Why Poor Things 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.
If you weren't familiar with Yorgos Lanthimos' work prior to watching Poor Things, you were likely in for a shock. Hell, I was familiar with his work and even I was fairly shocked by a good portion of it; yes, Lanthimos' latest sees the unconventional director with a proclivity for the darkly funny and the absurd at perhaps his most bizarre yet. It is crazy to me that this film is adapted from a real story because it just seemed to fit the director's preferred style perfectly. But 'tis true- based on a 1992 novel of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, Poor Things follows Bella Baxter, a young woman who is revived by a brain transplant by doctor and mad scientist (aptly called "God"), as she goes on a both literal and metaphorical journey, seeing more of the world and discovering her own body and agency.
Despite its body horror, gratuitous nudity and bizarre schema, audiences and critics alike were delighted by Poor Things. It’s grossed over $100 million to date, had the third-best 'per-venue' opening of the year 2023, and successfully expanded from 900 to 2300 theatres in the wake of this buzz. It's also, even amidst more emotional or traditional awards fare, one of the best-reviewed of the Best Picture nominees, notching an 87 on Metacritic, or “universal acclaim.” Relatedly, it recently ended up atop many a year-end list and has beem racking up awards nominations, and has evem scored some major wins. Now, most of those wins have largely been on the back of lead actress Emma Stone, who enters Oscar night as a slight favorite to win Best Actress for the second time, but it's not exclusively about her: in addition to nominations for Best film at nearly every festival and awards show this season, the movie has also taken top honors at the Golden Globes, Satellite Awards, and National Board of Review.
I discussed this in my first preview, as it pertained to Barbie, but it was a significant development that the Academy showed last year they aren’t necessarily scared off by untraditional, chaotic movies by handing just about every major award to Everything Everywhere All At Once. This film generated far less buzz amidst the masses than the reigning champion, to be sure, but it did generate every bit the amount of award nominations, and actually received superior critical acclaim. And speaking of Barbie, this could be seen as an ”arthouse” version of that massively popular film. There is a prevailing sentiment among many (perhaps because of SEXISM?!?) that Barbie was fun, but too unsophisticated to be an ‘Oscar movie.’ There's no tangible evidence the Academy feels that way about the Mattel movie, given how widely it's nominated on the night, but should that be a prevailing sentiment in their ranks as well, this might prove to be their "wild, hilarious, depply original" flavor of choice.
It's true that Poor Things is not favored in most of the categories they are up for, but having the second-most nominations at the Oscars of any movie has to mean SOMETHING, right? It's hard to see that, and see the categories it's a player in, and conclude that it's not one of the foremost, if not the foremost challenger to Oppenheimer in this race. Furthermore, just as was the case with Killers of the Flower Moon, the numerous nominations include a Best Director nod, Supporting Actor nod (for two different actors, in Poor Things’ case), and a Best Actress nod. And in another similarity, the latter represents the best chance for the film to get a major win. as Stone has been neck and neck with Killers' Lily Gladstone throughout the awards season. The two films could not be more different, but given those parallels, I’ll say the same thing about Poor Things that I said about that one: any movie with 10+ nominations and a good chance at a major acting win has a real shot at the top prize.
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