AFFotD’s 2024 Oscar Guide – Best Picture

“Oh God, we’re doing this again?”

~The Entire AFFotD Staff

Last year, our staff made the decision to do write ups-on the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, Best Actors, Best Actresses, and all the rest. Our results? We were pretty accurate actually!

And we put more work into our predictions than, hmm, some multi-million dollar entities that decided to rely on AI. And we’re not gonna take our foot off the gas. Here’s our rundown of the ten Best Picture nominees for the 2024 Academy Awards.

The Official AFFotD Guide to the 2024 Academy Awards (Best Pictures)

American Fiction

What’s it About?

Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, and adapted by The Good Place writer Cord Jefferson in his first credit as a director, this satirical dramedy received five Oscar nominations (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Score).

It tells the story of a genius, but not-commercially-successful writer and suspended professor (played fantastically by Jeffrey Wright, who you know from various Wes Anderson films, The Hunger Games, Westworld, or The Batman, based on the kind of things you tend to watch. You KNOW this man though).

Frustrated by the lack of interest in his well-written, thoughtful novels while seeing best-selling novels that he views, roughly, as “blaxpoitation“, he writes a “black” novel under a pseudonym pretending to be a currently-incarcerated former gang member as a satirical statement, but finds it becoming a huge success, largely lauded by white elites who praise its “bravery.”

Should it Win?

Probably not? We had it listed as seventh of all the movies nominated. It’s well-made (94% on Rotten Tomatoes so at least the critics like it) though apparently it takes away some of the bite from the original source material.

Now, if we were betting men and women (of course we are, look at our weekly alcohol consumption) we’d say that this movie will not win any of the five Oscar nominations it (rightfully) received. But we want to take a moment to point out that it is patently insane that Sterling K. Brown only just now got his first Oscar nomination (he plays Jeffrey Wright’s brother, a recently divorced, recently un-closeted gay plastic surgeon going through a midlife crisis).

Will it Win?

Nope. It’s not in the narrative at this point. As we said, we listed it seventh best. It does have a lot to go for it, especially with the acting. Would we be thrilled to see Wright or Brown came away with a statue? Absolutely. But it’s not going to happen.

Anatomy of a Fall

What’s it About?

A German author (Sandra Hüller, who not only was nominated for her role in this film, but also had a leading role in Zone of Interest, another foreign-language Oscar nominated film) is accused of the murder of her depressed writer husband. It’s essentially a French courtroom drama that shows an impressive amount of restraint and leaves you with intriguing questions.

The title refers to the manner of death of Sandra Voyter’s (Hüller) husband, and if it was a homicide or a suicide. It’s not a show-y movie, but it is incredibly successful at creating courtroom drama.

Should it Win?

No. Weirdly enough, it wasn’t even nominated for best Foreign Language film (it was nominated for Actress, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing and Original Screenplay). That’s because each nation is only allowed to submit one film under that category, and, listen, we are on record as saying that the French are bullshit, but this just proves it.

They chose a different movie (which did not get nominated) for reasons that range from “France is dumb” to “there was a fair amount of English, and France randomly hates it when their art isn’t 100% French, because they are, as they would say, ‘idiote’.”

Will it Win?

Nope. We had it ranked 6th, just edging out American Fiction, if for no other reason then they managed to make a movie that has 20 minutes of a douchey bald French guy yelling at women and children at a trial be…somehow compelling?

But no. This is an outlier that likely won’t win any awards, but it was a surprisingly quick 2.5 hour watch. If you told us in advance we would have to watch 180 minutes of French people talking about a maybe-suicide we’d have maybe-suicided to get out of having to post anything on this site anymore.

Yet it was surprisingly watchable and engaging. Not “winning an Oscar” great, but if you are able to, we recommend you watch it.

Barbie

What’s it About?

You might have heard about this one. One of the biggest movies of the last decade? No?

Okay it’s about toxic masculinity, consumerism, feminism, and the existential crisis of mortality. Typical $1 billion box office fare.

Should it Win?

Honestly? Yes. We have this ranked as our top film of the year. Now, keep in mind, our ranking is largely influenced by “how often we want to watch this.” And of all the Best Picture nominations, Barbie is the one that we’ve most wanted to re-watch and most enjoyed on each re-watch.

It got a lot of press over its various snubs (director and lead actress come to mind) but still received eight nominations and an almost sure-fire win for Best Original Song (Though “I’m Just Ken” is fantastic, Billy Eilish is almost certain to win her second Oscar for “What Was I Made For”). Ryan Reynolds and America Ferrera were rightfully nominated, and Greta Gerwig at least got a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination (the category choice, versus Original Screenplay, is part of some mild controversy).

Will it Win?

Nope. Christopher Nolan has too much “it’s his time” energy going his way right now, and while the movie has some incredible emotional beats and has a really solid message behind it…it’s funny. Funny doesn’t win Oscars usually. We’re not saying that’s right (it’s not) but it’s how things work.

The Holdovers

What’s it About?

An East Coast prep school makes a curmudgeonly long-tenure professor stay over winter break to watch over the students who are not able to get back home.

Various Alexander Payne-esque shit happens. It ends up as a solid 1970’s pessimistic-nostalgia film that hits hard for anyone who has a familiarity of prep school reputations, but also is a showcase for Paul Giamatti’s facial acting chops, and also a “girl you did that thing” moment for Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

Should it Win?

This was our third-favorite nominated film. It’s an easy watch, and is kind of surprisingly nice? But it’s not the best picture (Payne didn’t even get nominated for Best Director, which is a likely sign it won’t win).

That said, it got five nominations, including Editing, Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Randolph) and Best Actor (Giamatti). This is Giamatti’s second ever nomination (the first was for Cinderella Man nearly 20 years ago) and with a Golden Globes and Emmy win for this role, he might just get a (much deserved) career-rewarding Oscar this year, but honestly it’s about a 50/50 chance between him and Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer.

Da’vine Joy Randolph, playing a widowed cafeteria worker, is almost a lock to win Best Supporting Actress (also very much deserved if that happens). She’s fantastic in this, and one of the best aspects of the movie, but at the end of the day, the movie itself is not likely to come away with any statues other than those two acting categories. And only one is a lock.

Will it Win?

Think we pretty much summed it up in the above section. It will almost certainly get Best Supporting Actress, and miiiiight get Best Actor, but that’s about it.

Killing of the Flower Moon

What’s it About?

Um, genocide basically? American history is a treasure trove of Urkel saying, “did I do that” only, you know, legitimately depressing and horrific. Yayyyyyyy!

Should it Win?

Yes and no. We listed this as the 4th best movie of the year. If Scorsese hadn’t won his Oscar yet, he’d at least get director or film here. It’s honestly one of the best movies he’s ever done. And yes, “white dude making a movie about slaughtering of Native Americans, oh and that dude is like 80” makes you think this would not work…it surprisingly really does.

It coaxed one of the best performances from Robert De Niro in his whole career – he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, one of 10 total nominations for the film that includes Original Song, Cinematography, and (the most likely winner) Best Actress (the first ever nomination for a First Nation actress with Lily Gladstone).

Will it Win?

Gladstone is just about a guarantee to bring home a historic Best Actress award, but as far as best picture goes, it hasn’t won any major awards on that front. It’ll go down as another example of Martin Scorsese crushing it in his later years, but it’s not going to win best picture.

Maestro

What’s it About?

A biopic of Leonard Bernstein, the brilliant composer and complicated conductor who had many male lovers and a devoted wife, because the 60s. This was a passion project of Director Bradley Cooper, who has usurped Leonardo DiCaprio as “the guy who is most desperate to win an Oscar” (he has zero wins in 12 [yes, 12] nominations – 5 for producing, 2 for writing, 4 for Best Actor, 1 for Supporting Actor and none for Directing, even though since A Star Is Born it’s clear that’s the one he wants most).

Did you know that he spent years trying to perfect Bernstein’s conduction of one of his most famous performances? Did you also know that the movie is largely in black-and-white? Of course it was! Every fucking movie inserted black-and-white scenes this year!

Should it Win?

This might be our general “meh” attitude for biopics, but we listed this as the 10th best film of the nominated films. It received seven nominations, including Screenplay, Best Actor (Cooper) and Best Actress (Carey Mulligan, her third nomination).

Will it Win?

Nope. This is probably likely to not win any of its nominations, though it has a chance for the sound categories.

Oppenheimer

What’s it About?

Big bombs and awkward sex.

Should it Win?

We have it as the second best film, and with 13 nominations, including Actor (Cillian Murphy, who starred in the relatively unknown Sci-fi film Sunshine, which is our staff’s favorite movie), Supporting Actress (Emily Blunt), Director and Adapted Screenplay (Christopher Nolan has three nominations for this film, taking his total to 8. He hasn’t won a single trophy yet. The other nominations he has are mostly not surprising – multiple nominations for Dunkirk and Inception. Where you might be surprised? He was nominated for screenwriting in Memento.) (honestly he should have won for Memento.)

Anyway. We put Barbie ahead of this because, well, would you rather see a musical comedy that’s coated in pink a bunch of times, or re-watch the three-hour movie that is 20% black-and-white cinematography where its director managed to find a way to film a practical-effects equivalent of a nuclear bomb detonation without having to use any nuclear material?

Okay that last part is pretty badass.

Will it Win?

Yeah. It’s been sweeping award season, and the combination of scope, effort, talent and pedigree make it feel like a win here is inevitable (let’s not forget, The Dark Knight not getting nominated for an Oscar was one of the main reason why the Academy expanded the Best Picture category to ten nominees, or as we like to call it, made us do twice as much work every year).

Fanboys want Nolan to finally get an Oscar, and he’s been in the conversation enough it feels like this might be his best chance yet. If this ends up being a career-acknowledgement win for Nolan…honestly, at this point, as one of the only directors who doesn’t rely on old IP (outside of, well, Batman) we’re pretty okay with the idea of this historical biopic giving Nolan his first statue.

Past Lives

What’s it About?

Two childhood friends traverse two instances of re-connecting over a 24-year period. Nora moves to New York as a 12-year-old and becomes a playwright. Hae Sung reaches out to her when they are both 24, but when it becomes clear that they cannot meet in person, is told the friendship needs to be paused.

It follows the starting and ending and starting of a relationship, with the South Korean notion of 8,000 layers of connection over past lives driving the main storyline.

Should it Win?

We had this as the 9th best film. It’s a great film, but it’s also what you’d expect from an AI machine if you sent the prompt “South Korean love triangle, made by A24.”

Will it Win?

No, it’s not in the conversation. It has two nominations, one for screenplay and one for Best Picture.

Poor Things

What’s it About?

Emma Stone’s boobs. No wait, sorry, that’s just what you see for 30% of the movie. A more accurate, and harder to understand, description is – a pregnant woman jumps off a bridge and kills herself. A Dr. Frankenstein-like doctor finds the body, takes out the baby and puts its brain in the woman’s body.

Then a (rapidly progressing) newborn child brain is now in the body of their recently-deceased mother’s body. Guess what? Is black-and-white film used here? OH YOU KNOW IT IS! Do all the scenes in color then look like they’re painted by Van Gough? Yup. A lot of it is about Emma Stone finding out how sex works? Like, we assumed that was implied.

It was nominated for 11 Oscars, including Emma Stone (who, for the record, would have won but won’t because Lily Gladstone rightfully has locked Best Actress up), Mark Ruffalo got a nomination (he has four Oscar nominations and was nominated here despite the entire role just…not fitting his vibe), It got Best Director, Adapted Screenplay and Cinematography. It’s currently listed by IMDB as one of the top 150 films al all time.

Should it Win?

Yorgos Lanthimos has long been the best weirdo in Hollywood (see also, The Lobster, etc). But no. It’s a good movie that definitely goes for it, but it’s mostly Emma Stone doing the most “I’m an Oscar-winning former high school theater kid” that holds this up.

It makes for an engaging movie, but it’s just uneven enough that it doesn’t have what it takes to take it over the top.

Will it Win?

It’ll probably win a few minor categories (the makeup and hairstyling should win for this if only because they had to deal with the ridiculous request of “oh Emma Stone’s character’s hair grows two inches a day so you have to make a 4-foot-long extensions for her by the end of filming”) (no that’s 100% a thing).

Zone of Interest

What’s it About?

Oh boy. Um good to close with an uplifting movie. It’s about Auschwitz.

Okay, let’s go into this a little bit more. Yes, it’s a holocaust movie. It also handles the topic very uniquely.

It was nominated for five Oscars – Jonathan Glazer, who has only done three other films – Sexy Beast, Under the Skin and Birth – received his first nominations of his career, for Director and Screenplay. But his Adapted Screenplay nomination was a generous definition of Adapted Screenplay, as only a handful of sentences of the source material was used for the film.

It revolves around a Nazi officer who is an officer of Auschwitz. You know, aspirational.

Where the film excels is that it handles a horrific topic (2023 was all about genocide apparently) but does so in a unique manner. Stephen Spielberg said it’s the best Holocaust movie since Schindler’s List.

It doesn’t show the atrocities that happened under the Third Reich, but it has you listen to them (they rightfully deserve to win in the sound categories they were nominated for). You never see anything, but instead hear, in the distance from the idyllic villa occupied by the Nazi officer and his family just outside of the walls of the camp, gunshots and screams as a family tries to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary is occurring.

It’s a unique and haunting film. It also highlights how the Academy Awards are…inconsistent with its nomination process for foreign films. While Anatomy of a Fall did not get nominated for that category, this film, with German dialogue, filmed in Poland, was nominated for that category as a representative of….The United Kingdom?

Okay cool.

Should it Win?

No. There are some who think this should win, but it won’t. We had it as the 8th best film. This is where we should remind you that re-watchability is a bit part of how we rank these. This is a good movie, yes. It’s a unique film that talks about a complex topic in a new and inventive way, handled deftly by a master of the craft, yes. But it’s not a good hang.

Will it Win?

This was one of the biggest surprise nominations, and it definitely won’t win Best Picture. That said, the other two movies nominated that are foreign or largely performed in foreign languages (Past Lives and Anatomy of a Fall) are not nominated for best Foreign Language film, so this seems like a slam dunk for that category.

We’ll follow this up with a best actor/supporting actor and actress/supporting actress prediction post, as well as one for the rest of the awards, just like we did last year. But comparing this year to last, we’ll say this – there weren’t any nominated films that we felt didn’t deserve the honor they received.

2023 was a good year for movies, and we’re looking forward to 2024!