Why Marty Supreme Will Win Best Picture
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Less than a week now 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.
Amidst this awards season, I've seen a lot of discussion about Timothée Chalamet's filmography; namely, how impressive it is. And it's true! Regardless of how you feel about him as an actor or how important the roles he played in each film was to you, appearing in 8 Best Picture nominees by the ripe old age of 30 is no small feat, especially when you consider those 8 don't even include his first movie role Interstellar, the most beloved movie of a specific subset of young millennials/and early GenZers. So it stands to reason that Marty Supreme, a film that places Chalamet front and center-- if I'm not mistaken, he appears in every single one of the movie's scenes --would garner many an Oscar nomination, including for Best Picture.
In fact, with 9 total, Marty Supreme is one of the most-nominated of any films at these awards, and those 9 include some heavy hitters: Picture, Actor for Chalamet, Best Director for Josh Safdie, and Best Original Screenplay for Safdie and Ronald Bronstein. This isn't new for the chaotic, breakneck-paced story of a ping-pong player's unceasing pursuit of greatness as he navigates family and community obligations back in New York. The unconventional Oscar contender has been a major player all awards season, also landing numerous noms including the Best Picture equivalent at: the SAG Awards, BAFTAs, Critics' Choice, Directors' Guild, Golden Globes, and Producers' Guild Awards. It's among a small group of four movies to land those nominations at each of the major players in this circuit. Like just about every other film this year, it's lost almost all those races to One Battle After Another, but that does not spell a death knell for its chances at the Academy Awards. Yes, there are numerous examples over the years of films that score a large number of nominations and whiff entirely at the Oscars, but as I've said before, in this series, it's extremely significant to be in the conversation for all the Oscar forerunners, especially as these awards are the only ones to utilize the ranked choice system, which has generated upsets in the field almost as often as it hasn't in the last decade.
There may be some leftover Safdie sympathy in the Academy, which would come in handy. It was widely agreed-upon that Uncut Gems the biggest snub of its year when it was shut out of the awards entirely. While Safdie directed that one in tandem with his brother Benny, this was his first solo effort since that snub, and Marty plays, both stylistically and thematically, like its predecessor. Might a 'more palatable Uncut Gems' deliver the goods so many thought that movie would 6 years ago? It might be helped by the greater context. In a culture that was still shellshocked by the first era of Trump, a story of a man relentlessly chasing success, regardless of how many livelihoods he shatters in the process, probably felt a bit galling. Now? In a country that's undeniably shifted right, and an era of bleak masculinity? That trope could land more effectively.
Really, though, the hopes of this film ride almost entirely on its star. In my preview of Hamnet yesterday, I explained the importance of a lead acting win for a movie's Best Picture chances. In the 2020s alone, eventual winning performances by Joaquin Phoenix, Anthony Hopkins, and Will Smith lifted their films, that likely otherwise wouldn't have gotten much awards attention, to the Best Picture race. And just two years ago, Cillian Murphy's triumph represented what was an enormous night for Oppenheimer. Now, the race for Best Actor has certainly tightened in recent weeks as Chalamet failed to take home both the BAFTA and the SAG awards, but make no mistake, it still very much feels like his to lose. If he's able to withstand the late-breaking momentum from Michael B. Jordan and Sinners in general, that could mean good things for Marty Supreme at large, not just for its star.
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