Why The Secret Agent Will Win Best Picture
- Mar 12
- 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.
It's not at all uncommon for historical fiction to find favor at the Academy Awards. What's slightly less common is for that historical fiction to come from another country, but that's a wall The Secret Agent, the latest from renowned Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, has hurdled. Filho's latest mostly takes place in his real-life hometown of Recife, and tells the fictional story of Armando, a professor attempting to reunite with his young son and flee with him from the military dictatorship that reigned in Brazil from the 60s to the 80s.
You may read that and think, "wow, that has almost nothing in common with the 2020 film Parasite." And you would be correct in that! But ever since the Korean film broke through at the turn of the decade and became the first International Film to win Best Picture, there has been a steep rise in the worldwide representation at these awards. Every single year since the Parasite triumph, at least one non-English-speaking film has been nominated for Best Picture, and in fact, this marks the third consecutive year with two such nominees. The Secret Agent, obviously, is one of them, and while they would love to land Brazil's second conseuctive win for Best International Film, Kleber and co. are also hoping to take it one step further than 2024's I'm Still Here, and score an upset in the Best Picture field they're nominated in.
It's certainly followed a similar trajectory to I'm Still Here in the awards circuit: audience awards at film festivals and universal acclaim, but quiet nights at the early awards shows, as their peers in a strong field take them home instead. (In Secret Agent's case, it's a tight head-to-head with fellow Best Picture nominee Sentimental Value, of Norway.) But then, a slow rise through the circuit late on, with word-of-mouth growing steadily, and crucially, some major award wins, like at the Critics' Choice Awards and Film Independent Spirit Awards. Not only did I'm Still Here not pick up these Oscar forerunners prior to their win on Oscar night, they also didn't have quite the level of universal acclaim that Agent has: topping many a year-end list, and with a Metacritic score of 92, Kleber's film is bested in critical acclaim only by frontrunner One Battle After Another.
Another similarity this one shares with the reigning Best International Film is the strength of its lead performance. I've talked in each of the last two pieces prior to this one now, about how significantly an award-winning performance from a led actor or actress can boost its film's chances of winning. Just as Fernanda Torres did last year for I'm Still Here, Wagner Moura has earned breathless portrayal for his depiction of Armando in Secret Agent, so much so that he's got an outside shot at taking home the statuette himself. Again like Torres, he's mostly seen as a potential spoiler to what's shaped up as a two-horse race, but with a Golden Globe and a win from the Cannes Film Festival and many a critics' association in hand already, Wagner could be a very appealing option in an open race in which neither Timothée Chalamet nor Michael B. Jordan quite seem to have the mandate of heaven. If there's enough goodwill out there for Wagner's performance, as it seems there is, to lift him to a Best Actor upset, there's certainly enough goodwill out there for a Best Picture win for The Secret Agent as well.
And really, regardless of how you feel about the film itself, you have to admit it would make for a wonderful moment for the Academy were they to choose this film. To bring it back briefly to the last good thing that happened before the outbreak of COVID: the win for Parasite not only showed a rare synergy between the Academy voters and the movie most critics and cinephiles alike agreed was the best of the year, regardless of borders; it also represented a huge nod to South Korea's rapidly burgeoning cinema scene and sparked a renewed passion for film in that country. After seeing the scenes-- as surely many of them did --in Brazil last year when I'm Still Here became the country's first Oscar winner, can you imagine what a Best Picture win for The Secret Agent would mean for cinema in the largest Latin American nation in the world?
Comments