Why Train Dreams Will Win Best Picture
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
Less than 10 days 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.
We kicked this series off yesterday with Sinners, easily the 'buzziest' of the Best Picture nominees this year. Today's featured nominee is...well, on the other end of the spectrum.
If you know very little about, or even haven't heard of Train Dreams, you're not alone. Despite a great deal of acclaim following its debut at the Sundance Film Festival last January, it received only a select theater release in the Fall, before being picked up by Netflix. Even combining the limited theater screenings and Netflix views, it was certainly the least-watched of all nominees this year, despite centering around a cast of recognizable names like Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones and William H. Macy. That it managed to land multiple Oscar nominations, including the biggest Oscar nomination of them all, speaks to its positive reputation as a film.
The Oscars weren't the first, mind you! Far from it, in fact. Train Dreams won Best Feature (and Clint Bentley, Best Director) at the Film Independent Spirit awards in February, an award that has gone to the eventual Oscar winner 3 times already this decade (Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and reigning winner Anora). It was also shortlisted for the Best Picture equivalent at the Golden Globes, Critics' Choice, and Producers Guild Awards, the latter two famously being the most predictive awards for Best Picture at the Oscars. While the movie missed out on winning at either of those, Train Dreams simply being in the conversation at them arguably puts it in better position than some of their more widely-watched fellow nominees. None of Edgerton, Jones or Macy landed Academy Award nominations for their respective acting jobs the way they had-- especially Edgerton --at previous awards on the circuit, but among the few nods their movie did get was the one that has become almost a guaranteed prerequisite in recent years for winning Best Picture: a Screenplay nomination. Considering the heavy hitters it was and is up against in the Adapted Screenplay field this year, that is no small feat, either.
Will Train Dreams pull off the upset for Best Picture? Let's put it this way: the odds of it happening are probably lower than the odds of a logger dying in an on-the-job accident in early 20th-century Idaho. But could it? It absolutely could. Despite a setting in a completely different time and place, it shares common themes with an Oscar darling and frontrunner, Hamnet: a beautifully told story of love and loss, realistic depictions of nature in its beauty, and man's (and woman's) relationship to Earth. However, this film has avoided the minority-but-not-insignificant backlash that film has cultivated online and, to a lesser extent, amongst critics; Train Dreams' subtle portrayal of grief is unlikely to face the same accusations of overwrought emotion or "grief porn" that Hamnet has gotten saddled with. Is that a sentiment held within the Academy? Is there a lane for a movie that has many of Hamnet's sensibilities but a more palatable-- to them --tone? It's certainly possible.
One thing has definitely been proven to be true: while Clint Bentley's film was not widely seen, it was near-unanimously beloved by those that did see it: Train Dreams is spoken about in such glowing tones by those, including myself, that watched it, and has the third-highest critical score of all nominees, only narrowly trailing One Battle After Another and The Secret Agent. In some ways, its biggest hurdle would seemingly be to just get noticed, but it did get noticed: it's nominated for the award. In a ranked-choice voting system, and especially with the new mandate that voters screen all films before voting, a unanimously beloved movie is certainly a contender.
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