Why Drive My Car 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 final Best Picture nominee in our preview series is the acclaimed Japanese drama Drive My Car.
The film from director Ryusuke Hamaguchi follows the character Yūsuke Kafuku as he works to direct a production of the play Uncle Vanya all while grappling with the death of his wife. Throughout the preparation for the stage production, Yūsuke is driven to and from work by a young woman named Misaki, with whom he begins to bond over family, love and loss. As is the case with most acclaimed international films, it's a simple, serious movie, made extremely well.
I think it's safe to say in an Oscars announcement that held a fair amount of surprises, probably the biggest one of all was the number of times Drive My Car heard its name called, including in this field for Best Picture. The film had generated enough buzz to be considered a shoo-in for Best International Feature, if not the favorite for that award. But the further nods for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, particularly the latter two, raised many an eyebrow. Even in the era of expanded fields for this award, a foreign-language nominee is quite rare. Still, perhaps it shouldn't have totally been a surprise; were it up to film critics alone, this would win top honors, as it's the only Best Picture nominee with a Metacritic score north of 90. It's also no stranger to wins on the awards circuit; Drive My Car has essentially swept the foreign-language film (or its equivalent) award this cycle, and has also won the award for best feature film at the Cannes Film Festival, and from the critics associations of New York, Boston, Seattle, Toronto and Los Angeles. It would not be completely out of left-field for it to win at the Oscars, too.
It's also worth noting that the last foreign nominee that was nominated for Best Picture won-- unless you count last year's Minari, which was set in America and filmed entirely in America, though much of it was spoken in Korean. Yes, it would be lazy to compare this film to 2019's Parasite. The two films are nothing alike, and while Parasite was a surprising winner, Drive My Car would be a stunning winner. But with how much buzz Parasite generated after its victory, it's easy to forget how little hype it had heading into the Academy Awards. It really had only garnered the same types of wins discussed above, a near-sweep of the foreign language film awards, with the occasional nod from critics associations. Then it got a surprisingly high number of nominations at the 2020 Oscars, including for screenplay and directing. Then it got surprising wins for those awards, and well...the rest is history. What I'm saying here is maybe the fact that Drive My Car has already, by virtue of its nominations, had a bigger Oscar night than anyone anticipated indicates that it has a lot of fans in the Academy. Enough for it to score a stunning victory? It's not impossible.
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