Why Wicked Will Win Best Picture
'Tis 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. This also appears to be a far more competitive race than in years past, which has often spat out at best two-horse races (like The Power of the Dog vs. CODA in 2022, or 1917 vs. Parasite in 2020), but more often a runaway coronation (as we've had in the last two years, with Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All At Once).
No, this one genuinely feels wide open in large part because of how many new names are up for the big awards. For the first time in history, the 5 Best Director nominees at these Oscars are all first-time nominees. Only 1 out of the combined Best Actor and Best Actress nominees has ever won an Oscar, and only 4 of them have even been nominated before. But it's not just the absence of bona fide star power helming the nominated movies; it's the fact that there isn't a traditional frontrunner, as a small handful of films have split honors across the awards circuit thus far.
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 2nd.
To kick off this series, I'm starting with the one nominee I can guarantee everybody tuning in to next weekend's Academy Awards has at least heard of, if not seen, if not seen multiple times. I'm speaking, of course, of the adaptation of Broadway musical Wicked.
If you don't know a lifelong theatre kid, and/or weren't on Twitter (or at least in film Twitter circles), it's possible you missed the hype about Wicked, but I would be shocked if you were not at least aware of its release shortly before Thanksgiving 2024. The film vastly overperformed box office projections, refuting skepticism over whether there was still a market for musicals post-pandemic. It topped the box office in its opening weekend, went on to become one of the three biggest films in all of 2024, set a new American (and Canadian) record for highest-grossing stage-adapted musical, and won the Golden Globe for Box Office Acheivement. It also generated copious mounts of buzz online, amidst moviegoers of all ages, proving it had reach and appeal simply beyond theatre fanatics.
In other words, of the Best Picture nominees, it's this year's Barbie. The wildly commercially successful, crowd favorite whose commercial and critical performance disproved cynical takes about how well a 'childish' and woman-led film could do. It did not exactly reach the commercial heights Barbie did, nor is it a lauded original screenplay, but it does have one key thing going for it that Greta Gerwig's film didn't: an Oscar nomination for its two main leads, both of whom have a real chance at an upset victory next Sunday. Neither Cynthia Erivo nor Ariana Grande are the favorites for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, but both races are open enough and both performances lauded enough, that a groundswell of support for either or both could include a similar sentiment behind Wicked for Best Picture. John Chu, like Gerwig before him, may have missed out on a Best Director nod, but his movie was consistently ranked among critics' year-end lists, and has consistently been nominated for the major awards shows. It has rarely won the Best Picture equivalent at these, yes; but simply being in the conversation at the Producers' Guild Awards, SAG Awards, Critics' Choice Awards, and Golden Globes makes it a very compelling nominee.
Wicked is, oddly enough, not the only musical nominated for Best Picture at these Academy Awards, and for quite a while, many thought Emilia Pérez (the film that beat it out at the Golden Globes for Best Picture - Musical) would be the stronger threat to take home the Oscar as well. However, that film's momentum has has been brought to an abrupt halt, between serious backlash and opposition from online fandoms and critics alike, and-- more seriously --the revelation of a string of incredibly offensive tweets by its star, Karla Sofia Gascón. The two could not be more different thematically, but given that there clearly was an appetite for a musical to win Best Picture (for the first time since Chicago in 2003)...might Wicked be able to siphon off support from previous would-be Emilia Pérez voters? And speaking of themes: Wicked is ostensibly an anti-fascist fable, rendering it unexpectedly pertinent to this incredibly dark era in America. Might its socio-political relevance prove too tempting for "liberal Hollywood" to pass up?
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