Why Bugonia Will Win Best Picture
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Less than 10 days until 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!
It's been a marvelous year for movies, and this race has been a fascinating one. It's certainly not quite as wide-open as last year's felt, and in fact, early indications were that we might be headed for a runaway coronation (as we've had twice in recent years, with Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All At Once). But the wealth has begun to be spread a little more in recent awards shows, and two changes to this year-- a much later ceremony than usual and the requirement for all voters to screen all films before voting --both would seemingly favor the nominees with late-breaking momentum as opposed to the early ones.
What's more, I can't remember an Oscars with a more wide-open race in most of the acting categories; of the four, only one (Jessie Buckley for Best Actress) has been a constant winner, and even she doesn't feel like a guarantee, with the groundswell of support some of her fellow nominees have. Acting races can usually tip off a Best Picture race: Mikey Madison's "upset" over Demi Moore last year spelled a huge night for eventual Best Pic winner Anora. As such, with so much unknown in those categories, it's highly possible we get some chaos in the biggest of them all as well.
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 15th.
Bugonia, adapted from the 2003 Korean film Save The Green Planet!, is the story of a conspiracy theorist and his autistic cousin who kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical conglomerate and imprison her in their basement as they attempt to force her to confess she's a member of a malevolent alien race that's killing the Earth's honeybees and subtly enslaving the human race. In other words, pretty par for the course for a Yorgos Lanthimos film!
I jest, but in all seriousness, Bugonia is, oddly enough, somehow one of the more grounded and realistic offerings from Lanthimos, among whose past work includes such plotlines as: a hotel full of eligible singles required to find a romantic partner within 45 days or else they'll be turned into animals; a medical doctor and his family being emotionally tortured by a cursed teenager who turns them all ill until the family decides to sacrifice one of their children; and a genre-defying story of a young woman who is brought back to life via brain transplant and undergoes a journey of self-discovery, sexual awakening, and enlightenment as she rapidly progresses from the mental age of baby to adult. The Greek director's modus operandi doesn't exactly scream "Oscar bait," yet, given that two of his last three works yielded a combined 21 Oscar nominations and several wins, including Best Actress wins for both Olivia Colman (The Favourite) and Emma Stone (Poor Things), it's no surprise Bugonia places Lanthimos among the Best Picture nominees yet again amongst its 4 nominations on the night.
Stone once again is nominated for Best Actress in these awards, her 5th total, and truthfully, most of Bugonia's presence on the awards circuit has been generated from her and co-star Jesse Plemons, who was not nominated for Best Actor (a decision many have argued was the biggest snub at these Oscars). But that's not unilaterally been the case: the film itself was nominated for Best Picture/its equivalent at the BAFTAs, the Critics' Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Producers' Guild Awards. As discussed in yesterday's piece on Train Dreams, simply being in contention at these other major shows, including some of the most Oscar-predictive of them all, makes it a not-insignificant threat to win, given the clear adoration it has in the industry.
In my estimation, though, if Bugonia is going to pull off the big surprise next Sunday night, it will be less about its presence on the award circuit and more about the various players involved. Emma Stone is quite clearly an Oscar darling, but her multiple Best Actress wins and her 3 other individual nominations have all been for movies that were nominated for Best Picture didn't win. The last two of those instances, not yet counting Bugonia, have been for Lanthimos-directed films. For all of the Oscar adulation The Favourite and Poor Things received, including Best Picture nominations, the only "major category" victories of their 21 nominations were the Best Actress wins for Stone and Olivia Colman. For both vindication for the actress's choices of work as well as for the esteemed-but-winless director, a win in this category could satisfy the "it's due" storyline that so often rears its head at these awards. The nature of ranked-choice voting could play a part here, too; yes, Bugonia is surely one of the most divisive among the nominees, but those who like this movie really like it. Were it to rank at or near the top of enough ballots, its point accrual might just push it ahead of the other more universally-palatable options that more consistently rank in, say, the 3-5 range for voters.
There's also the perhaps secondary, but not-insignificant matter of the movie's themes itself. Anybody who has paid any attention to the fringes of American extremism in recent years-- or who has simply spent enough time on social media --will recognize the sobering realism of Plemons' character and the plot. There's a timely sociopolitical element to this story that might satisfy the Academy’s urge for a “relevant” picture with a message that’s less divisive than a One Battle After Another, or less, ahem, 'challengingfor whites' than a Sinners.
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