Why The Zone of Interest 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.
The previous preview I wrote was about an unconventional Best Picture nominee, and this last one very much is as well. However, the two are unconventional in completely different ways. The Zone of Interest, which depicts Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they live directly next to the Auschwitz camp, is unlike any movie I’ve seen. It's a film that is all about what isn't shown, nor hardly even talked about, rather than what is. What the audience sees is the normal, everyday life of Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their kids as they live in an idyllic home, play in their pool, swim and fish in the nearby river, and have food prepared for them by the house servants. What the audience doesn't see, other than in the form of fires burning at night and the occasional billow of smoke by day, is the atrocities of the Auschwitz concentration camp, directly on the other side of their backyard wall. It's not a documentary, but it almost feels like one, capturing a snapshot into daily life, but the present-day knowledge of genocide literally right next door leaves one with a harrowing gut punch to the stomach that lingers.
A movie like this is not made to make money, but rather a point. Yet, it still resonated with audiences enough to gross $20 million worldwide, a somewhat stunning figure considering the subject matter, lo-fi production and zero household names on the bill. If this is to be an awards season spoiler though, it won't be on the back of its commercial success but rather it's critical one. Significantly, it’s the best-reviewed of all Best Picture nominees, earning a 94 on Metacritic, and landing at or near the top of multiple year-end rankings from esteemed critics and entertainment outlets.
I don’t think The Zone of Interest will win Best Picture tomorrow night, but I must say, it’s the only film I am yet to hear an adverse reaction to. Sure, some of that may have to do with the subject matter at hand, but I’ve seen enough hushed reverence for this film (sentiments I share, for what it’s worth) to make me think it’s a stealthy favorite of voters, perhaps in the manner of Spotlight and Moonlight. Unlike its fellow foreign Best Picture nominee, Anatomy of a Fall, it is nominated for Best International Film, so there is always the risk the Academy will simply give it that award and not but Parasite’s win in 2020 showed that one does not necessarily preclude the other.
And, though this film is absolutely nothing like Parasite, it has a similar appeal in that quite simply, there’s no other movie like it (not just this year, but really ever). Not having any other film ‘clog its lane’ might benefit it, in a ranked-choice voting system especially. As I've done several times throughout this series, I also think you have to examine it in contrast to runaway favorite Oppenheimer: if there’s any sort of quiet backlash amongst the Academy members to the presumed frontrunner, Jonathan Glazer's film, with its more revelatory and subversive storytelling about one of world history’s greatest tragedies, would be a natural ‘protest vote.’
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