Why Top Gun: Maverick 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.
Simple. This movie SAVED the movie industry! Okay, that might be a bit hyperbolic. But in some ways, it’s true. In a lot of ways, Top Gun: Maverick was the movie that defined 2022. Beating Marvel and Avatar (domestically at least) at the box office, and bringing people back to the movie theaters after the pandemic had kept them away for so long. I know that money is not the thing that equals awards success, but I think this is more than just a blockbuster film. In an age of streaming, Tom Cruise and company held out on this movie received the proper theatrical release that it deserved, and it paid off big. They believed in the power of the big screen, and that resulted in bringing everything together back to the movies. If that’s not worthy of Hollywood’s top honor, I don’t know what is!
If that wasn’t enough, it’s also just a damn great movie! Old fashioned, sure. But maybe that’s what the Academy is looking for in a year of experiments and big swings that don’t often pay off. Top Gun: Maverick harkens back to the old days of studio filmmaking and part of the movie’s marketing and awards campaign has been showing off how they pulled off some of the most impressive practical effects I’ve ever seen.
I know it’s very hard for a movie without a directing nomination or any acting nomination to full on win the top prize, but recent years have shown as that these stats are flying out the window faster than one of Mav’s planes. Just last year CODA was only nominated for three total Oscars and still managed to pull off a Best Picture win. The Adapted Screenplay nomination for a blockbuster sequels like this doesn’t typically happen, and may signal some of the above the line support the film needs to push it over the edge. Heck, it could even be the type of thing that wins nothing else but Best Picture! Because at the end of the day, it’s the narrative of what this movie did for Hollywood as a whole rather than any of its individual stars or artists. If they have the opportunity to award Tom Cruise for that (nominated as a Producer), I think they’d want to take it.
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