Why Nickel Boys Will Win Best Picture
'Tis 10 days 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. This also appears to be a far more competitive race than in years past, which has often spat out at best two-horse races (like The Power of the Dog vs. CODA in 2022, or 1917 vs. Parasite in 2020), but more often a runaway coronation (as we've had in the last two years, with Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All At Once).
No, this one genuinely feels wide open in large part because of how many new names are up for the big awards. For the first time in history, the 5 Best Director nominees at these Oscars are all first-time nominees. Only 1 out of the combined Best Actor and Best Actress nominees has ever won an Oscar, and only 4 of them have even been nominated before. But it's not just the absence of bona fide star power helming the nominated movies; it's the fact that there isn't a traditional frontrunner, as a small handful of films have split honors across the awards circuit thus far.
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 2nd.
It could not be more different in content, but if Nickel Boys is going to pull off an Oscar shock and sneak up to take Best Picture a week from tomorrow, it might be on the back of a similar angle as yesterday's previewed nominee, The Substance. It's a similar underdog story: a small-budget film, the lowest box office output of any Best Picture nominee this year, made by a relatively green filmmaker (Ramell Ross's first feature film!), and one that uses a completely unconventional style. By most traditional metrics, it shouldn't even be in Oscar contention and yet, here it is, at the biggest awards show of them all, up for the biggest prize of them all!
Where it of course diverges from The Substance is that it tells a wildly different story, in a wildly different way, from totally different source material. Nickel Boys' first form was an award-winning book by Colson Whitehead (2019), and Ross and Joslyn Barnes' faithful adaptation takes the unusual step of shooting from first-person point of view. It was a move that has proven to be pretty divisive among viewers and critics alike (I loved the movie, but have already had one cinephile friend tell me he "got half an hour in and had to turn it off"), but two things are for sure: one, it's highly original and unexpected, and two, it's an effective measure to keep the focus of the deeply serious, deeply sad story on the two boys that are the main characters rather than let the film turn into another example of graphic Black tragedy porn. The Academy, for all their faults— and there are many —on representation, have shown on at least a couple occasions in the last decade with wins by 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight that they do occasionally have the ability to reward incisive and gut-wrenching examinations of race in America.
This movie wasn't just the 'smallest' of the Best Picture nominees: another thing that, on the surface at least, is working against it is that it has had the smallest awards circuit impression of any nominee, landing a sole Best Picture - Drama nod at the Golden Globes and a solitary Screenplay nomination at the BAFTAs. It didn't win either one, nor did it win at all at the Critics' Choice, but they did perform best at that one, garnering 6 major nominations. The likely reason for that is the crux of why I think Nickel Boys has a shot, however outside a shot it may be: it's the critics' favorite. And for most of the field, it's not even all that close: Metacritic puts Anora and The Brutalist (probably the co-favorites for the award at this point) only slightly behind the Nickel Boys rating of 92, but the entire rest of the field languishes in the mid-to-high 70s. Of course, it's not a guarantee that the critical fave wins; in fact, more often than not, it doesn't pan out that way. But what did the three biggest surprise winners in the era of ranked-choice voting (Spotlight, Moonlight and Parasite) all have in common, apart from being one-word titles that end with the "ight" sound? All were the consensus critical favorites amongst the nominees in their years, which speaks to the power of widespread acclaim in a voting system that can often reward the "least-bad" option. Last year, the 'favorite' movie from critics and on Film Twitter was Past Lives, which just like Nickel Boys, garnered only a Best Picture nomination and Screenplay nomination; that went on to win neither. However, last year-- like the year before it --was absolutely stuffed to the brim with high-quality movies, from some of the biggest filmmakers in all of Hollywood. In a much more wide open year, isn't it reasonable to wonder whether there's a 'universally esteemed' angle for one of the nominees? Amidst what has been a chaotic, and at times, downright ugly Oscar campaign season this year, might voters just generally opt for the critics' favorite? A well-made movie free of controversy, with a freshfaced director and cast and an impactful and profound message? Certainly stranger things have happened at these awards.
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