination did kick off 5 straight years of at least one international/foreign-language nominee for Best Picture. This year, two occupy that zone, the first of them being the French film Anatomy of a Fall. The movie follows fictional German novelist Sandra Voyter and her son Daniel as the former stands trial for the murder of her husband (and Daniel's father). A slow simmering story with note-perfect acting performances, it is as much a depiction of an unraveling marriage, a la Marriage Story, as it is a whodunit in the style of Gone Girl.
Foreign films aren't the only category with a recent Best Picture nomination streak: three of the last four Palme d'Or winners at the Cannes Film Festival have gone on to be named among the Oscar contenders. Anatomy of a Fall becomes the second consecutive winner to earn this honor, following Triangle of Sadness last year. Its winning streak didn't stop there, either; Justine Triet's film took top honors at the premier film awards in France, England, Belgium, Australia, and the European awards, and was named top international/foreign-language film in no less than 15 American awards ceremonies. It will perhaps not surprise you, then, to hear of its universal critical acclaim; per Metacritic, it's the 3rd-highest reviewed of what is the highest-reviewed Best Picture field (by Metacritic average) in some time. Yet, despite all this acclaim, and despite winning the top film at France's two primary awards shows, plus the nation's (and the world's) foremost film festival, it inexplicably was not France's selection for Best International Film at these Oscars. The country's film association instead opted for The Taste of Things (which missed out on an Oscar nomination altogether), a bizarre move that many see as politically motivated, given Triet's and co-writer/husband Arthur Garari's outspoken criticism of French prime minister Emmanuel Macron.
Oddly enough, this may prove to help the movie's long odds in spoiling the Best Picture race. After all, the mountain that so many previous international films had to climb at the Oscars was that there already was a Best International (previously named Best Foreign Langauge) Film category, and all too often, the Academy would opt to confine the strong international movies to this category. With France removing Anatomy of a Fall from contention in the International category, the only way for the Academy to give it top honors is in this race. If voters want to opt for a 'subversive' winner, this would be a prime candidate to fit that bill: a female-centric foreign film quasi-blacklisted by its own country due to political criticism? Any voter looking to make a statement will be licking their chops. And while, yes, it would still be very counter to the Academy's nature to be subversive, the surprise success of last year's winner and notable increase in racial and sexual diversity among nominees in recent years perhaps speaks to changing times for the traditional good ol' boys' club.
What's more, for all the weeping and gnashing of teeth that was made over Greta Gerwig's and Margot Robbie's snubs from Barbie, very little attention was paid for the surprise double nomination for director Triet and lead actress Sandra Hüller. The overlooking of women directors is unfortunately an annually relevant Oscars discussion, but it wasn't all too long ago that a Best Picture nominee also had a female director nominated for Best Director and its lead nominated for Best Actress. That movie? Nomadland, whch only went on to win all three of those awards in 2021. Will the same fate befall Anatomy? It seems considerably less likely in all three races, but its dramatic overperformance in Oscar nominations relative to expectations already has spoken to how highly the Academy thinks of this film.
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