The Oscars Have Left the Mainstream Moviegoer Behind

In the years since it began a committed effort to diversify and expand its membership, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has weathered strikes, the pandemic shutdown of theaters, and constant hand-wringing about declining TV ratings and potential cultural irrelevance. But one trend has remained consistent for the Academy Awards, the voting body’s annual big event: The Academy has been getting more and more international. This year’s nominations, announced today (six days later than planned, after a delay in recognition of the horrific Los Angeles fires), confirmed the extent to which Oscar voters’ tastes have shifted. The French-produced, Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez received the most nominations of the day, accompanied by several other movies that premiered—and were big hits—at European film festivals.

The Academy nominated 10 films for Best Picture, leaving room for some of the biggest blockbusters of last year. The musical Wicked (10 nominations) and the sci-fi sequel Dune: Part Two (five nominations) were two of 2024’s highest-grossing films, racking up hundreds of millions more in box-office grosses than most of the other Oscar contenders. But if you want to gauge the true awards favorites, looking at the Best Director category, where only five hopefuls get picked, is usually more useful. Each of this year’s directors is a first-time nominee in the category, and four worked on features that mainstream moviegoers might consider unorthodox: Alongside the filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, there’s the indie darling Sean Baker’s Anora, a raunchy dramedy about a sex worker; the actor turned filmmaker Brady Corbet’s 215-minute historical drama, The Brutalist; and the relative newcomer Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, one of the few horror films in the Academy Awards’ history to resonate with voters. The writer-director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown—a musical biopic that’s seen as conventionally attractive Oscar fare—stands out as the anomaly of the group. That Mangold’s film was also the only one to skip the international-festival circuit further suggests a turning tide for the Academy’s preferences.

[Read: A film impossible to have mild feelings about]

But Emilia Peréz, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is a unique case among those five front-runners—it’s a Netflix-branded movie. The streamer has spent years striving for the Best Picture title, only to narrowly miss out again and again. Netflix made what seemed to be likely bets over the past half decade with Roma, The Irishman, Mank, The Power of the Dog, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Maestro, and over and over again, Netflix’s most prestigious work has gotten a ton of nominations but walked away without the biggest trophy. (In the cases of Roma and The Power of the Dog, the company at least left with the consolation of Best Director.) That track record is partly because of Netflix’s tendency toward backing fairly artsy, auteur-driven movies; the hope apparently has been that a director such as Martin Scorsese and David Fincher would be enough to draw viewers and votes. But the paltry Oscar showing thus far is likely also because, as a streaming-first studio that remains fairly hostile to cinematic releases, Netflix has a more polarizing status in Hollywood than most of its peers.

Could Emilia Pérez be the contender to break that streak? If so, it’ll be a slightly confounding win that could spark another thousand think pieces about the Academy’s continued drift from popular opinion. It’s a non-Hollywood film with very little English dialogue, a gonzo musical about a Mexican cartel leader (played by Karla Sofía Gascón) who fakes her death, transitions into a woman, and then tries to build a more authentic life. Emilia Pérez won major accolades at Cannes, but its post-festival reception has been more muted; it has weathered waves of backlash from multiple sides since its November debut on Netflix. The company has pushed all of its resources into the movie anyway, clearly seeing the potential for nabbing the big prize in a diffuse field; it’s already triumphed at the Golden Globes. But Netflix has come close and missed before, so it’s perhaps too early to be bullish on Emilia Pérez’s chances.

Netflix’s biggest challenger appears to be the distributor A24. The independent company acquired The Brutalist after its successful debut at the Venice Film Festival. The movie is a large-scale American epic made for a comparatively small budget, a supersize film (with an intermission) about topics that have resonated with Oscar voters for decades: tortured male geniuses, the long shadow of World War II and the Holocaust, the struggle of art against commerce. It’s an excellent film, as well as the kind of big movie that has won Best Picture many times. A24 mounted a slow Christmas rollout as a way to build buzz with not just critics but audiences too, including putting the movie on IMAX screens. The plan has worked thus far, and the breadth of awards-season attention, including Oscar nominations for all three main cast members—Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce—might be enough to take the movie all the way. But simmering backlash to The Brutalist’s knottier second act—and, to a lesser extent, some scuttlebutt regarding the use of AI—could do it in; that the feature peaks about halfway through has become something of a prevailing opinion.

[Read: Watch—and rewatch—this 215-minute film]

The other big favorites will probably have to settle for slightly less notable trophies. Anora won the Cannes equivalent of Best Picture and has received a slew of other awards nominations, but after getting passed over at the Golden Globes, it somehow feels like an outside shot in every category (except maybe Original Screenplay for Baker). Wicked was an audience sensation that got warm reviews (if not outright raves), but it seems competitive only for the design trophies. Conclave, a robust grown-up drama about the Vatican choosing a new pope, missed a predicted slot in Best Director, suggesting a broad sense of “liked but didn’t love” among voters. Dune: Part Two will be treated as its predecessor was: a technical achievement, first and foremost.

Two smaller-scale nominees that snuck into Best Picture, I’m Still Here and Nickel Boys, benefited from passionate reviews and well-run campaigns by their respective distributors, Sony Pictures Classics and Amazon MGM Studios. Another competitor, The Substance, sustained its festival buzz with a solid box-office run; pundits’ worries that its lurid material might be too polarizing for staid awards voters have now been swept away, and the lead actor, Demi Moore—who won a Golden Globe for her performance earlier this month—looks like the top candidate for the Best Actress trophy. Meanwhile, two films that debuted and played well at North American film festivals—and which critics assumed were in Best Picture contention—ended up just missing out: A Real Pain, which was still nominated for Best Supporting Actor (the recent Golden Globe winner Kieran Culkin is a favorite) and Original Screenplay, and Sing Sing (which got three other nominations, including Best Actor for its star, Colman Domingo).

[Read: The 10 best movies of 2024]

The one movie that defies many of the trends among this year’s Oscar crop—particularly its lean toward a more international, film-festival-friendly lineup of nominees—is A Complete Unknown, as old-fashioned an Oscar picture as they come. It’s an American-produced biopic from a reliable, well-liked filmmaker (James Mangold) featuring a major star (Timothée Chalamet) playing a national icon (Bob Dylan); it’s largely traditional but with a slightly arty twist. Critics and theatergoers alike have praised the movie, and Chalamet in particular has enjoyed a great year: Between a buzzy press tour and his starring turn in fellow Best Picture nom Dune: Part Two, he appears to be well positioned to earn Best Actor. But in the end, Chalamet might be too “normie” for the big trophy. That reading stands in stark contrast to the Oscars of even 10 or so years ago, when the Academy favored movies such as Argo and Spotlight, mature Hollywood dramas that told well-known true stories in effective ways. This year’s ceremony, to be hosted by Conan O’Brien on March 2, will demonstrate just how much that consensus has shifted.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Sony Pictures Classics; A24; Page 114 / Why Not Productions / Pathé Films / France 2 Cinéma; Bettmann / Getty.