Will Sinners Break the All-Time Oscars Nomination Record?

After months of guild nominations, box office returns, and Timothée Chalamet scaling large structures, the nominations for the 98th Academy Awards are almost upon us. Every year, the days before the nominations are when even the remotest corners of the prospective Oscar ballot become ripe for speculation. Which Best Picture contenders will be left out of the Best Film Editing lineup? Which pop star will inevitably lose their spot in Best Original Song to an obscure number from a documentary? This year, we have a brand new category (Best Achievement in Casting), big-budget sequels to Best Picture nominees, and a Neon slate full of international features, all of which leaves us with the following questions about what will be announced Thursday morning.

Will Sinners Break the All-Time Nomination Record?

Three films are tied in the record books for most Oscar nominations in a single year with 14: All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. And with a brand new Casting category added this year, Sinners has a real shot at matching or even surpassing that total. Ryan Coogler’s film is a contender across the board, everywhere from acting down to sound and makeup effects. Aside from near-guaranteed nominations in Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay, the film has multiple contenders in the acting races: Michael B. Jordan is looking very solid in Best Actor, while supporting contenders Wunmi Mosaku and Miles Caton were nominated for the Actor Awards (SAG), and Delroy Lindo won the AARP Movies for Grownups award.

Then there are the craft awards. The guilds for the costume designers, art directors, and makeup artists have all nominated Sinners for their awards, always a good sign of Oscar success to come. Meanwhile, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, film editor Michael P. Shawver, and composer Ludwig Goranson are all poised to possibly win their categories.

In the song category, “I Lied to You” is a lock, and while a second song nomination for “Last Time I Seen the Sun” would be something of a surprise, Original Song is an unpredictable category every year. A Best Sound nomination seems reasonably secure for all those squicky, squelchy vampire sounds — plus all that music. The only craft category for which Sinners was shortlisted but isn’t widely expected to get a nomination is Visual Effects.

A very conservative tally of the above gets you to 13 nominations, even if Jordan is the film’s only acting nominee and the film misses in VFX. Now add in a nomination for the Casting award (which seems likely), and you’ve already got the record-tying 14 noms. From there, any nomination for Wunmi Mosaku, either of the Supporting Actor contenders, or a second Original Song nomination would break the record.

How far has Wicked fallen?

With reviews for Wicked: For Good less enthusiastic than they were for last year’s Wicked, plus a box-office engine that ran out of steam quickly after opening weekend, the awards buzz for the Wicked sequel has practically cratered. I was one of many people who’d heedlessly predicted Ariana Grande would win Best Supporting Actress; now, only a few weeks later, I’m wondering if she can hold on for a nomination.

But leaky buzz or not, Wicked: For Good is still a big-budget spectacle with audiovisual elements ripe for crafts nominations. I wouldn’t expect a repeat of last year’s 10-nomination tally, but a handful in categories like Costume Design and Production Design (two categories where Wicked won the Oscar last year), plus Makeup/Hairstyling or Sound could get the tally up to six or seven nominations.

The biggest question marks hover over Best Picture (where For Good is in a scrum for the last one or two slots with the likes of It Was Just an Accident, Bugonia, Sirât, and F1), Best Actress, and Best Original Song. Both original songs from For Good made the shortlist, but Glinda’s “The Girl in the Bubble” has the edge. Meanwhile, after a snub at the Actor Awards and a no-show at the Golden Globes, Cynthia Erivo’s chances in Best Actress seem to be sinking by the minute. Emma Stone (Bugonia), Kate Hudson (Song Sung Blue), and Amanda Seyfried (The Testament of Ann Lee) all now feel like much more imminent fifth-slot nominations.

Can Neon really run the table in Best International Feature?

After the Golden Globes went five-for-five in nominating Neon-distributed films in their Best Motion Picture — Non-English Language category, the indie distributor’s strategy of buying up all the top contenders at the Cannes Film Festival last year seems to be paying off. Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident, No Other Choice, and Sirât all made the Oscar shortlist for International Feature and currently seem like the most likely nominees.

If any of the other ten shortlisted films are going to play spoiler, I’d look to a pair of films about young girls:

Sony Pictures Classics’s The President’s Cake, about a nine-year-old who must bake a cake for Saddam Hussein’s birthday during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, is Iraq’s submission, and writer/director Hasan Hadi already won the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award as well as the Camera d’Or at Cannes in May.

And then there’s Netflix, which has gotten a nomination in International Feature for each of the last four years. Its contender this year is Left-Handed Girl, about a mother and her two daughters working in the night markets in Taipei. That film made the rounds at regional festivals throughout the fall and would be Taiwan’s first Oscar nomination since winning with 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Can It Was Just an Accident and Jafar Panahi hang on to their Cannes buzz?

One of this season’s major sub-narratives has been the continued presence of foreign-language films in the Best Picture race. Recent Oscar history has revealed an evolved Best Picture category, one more likely to include multiple international films. This is why Cannes has become such an important signpost in the Oscar race. After it won last year’s Palme d’Or, Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s film It Was Just an Accident was vaulted into the Oscar conversation.

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But in the last few months, Panahi’s film has been steadily eclipsed on precursor ballots by fellow Cannes films Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent. It wasn’t included on either the Producers Guild and or Directors Guild ballots, and it only appeared on one of the Oscar shortlists, compared to the five placements that late-surging Sirât earned. This has It Was Just an Accident hanging out in the poachable bottom tier of categories like Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. Panahi — who was sentenced to a year in prison in absentia in Iran last month — has been such a major presence on the awards circuit, and his film was one of the best and most resonant of the year. It would feel wrong if all those predicted nominations fell away at the last minute.

In how many categories will Bugonia play spoiler?

As the fortunes for films like Wicked: For Good and It Was Just an Accident have fallen, Bugonia has proved to be surprisingly resilient after peaking at Venice and then steadily bleeding buzz throughout the fall. In the past several weeks, a trio of Golden Globe nominations, SAG nods for stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, placement on the AFI top-ten list, and a PGA nomination all feel like proof that industry voters have not yet tired of Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s creative partnership. If I’m Kate Hudson or Ethan Hawke or the producers of Wicked: For Good, I am deathly afraid of Bugonia right now.

How funny would it be for Diane Warren to finally miss a nomination for her own documentary?

Much like pop star Conner4Real, Diane Warren will never stop never stopping. She currently stands at 16 Oscar nominations without a win in a competitive category, tying sound designer Greg P. Russell as the losingest Oscar nominee of all time. She’s been nominated in Best Original Song in ten of the last eleven years for ten of the soggiest empowerment anthems you ever did hear. But among me, you, and Diane Warren, only one of us wrote “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” so we put respect on her name. She’s in contention again this year, but not for a middling doc about RBG or a Christian movie about the power of prayer. Instead, the movie she wrote the song “Dear Me” for is a documentary about her own life and career: Diane Warren: Relentless. Which is why it would be incredibly funny if this is the year that cools her hot streak. It might be! We’ve all learned not to bet against Diane in Original Song, but with two contenders from Sinners, two from Wicked, the Miley Cyrus song from Avatar, the title song from Train Dreams, Ed Sheeran’s exhaustively campaigned “Drive” from F1, a very beautiful Sara Bareilles/Brandi Carlisle song from the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, and of course the frontrunner, “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters, this category is no cakewalk to a nomination.

Will Nouvelle Vague be the latest black-and-white movie to captivate the cinematographers’ branch?

In the last seven years, seven films shot partly or entirely in black-and-white have been nominated for Best Cinematography. What’s more, on the increasingly rare occasions when the cinematographers reach outside of the Best Picture films for nominees, those have frequently been black-and-white films, including Cold War in 2018, The Lighthouse in 2018, The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, and El Conde in 2023. Am I just throwing a bunch of stats at you to back up my hunch that Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s black-and-white ode to the French New Wave, is going to pick up a Cinematography nod? Maybe! But after getting a surprise Best Picture Musical/Comedy nomination at the Golden Globes, plus showing up on a handful of other precursor lists (including Cahiers du Cinema’s top ten, which is just baiser du chef), I think Nouvelle Vague ended up on enough voters’s screener piles to merit consideration.

Will F1 be the most-nominated film to miss a Best Picture nomination?

The last three films to earn the most nominations in a given year despite missing a Best Picture nomination — 2024’s Nosferatu, 2023’s Napoleon, 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — all have a few qualities in common: they were all large in scope with an added prestige factor, be it literary source material, historical import, or Angela Bassett. F1 is certainly large in scope, and while Formula 1 car racing isn’t the Battle of Austerlitz, the film is director Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Top Gun, so it fits the bill. It’s also impressive as a feat of sight and sound. Nominations in the three craft categories where Maverick was nominated (Sound, Visual Effects, and Film Editing) all feel like strong possibilities. I’d also give the movie an outside shot at nominations in Cinematography and Original Song.

Where can we squeeze in a nomination for The Testament of Ann Lee?

Mona Fastvold’s festival hit about the founding of the Shakers religious sect hasn’t landed with awards voters the same way that The Brutalist (another co-production between spouses Fastvold and Brady Corbet) did last year. But critics sure did love it. The smart money at the beginning of the season was on Seyfried to ride the critical acclaim to a Best Actress nomination; but after Rose Byrne’s streak of precursor wins stole the “little indie actress that could” narrative, the Ann Lee ship sailed off course. But if not Actress, maybe Best Costume Design? While there weren’t too many Shaker-knit sweaters on display, good period detail is something the costume designers flock to. Here’s a stat for you: in eight of the last 10 years, there has been a Best Costume Design nominee with a female character’s name in the title. If it’s gonna happen this year, it’s on either Ann Lee or Nia DaCosta’s ’50s-set Hedda to come through.

Will the Casting branch do the coolest thing possible?

That would be to nominate Weapons. Casting Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys is the cherry on top, of course, but that movie is full of great casting decisions, including scene-stealers like Austin Abrams and Benedict Wong, not to mention all those rampaging kids. In the first year of this category, it would be great to set a tone that equates well-executed horror with well-cast horror, and the casting branch (hopefully) won’t be hemmed in by demands for prestige.

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