Why Killers of the Flower Moon Will Win Best Picture
'Tis the week 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.
The last time the great Martin Scorcese made a movie was in 2019 with The Irishman, a historical drama running over 3 hours long that was widely acclaimed and ended up being nominated for 10 Academy Awards. In 2023, he returned with The Killers of the Flower Moon, a historical drama running over 3 hours long that was widely acclaimed and has landed 10 Academy Award nominations. The more things change, right? It's worth noting that The Irishman went on to win a grand total of 0 Oscars, so Scorcese and co. will hope the parallels between his last movie and his new one end there.
Originally scheduled to release in early 2021, Killers was a victim of the pandemic; production got halted and resumed in 2022. Whether it was the long delay pushing the premier to a busier, more loaded year in cinema or the daunting run time, the movie was far from commercially successful at first, losing distributors Apple somewhere around $20 million. However, that mattered little as universal acclaim from critics and buzz from word of mouth saw its box office spike by 3811% in the wake of its Oscar nominations. Yes, you read that number correctly, I promise. I triple-checked. Unsurprisingly, given the critical praise, the film has been a mainstay in awards season, with lead actress Lily Gladstone picking up numerous wins in particular, and was on countless year-end best-of lists.
So why might it avoid the Irishman fate of going 0 for 10? And to be more audacious, why might Killers of the Flower Moon actually...win the damn thing? Well, because universal acclaim and consistent awards show nominations is a pretty strong indicator of how highly people think of the film. There were back-to-back Best Picture winners not too long ago that generated early buzz as the favorite, got the best reviews of any nominee, proceeded to win next to nothing on the awards circuit, and then creep up to win top honors on Oscar night. And while this film has very little in common with Spotlight, and less so with Moonlight, it may be able to stake the same sort of claim as those two. The fact that Killers is the second-most nominated movie at these awards is already a good indication of how highly the Academy thinks of this film.
Perhaps, you counter, it's more so a sign of the Academy's deep love and admiration for Martin Scorcese. Okay, maybe it is! That wouldn't suggest it's not a viable Best Picture contender, and in fact I would argue just the opposite. The Shape of Water's triumph 5 years ago was not because it was the best movie (it wasn't even close), it was almost entirely down to how beloved Guillermo del Toro was and how 'belated' his major Oscar was. The auteur angle especially works in this case because you have to imagine Marty is nearing the end of his career, and he shockingly still only has one Best Director and Best Picture Oscar (both for The Departed, in 2007). It's not as if he has been far too rewarded in his life, nor will there be too many more chances to reward him. The personnel argument doesn't in there, either; in Lily Gladstone, the movie has a real shot at a major acting award should she pull off the minor upset over Emma Stone. I discussed this in my last piece on The Holdovers, but it once again rings true: any Best Picture nominee with at least one major acting Oscar winner has a real shot at the big one. It's no coincidence that the last 3 Best Picture winners have all had this, and in the case of 2 of them, it was for Best Actress specifically.
Finally, though this likely sounds counterintuitive, the movie might benefit from comparison to Oppenheimer. Like the runaway favorite, Killers is also a sweeping 3+ hour historical biopic, but with less polarizing of a central figure and less ethical quandary. Thus, the Academy, a body full of...checkered history, shall we say, might relish a more clear-cut opportunity for some moral redemption.
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