The Oscar Grouch: No, We Don’t Think It’s Too Early for 2018 Oscar Predictions

By Joe Reid @joereid
Published March 1, 2017, 11:45 a.m. ET

Of course, the Oscars are nothing if not a political game. Every week, new films are released, reviewed, and hyped by the Hollywood machine. And that means that every week, new frontrunners might emerge. The Oscar Grouch will be back every Wednesday to keep you updated on this year’s Oscar race.

A year ago, while under-the-radar indies like Moonlight were barely a glint in our eye, we could nevertheless see some of the Oscar contenders on the horizon. Movies like La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, Lion, and even Hacksaw Ridge were visible, if you had a long enough telescope. (Also visible: movies like The Birth of a Nation and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which both crashed and burned. So: grain of salt.)

Making Oscar “picks” in March is a fool’s errand, of course, but a) nobody ever said we at the Oscar Grouch weren’t fools, and b) it can be great fun to take some shot in the dark. After several months of talking about the same dozen or so movies, now we have a whole calendar’s worth of NEW movies to talk about. How exciting is that!

So to help set the table for the 2018 Oscars (51 weeks away!), I turned to Decider’s own Meghan O’Keefe to help spot the major contenders and even a few diamonds in the rough.

Joe Reid: Meghan! I know our envelopes are still warm from Sunday night, but there is no rest for the wicked nor for Oscar watchers. I’ve always found it the most fun to sit down right after the Oscars, lay out the entire year’s worth of movies ahead of me, and try to guess which movies will end up tickling Oscar voters’ fancy. And it’s not like we’re taking total shots in the dark here. Everything from a film’s director, its stars, its subject matter, its s

tudio, all the way to its release date — they’re all clues as to whether a movie is fixing for an Oscar run, even a year in advance.

Last year, you had La La Land pegged as a Best Picture contender because it had moved its release date into December. 2017 has a trio of big December movies on the schedule:

  • Ready Player One, which is the latest from Steven Spielberg, a sci-fil/action/thriller about video games that, at least on the surface, seems like a more commercial play than an awards play.
  • Downsizing, the latest from Alexander Payne, whose last three movies (Nebraska, The Descendants, and Sideways) were Best Picture nominees. This one stars Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig in a social satire about a man who decides to shrink himself down to four inches tall.
  • The Greatest Showman, a biopic about P.T. Barnum starring Hugh Jackman.

Do any of these three seem like contenders to you?

Meghan O’Keefe: Hello, Joe! Thank you for letting me back in Oscar Grouch land. You know how I love the sweet intoxication of speculating about Oscars a year in advance.

Well, I think Ready Player One could be a huge return to form for Spielberg. If he can just find his old groove with a whip-smart sci-fi action adventure, the Academy will be throwing Oscars at him. Think technical awards and Best Picture. Downsizing sounds like a safe bet and The Greatest Showman sounds like it could go either way. Biopics are either super schlocky and gross or mesmerizing and illuminating. Hugh Jackman vamping as a great big literal showman feels more like the former to me.

Some other titles that have caught my eye:

  • Darkest Hour: Joe Wright directs GARY FUCKING OLDMAN and BEN FUCKING MENDELSOHN in a movie about Churchill taking on Hitler. Sign me up. Sign me so up.
  • Mudbound: Dee Rees finally returns with a racially-charged family feud film. Oh yeah!
  • Molly’s Game: Can Jessica Chastain finally get that first Oscar for an Aaron Sorkin-penned role (about Hollywood sleaze bags?)

And, sigh, I mean, I guess we have to talk about Mary Magdalene. Jesus movies have the power of Christ behind their Oscar swell.

JR: I’m all in on Darkest Hour, especially if it means Joe Wright can make everybody stop talking about Pan and instead remember that he’s the guy that gave is Atonement and Anna Karenina and Pride & Prejudice. I think Gary Oldman (right) is at the front of my Best Actor rankings.

Mary Magdalene is an interesting one. Directed by Garth Davis, who was juuust on the cusp of a Best Director nod for Lion this year. Starring Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix (as the titular Mary and Jesus, respectively), two actors who have been smiled on by the Academy multiple times. Mara in particular seems to be in exactly the right spot for a Best Actress win with the right campaign. But “power of Christ” or no, when was the last time a Bible movie got major Oscar nominations?

I can’t believe it took us this long to get to Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s summer World War II movie that’s been screaming “Oscar bait!” since it was announced. I personally think the weight of early-Oscar-frontrunner is going to be too much for this one to bear, considering Nolan doesn’t seem to be a favorite of either Academy voters (snubbed for The Dark Knight and Inception despite major buzz) or the Twitterati.

A couple other movies to Melissa-Leo-style “consider”:

  • Mother!, the Darren Aronofsky/Jennifer Lawrence/Michelle Pfeiffer joint whose plot is shrouded in mystery but whose title — exclamation point and all — suggests something heightened enough that it’ll either be too much for the Academy or just right for critics. Black Swan seemed to outré for Oscar at first too, and look how well that did.
  • The Glass Castle, the follow up to Short Term 12 for director Destin Daniel Cretton and star Brie Larson. Short Term 12 was the movie that put Brie Larson on the map as an actress of some ability before Room made her an Oscar-winner. Repeats are tough to come by, but these two can make a good movie. Maybe this is a supporting play for Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson as a pair of eccentric/troubled parents?
  • Call Me By Your Name, the Sundance sensation and novel adaptation from Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash; I Am Love). On the surface, a sexually frank love story of gay awakening between a teen and a twentysomething wouldn’t be something the Academy would embrace. But we’re officially talking about the Moonlight Academy now, so maybe those rules are out the window. The critics are already onboard, so all this one needs is a smart campaign.

MO: I’m super excited to see Call Me By Your Name. By all accounts, it sounds different and special. In fact, there’s a lot on the docket for next year that already sounds interesting.

Like, isn’t there also a Katheryn Bigelow film? About Detroit? And Martin McDonagh is directing Frances McDormand in something (probably bleak and dark and bitingly funny). And I know it probably won’t be an Awards contender, but it has come to my attention that JC Chandor is doing an action-adventure film with Mahershala Ali, Channing Tatum, and Tom Hardy. Tell me about that film. I want to hear more about it. Just because.

JR: Ah, the J.C. Chandor film is called Triple Frontier, and it’s an action-adventure set in South America and written by Mark Boal, writer of Zero Dark Thirty and also that as-yet-untitled Kathryn Bigelow movie you mentioned. I’m expecting the Bigelow movie to be big once it comes together. It’s about the Detroit race riots in 1967 and stars Star Wars‘s John Boyega, who could be ready for his own Oscar breakthrough. (It’s probably worth mentioning that, following up what was such a great year for the Oscars and diversity, 2017 at first glance is looking pretty white. Boyega is definitely one to watch when it comes to breaking that up.) As for Triple Frontier, it’s still listed in pre-production, and after Chandor’s last film, A Most Violent Year, got swallowed up after opening very late in the year, I might expect it to wait for 2018.

I’m also SO glad you brought up that Frances McDormand movie, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. She plays the mother of a murder victim who takes out billboards in order to light a fire under the police chief (Woody Harrelson) to solve them. McDormand and the director of In Bruges (which won a Golden Globe for Colin Farrell) will always have my attention.

Other movies from past Oscar favorites include:

  • The Mercy, directed by James Marsh (The Theory of Everything), where Oscar winner Colin Firth plays a fabulist sailor opposite Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz.
  • Paul Thomas Anderson’s as-yet-untitled movie about the London fashion scene (!) starring Daniel Day-Lewis (!!).
  • Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, where he reunites with his recurring muse Julianne Moore.
  • Stephen Frears (Philomena; Florence Foster Jenkins) directing Judi Dench in Victoria and Abdul, where Dench plays Queen Victoria again (her first Oscar nod was for playing Victoria in 1997’s Mrs. Brown).
  • And finally, the movie I’ve got my fingers crossed most fervently for: Tully, which reunites director Jason Reitman, writer Diablo Cody, and star Charlize Theron for the first time since 2011’s massively undervalued Young Adult.

So. Care to make some predictions? Five movies to predict for Best Picture, plus five actors you expect to be contenders in either lead or supporting categories?

MO: Sure! Five movies I could see in the Best Picture race:

  • Mudbound
  • Bigelow’s Untitled Detroit Project
  • Mary Magdalene
  • Darkest Hour
  • Ready Player One (I’m serious)

Five Actors To Watch:

  • Jessica Chastain for Molly’s Game
  • Rooney Mara for Mary Magdalene
  • Frances McDormand for Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri
  • Jason Clarke for Mudbound
  • Oh, I don’t know, let’s throw Michael Shannon in for The Current War, where he plays George Westinghouse opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s Thomas Edison

JR: Excellent picks! I’ll throw in my own:

Five movies I could see in the Best Picture race:

  • Kathryn Bigelow’s Untitled Detroit Project
  • Downsizing
  • Call Me By Your Name
  • The Glass Castle
  • and even though I made my case against it, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. With up to 10 nominees, early buzz could take it decently far anyway

Five Actors to Watch:

  • Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour
  • Michelle Pfeiffer in Mother!
  • Woody Harrelson in either The Glass Castle or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
  • Mary J. Blige in Mudbound (she got very good reviews at Sundance)
  • Saoirse Ronan, who’s the lead in adaptations of Chekhov (The Seagull) and Ian McEwan (On Cheshil Beach)