Why CODA Will Win Best Picture
'Tis the week before the Oscars, and a field of 10 films-- the highest number since 2011! --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 really only two films have won any of the prizes on the awards circuit, and one of those [Jane Campion's The Power Of The Dog] is a notable step ahead in the sweepstakes. However, no frontrunner is a traditional winner, nor is without its detractors; those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, and Parasite's stunner in 2020 taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 27th.
The next Best Picture nominee in our preview series is the little indie movie that could, CODA. The low-fi movie about the hearing child of deaf parents with big dreams beyond her Massachusetts fishing town has gathered a lot of steam of late.
We’ve got a true underdog story right here. A movie that everyone seems to only be hearing about now, yet has been out for much longer than all the other nominees. It premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and was dropped sort of quietly by AppleTV+ back in August, but not many thought anything of it at the time. All along I thought an Adapted Screenplay nomination was its best bet and would have been a nice feather in Apple’s cap to break into a major category like that. But over the past month or so since the precursor awards began, CODA has just been coming out ahead more and more.
Let’s break it down. It won SAG ensemble, Best Adapted Screenplay at BAFTA and WGA, and just last weekend won the Producer Guild’s top award. Momentum is in CODA’s favor here. The theory behind why it only got 3 nominations is that just not enough people had seen it at the time of the nomination announcement. But now that word of mouth is growing, casual viewers and voters are seeing what a crowdpleaser it really is. With the preferential ballot being the system that the Academy uses these days, often times the Best Picture race really boils down to “which movie is disliked the least?” A lot of the other nominees seem to have generated really strong negative opinions, but CODA is a movie everyone agrees is at least wholesome and nice, which will give it a lot of number 1,2, and 3 votes.
The fact that it’s also the favorite to win in Best Supporting Actor and Adapted Screenplay gives it all the ingredients it needs to pull off a Best Picture win. Just last year Nomadland also only won 3 awards, one of them being an acting win. We very well could see the same trend happen with this one.
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