15 Moments To Watch For At The Oscars: ‘Anora’, ‘Emilia’, Chalamet & Brody, ‘Conclave’ And Trump
Time to do your homework to get ready for the 97th annual Oscars. Records can be broken, anyone can win, frontrunners can be toppled, and Brazil and Latvia just might go crazy. Here are 15 moments to look for during the three-and-a-half-hour Oscar telecast, which begins at 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET on Sunday live on ABC and Hulu.
BEST PICTURE: Front-runner Anora would become only the third film in history to win the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or and also go on to win the Best Picture Oscar. Previously, Parasite in 2019 and Marty in 1955 did it. Before the fest’s top prize was called Palme d’Or, 1945’s Best Picture winner The Lost Weekend also won the top prize on the Croisette.
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BEST PICTURE: Emilia Pérez is not only the international film with the most Oscar nominations ever with 13, it is also in rarefied air in Oscar history with that number. Only 22 films have ever received 12 or more nominations, and all of them but four went on to win Best Picture. All seven with 12 nominations took the top prize home as well. Of the 12 films (including last year’s winner Oppenheimer) with 13 nominations like Pérez, only three — 1964’s Mary Poppins, 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — failed to win Best Picture. Should it lose, Pérez will be joining a very select group. Only 2016’s La La Land, one of three films to receive a staggering 14 nominations, lost Best Picture with more than Pérez has this year.
BEST PICTURE: Should Conclave win Best Picture, it will be only the seventh time a film has done that without a corresponding Best Director nomination, something the Papal thriller’s director Edward Berger shockingly did not receive. It would join the likes of the first Oscar winner, 1927’s Wings, 1932’s Grand Hotel and 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy. However, it has become a more recent phenomenon with 2012’s Argo, 2018’s Green Book, and 2021’s CODA also pulling off the feat, proving voters look at their Best Pictures differently these days.
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MOST FREQUENT TRIPS TO THE DOLBY STAGE ON SUNDAY: Anora’s Sean Baker has four opportunities to be called to the Oscar stage with nominations for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and Editing. Should he win it would be comparable to Parasite director Bong Joon Ho’s haul on his big Oscar night. However Emilia Pérez‘s Jacques Audiard goes one better, but with an asterisk. He is up for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Song (for his contributions to the lyrics of “El Mal”). He would also receive the Oscar for Best International Feature should it win, but the Academy does not officially count individuals as the winner of that prize, only the country that entered it. In this case that would be France, which is looking for its first win there since 1992’s Indochine.
BEST ACTOR: It is not just a race between frontrunner Adrien Brody of The Brutalist, who has won at Golden Globes, Critics Choice and BAFTA, and surging A Complete Unknown star Timothée Chalamet, who picked up his first big win last Sunday at SAG (after Oscar voting had closed) — but also for the title of youngest Best Actor winner ever. Brody has held the title since March 23, 2003, when he won at age 29 for The Pianist, but should Chalamet upset him he will not just take a second Oscar win away from Brody, but will also handily inherit the title of youngest winner ever in this category. Chalamet was born on December 27, 1995, which would make him 278 days younger March 2 than when Brody won the first time. Not that this is necessarily the reason, but an AI bot making Oscar predictions is forecasting a Will Smith/Chris Rock-style altercation between Brody and Chalamet.
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DONALD TRUMP: Should Sebastian Stan prevail in Best Actor for playing the younger version of Donald Trump in his acclaimed performance in The Apprentice, we can probably expect Trump, now President, to try to crash the party via his Truth Social platform to weigh in — just as he did last year at the end of the Oscars by criticizing Jimmy Kimmel, who proceeded to read the whole rant on the live broadcast. Maybe he will do it again regardless.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Anora’s Yura Borisov would become the first Russian actor to win since 1965, when Lila Kedrova took Best Supporting Actress for Zorba the Greek. And just a year and a half since facing off at the Emmys for Succession’s final season, look to see if Jeremy Strong in The Apprentice can overcome heavy favorite Kieran Culkin, who has been a “real pain” for Strong’s Oscar hopes after Culkin also beat him at the Emmys.
RELATED: Roy Vs. Roy! Jeremy Strong Will Vie For Oscar Against ‘Succession’ Co-Star Kieran Culkin
DIANE WARREN: Now nominated for an eighth year in a row in the Best Song category with an overall 16 nominations and no wins (though the Academy finally gave her an Honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards), can Warren finally prevail with her H.E.R.-performed song “The Journey” from The Six Triple Eight? My sources are telling me she thinks this could be the year, but then again hope reigns supreme. Unfortunately the name of the songwriter does not appear on the ballot, just the song and the movie. Seems a little unfair since two-time winner Elton John is up again for the song he wrote for the docu on his life, Elton John: Never Too Late. Not hard to figure out on the ballot who wrote that one!
IT’S A HABIT: The sound mixer/editor Andy Nelson received his 25th nomination for his Sound work, this time for Wicked, the biggest total for any living person other than John Williams with 54 nominations in the music categories. He has won twice.
NEW EGOT WINNER: Can Cynthia Erivo join the EGOT club should she win Best Actress for Wicked? Yes. She previously won a Tony, an Emmy and a Grammy, all related to her performance in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple.
ALL IN THE FAMILY: Isabella Rossellini won her first Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress for Conclave and joined an elite club of mothers and daughters both nominated in the category. Diane Ladd was nominated a couple of times in the category, including for Ramblin’ Rose opposite her daughter Laura Dern, who would later win Best Supporting Actress for 2019’s Marriage Story. Rossellini’s mother Ingrid Bergman won Supporting Actress for 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express to add to her two Best Actress Oscars. Judy Garland for 1954’s A Star Is Born was nominated for Best Actress, while her daughter Liza Minnelli won Best Actress for 1972’s Cabaret. Incidentally, both Bergman in 1946’s The Bells of St. Marys and Rossellini won Oscar nominations for playing nuns.
BRAZIL: It could be a very big night for Brazil, which is aiming for its first-ever win as Best International Feature Film for I’m Still Here from director Walter Salles, who was responsible for the last nomination Brazil got for 1998’s Central Station. That film also was nominated for lead actress for Fernanda Montenegro, the first Brazilian actress to be so honored. Her daughter, Fernanda Torres, is up for Best Actress for I’m Still Here, becoming the second Brazilian actress to be named in the category after her mom who is rooting for her to actually win it and make history. Oscar night is also Carnival in Brazil, and the country is planning to project the ceremony in the streets where all the revelers are also hoping for victory. By the way, both Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here are nominated for Best International Feature Film and Best Picture, making them the 10th and 11th films to pull off the feat which in each case resulted in a win for International and a loss for Picture except 2019, when South Korea’s Parasite won both. This year, something is obviously going to give.
DEJA VIEW: Janty Yates won Best Costume Design for 2000’s Gladiator and is now the sole nominee (in the same category) for this year’s long-awaited sequel, Gladiator II. Dune: Part Two’s Greig Fraser won the Cinematography Oscar for 2021’s Dune: Part One and is now hoping to repeat the feat, like Yates, for the sequel.
DAVID VS. GOLIATHS: Disney and DreamWorks Animation veteran director Chris Sanders got his fourth Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature with Universal release The Wild Robot, and Disney/Pixar has the year’s behemoth No. 1 Inside Out 2, which made $1.7 billion (!). They go up against Latvia, the little Eastern European country that could, which earned Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis his first nomination for the undercat in the category Flow, as well as a first ever nomination for Latvia as International Feature Film.
FROM SING SING TO DOLBY: Clarence Maclin was sentenced to 17 years in prison for robbery. He turned his life around and plays himself in Sing Sing and now is a nominee in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. Can he become the first former Sing Sing inmate to win an Oscar?
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