Why F1 Will Win Best Picture
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Just one week 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.
It speaks to the Academy Awards' reputation-- or at least, to their image preservation --that the most controversial of all Best Picture nominees is also the biggest box office success of all. F1 is the lone nominee in this field that, I think is safe to say, was probably much more adored by the masses than by 'movie lovers.' But, unlike the Grammys and all other music awards shows, and even to a lesser extent the Emmys, the Oscars have cultivated a loyal cinephile following that know these awards to typically value quality over quantity, true art over commercial success. That said, in the 15-year era of the expanded Best Picture field, and increasingly in recent years, the Academy has seemed to make a point to reserve a spot or two for some of the bigger-budget box-office smashes in the field.
You don't have to like it-- I certainly don't love it --but you must admit it makes sense as a strategy. Viewership for all awards shows that don't involve live performances from mega-watt pop stars has been on a gradual decline now, and extending an offering to the majority of Americans who will not have even heard of, let alone seen, most films nominated for awards, is one way of getting some more eyeballs on the ceremony that otherwise wouldn't be so inclined. In that vein, there could be far more offensive choices to satisfy this reservation than F1, the latest from Joseph Kosinski, director of other big-budget smashes such as Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, and Top Gun: Maverick, the last of which also earned a Best Picture nomination three years ago. Sure, it's formulaic (pun fully intended), and it's predictable almost every step of the way, but it knows what it is. It's a rip-roaring popcorn flick, with a pulsating score, and car race scenes that will get the pulses of even the most sports-resistant watchers racing-- again, pun intended.
I think a friend of mine described it perfectly when he called it a "great 'Dad movie'"; especially given the hand Formula One played in promoting it, this was a film built to go big at the box office, and that it certainly did. Grossing $633.4 million worldwide, it was one of the biggest movies of the entire year-- in fact, the highest-grossing non-animated flick of the year --and was Apple TV's biggest financial success yet. Unsurprisingly, that figure dwarfs all other Best Picture nominees as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a nominee for the Golden Globe for Box Office Achievement, but lest you think its award credentials are solely on the back of ticket sales. it's made significant appearances elsewhere on the circuit: a nomination for Best Film and an acting win for Damson Idris at the African-American Film Association Awards. An honorable mention at the Critics' Choice Awards. And vitally, a nomination at the all-important Producers Guild Awards. To go with what are likely shoo-in wins in the Sound and Visual categories at these Oscars, perhaps we all should have been slightly less surprised at its inclusion in the Best Picture field.
If the tone I've struck about this nomination has seemed less cynical than perhaps you expected, that's deliberate, but the truth is, the only path I see to an F1 victory a week from today is, in fact, the cynical one: money money money moooooney!! The bottom line rules all, after all, and as a diehard sports fan, I've seen the inevitable creep of money taking over all my beloved sports for a while now; let's not be so naïve as to act like a similar creep infecting the Academy Awards is impossible. The Oscars are politics, and politics is just money these days: given the global power of the Formula One lobby behind it, who's to say this race won't be won by the highest bidder? And although the Oscars may seem like the one major television event that's immune to a right-ward cultural shift, in reality, they play a numbers game, too. If there’s a concern about Hollywood’s future and a push to “save the movies,” can’t you see Academy members justifying a vote for F1 that way? As a message to middle America that the movies they like can also win awards?
If it were simply about the money, that might still be too big a stretch, but let's not minimize the impact of some key players here, too. Much like the drivers in the movie they play, Brad Pitt represents one of Hollywood's biggest stars ever, an adored veteran, and Idris one of the biggest bright young stars of the future. Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon are both adored and esteemed in international circles, who make up a good bit of the voting body. And Pitt’s production team, Plan B, is the same as the ones behind 7 past Best Picture nominees, including past winners 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight. Much like the APX team that Bardem’s character visualizes... this is a team built to win.
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