Why The Fabelmans Will Win Best Picture
'Tis less than a week until the Oscars, and for the second consecutive year-- but just the third time ever! -- 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 buzzy Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, not only would the multiverse comedy with a big heart and primarily Asian cast be a wildly abnormal winner, few if any other top contenders are traditional 'Oscar bait,' and none are without its detractor.
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 last year all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 12th.
Stop me if you've heard this before: Steven Spielberg has a film in the running for Best Picture. The legendary director has been nominated for this award 11 times now, though somewhat shockingly, has just one win to his name (Schindler's List, in 1994). The Fabelmans is a vast departure from his last several nominees for Best Picture, though, whether that be last year's remake of the classic musical West Side Story, or the politically-tinged quartet of The Post, Bridge Of Spies, Lincoln and Letters From Iwo Jima. No, this is a deeply personal story, a mostly autobiographical one, in which Spielberg relives his coming-of-age story through the eyes of "Sammy Fabelman." It's a story about him falling in love with movies, to be sure, but it's much, much more than that. It's a movie about and for his parents and sisters, about growing up with two parents he loved and respected slowly growing apart from each other, about being a Jewish kid in an anti-Semitic environment, and about learning how obsessive and invasive art can be.
I'll admit, upon hearing about this film and even before seeing it, I rolled my eyes at how ready-made for awards season it seemed to be (and I'd suspect I was far from the only one). And it did score some early wins: the oft-foretelling Best Picture - Drama at the Golden Globes, top honors at multiple international film festivals, and a spot on AFI's Top 10 movies of the year. Wins pretty thoroughly dried up for the Fabelman crew after that, which is likely why it's slipped to 5th in the betting odds for this award. That said, we referenced this when discuss Elvis the other day: even if it hasn't been racking up victories, the best sign of a surefire contender is a film that's been in the field for many other major awards. And boy, has The Fabelmans been in the field; it made the final cut for the SAG Awards, the Producers' Guild, the Critics' Choice and the Directors' Guild.
But to bring this preview full-circle, the 'auteur theory' is what makes The Fabelmans a serious contender for Oscar glory; everyone loves Steven Spielberg, and this film is Spielberg through-and-through. It's sprinkled with some other elements the Academy tends to gobble up as well: "love letters to cinema," coming-of-age tales, marital strife, etc. In a year of movies that can be hard to watch for one reason or another, be it the subject matter itself (such as in Women Talking, or even The Banshees Of Inisherin), or grittiness (All Quiet On The Western Front), or pure chaos (Everything Everywhere All At Once), there may be a special fondness for an easily digestible film. Especially if it's one that still packs an emotional punch the way The Fabelmans does. It's the exact kind of universally-liked, universally-respected nominee that would stand to benefit from the ranked choice voting model if there's not an outright winner immediately.
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