The film critics for The Times and the Sunday Times, Kevin Maher and Tom Shone, give their expert verdicts on who should win and who will win at Sunday’s Oscars ceremony.
Best picture
Coda
Belfast
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story
Who will win Coda. Forget everything you think you know about this year’s awards season. Forget Belfast. Forget West Side Story. And forget also The Power of the Dog for best picture. Coda, a feelgood film about a teenager torn between her musical ambitions and her deaf family, has become the 11th-hour frontrunner, scooping up trophies at key staging posts such as the Screen Actors Guild awards and, most recently, the Producers Guild awards — 22 out of the past 32 PGA winners (from Dances with Wolves to Nomadland) have gone on to win the best picture Oscar.
Who should win The Power of the Dog. Jane Campion’s revisionist western is critically adored, has been seen by practically everyone (it’s on Netflix) and was anointed at last year’s Venice Film Festival (where Oscar beasts are born) as a natural best picture champ. Kevin Maher
Who will win Best picture race is split between the lightweight Sundance crowd-pleaser Coda and Jane Campion’s sly, slow-burn arthouse western The Power of the Dog. Coda is the slight favourite after winning at the PGA awards, but would prove as embarrassing an albatross as the win in 2006 for Crash. Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is the outsider to watch.
Who should win Campion’s film is built to last. Tom Shone
Best director
Kenneth Branagh (Belfast)
Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car)
Paul Thomas Anderson (Licorice Pizza)
Jane Campion (Power of the Dog)
Steven Spielberg (West Side Story)
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Who should win Jane Campion. Because the historical nature of her presence here — only the first woman to be nominated twice for best director — is irrelevant. She put The Power of the Dog together with the painterly prowess and dramatic intensity of the master she is. She deserves the acknowledgement more than any film-maker on the list.
Who will win Jane Campion. She’s dominated the best director race all season. It’s inconceivable that she might lose. There is, however, a minor threat from recent PR misfires (she called actor Sam Elliott a “B-I-T-C-H” and belittled the Williams sisters) that could potentially alienate Oscar voters. But, really? Not really. KM
Who should win and will win Scorsese’s recent stamp of approval confirms Jane Campion’s frontrunner status in a banner year for women film-makers. The Power of the Dog may not be all that Campion is capable of — the ending seems to have split audiences — but the control and film-making craft still put her ahead of the pack. It’s good to have her back. TS
Best actress
Jessica Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye)
Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter)
Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers)
Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos)
Kristen Stewart (Spencer)
Who will win Jessica Chastain. She won the recent and often predictive Screen Actors Guild award (actors make up the largest Oscar voting body). She’s been nominated twice before but hasn’t won (Colman, Cruz and Kidman are all previous winners). Plus her eye-catching turn in last year’s TV hit, Scenes from a Marriage, has confirmed her status as a screen heavyweight.
Who should win Olivia Colman. Inexplicably ignored by the Baftas (Joanna Scanlan was great in After Love, but come on!), Colman has delivered the performance of the year, if not her career, as a self-hating mother and academic in the brilliantly unsettling The Lost Daughter. It is a characterisation that dares, unlike any other in this category, to be unlikeable. The essence of award-worthy. KM
Who will win A weak field has propelled Jessica Chastain to the front for her marvellous, prosthetics-heavy imitation of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye — a case of “great performance, shame about the movie”.
Who should win Penélope Cruz for her portrayal of a mother wrestling with a terrible secret in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers. TS
Best actor
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Javier Bardem (Being the Ricardos)
Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog)
Andrew Garfield (Tick, Tick . . . Boom!)
Will Smith (King Richard)
Denzel Washington (The Tragedy of Macbeth)
Who will win Will Smith. It’s that Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman phenomenon all over again. The huge ostentatious “Hoo-ah!” performance of which awards season voters never seem to tire. Smith has duly snapped up multiple trophies (including a Bafta) for his committed turn as the erratic patriarch Richard Williams in King Richard. But as a piece of screen acting, it’s very, well, hoo-ah!
Who should win Denzel Washington. Because The Tragedy of Macbeth, after a desultory cinema release, was dribbled out onto Apple TV+ with little fanfare, seemingly oblivious to its standing as one of the great screen Shakespeares, containing within it one of the strongest Macbeths and certainly one of the most laser-focused Washington performances. KM
Who will win After his win at the Baftas, Will Smith is all but assured the Oscar for his portrayal of Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena, in King Richard — Smith is long overdue a reward for all the blockbusters he has made.
Who should win Benedict Cumberbatch is at the height of his powers: his saturnine, insinuating turn eats up Campion’s film as Nicholson’s did The Shining.
Best supporting actress
Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter)
Ariana DeBose (West Side Story)
Judi Dench (Belfast)
Kirsten Dunst (The Power of the Dog)
Aunjanue Ellis (King Richard)
Who will win Ariana DeBose. The West Side Story actress (she plays Anita) has nabbed nearly every prize available, from Golden Globes to SAG awards to Baftas, since the season began. She owns this category. No one can touch her.
Who should win Jessie Buckley. Because as the younger self of Olivia Colman’s Leda Caruso in The Lost Daughter, Buckley didn’t just attempt to “match” the two performances with a loose Colman imitation (think Robert De Niro “doing” Marlon Brando for The Godfather II). Instead, she completely defined Caruso’s persona from the inside out, with rage, frustration and deep unhappiness. A serious achievement. KM
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Who will win Ariana DeBose was so powerful in West Side Story she upset the balance of the film — her grief makes Maria look frivolously infatuated.
Who should win Jessie Buckley’s turn as a fraught, fraying mother in The Lost Daughter pulls off the greater miracle: you identify even with a mother’s cruelty. TS
Best supporting actor
Ciaran Hinds (Belfast)
Troy Kotsur (Coda)
Jesse Plemons (The Power of the Dog)
JK Simmons (Being the Ricardos)
Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog)
Who will win Troy Kotsur. A late entry from the Oscar dark horse Coda, deaf actor Kotsur has overtaken Kodi Smit-McPhee as the sensible best-supporting bet. His role as the loveable and roguish father to hearing daughter Ruby (Emilia Jones) has melted hearts. While his accomplished antics at the podium (see his plea for a “deaf James Bond” at the Baftas) has won many admirers.
Who should win Ciaran Hinds. The under-appreciated character actor is the emotional anchor of Branagh’s quasi autobiography and, as Pop, provides the film with its tear-jerking strength. His wordless reaction shots in the hospital farewell with Buddy (Jude Hill) are alone worthy of a win. KM
Who will win Troy Kotsur’s performance as the deaf, rap-loving, blue-humoured father in Coda hits the Academy’s sweet spot — it’s a colourful, scabrous, attention-grabbing turn.
Who should win Kodi Smit-McPhee’s tall, willowy wallflower-that-turns is the sneaky source of all The Power of the Dog’s surprise. You leave the film thinking only of him. TS
Best adapted screenplay
Coda (Sian Heder)
Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa Oe)
Dune (Eric Roth, Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve)
The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal)
The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)
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Who will win Drive My Car. Because, unlike Gyllenhaal, Drive My Car director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has indeed made it into the best director race, and the best picture race. Yet despite claims that his slow, cerebral adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story is “This year’s Parasite!” (hint: it’s not!), Ryusuke has no chance of winning the main categories. This one, however, is the perfect place to acknowledge his formidable talent.
Who should win The Lost Daughter. Unfairly boxed out of the best director race (Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson aren’t entirely justifiable inclusions there), this is the only chance for the writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal to receive much-deserved recognition. She took the story in Elena Ferrante’s essentially conventional novel and she made it darker, more nuanced and, yes, better. KM
Who will win Coda looks set to triumph even though the writing is typical Sundance crowd-pleaser boilerplate.
Who should win The greater work of adaptation is Campion’s, capturing all of the elliptical power and idiomatic idiosyncrasy of Thomas Savage’s original novella. All a cult author could wish for. TS
Best original screenplay
Belfast (Kenneth Branagh)
Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, David Sirota)
Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson)
King Richard (Zach Baylin)
The Worst Person in the World (Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier)
Who will win Belfast. Because Branagh has previously been nominated four times (for movies including Henry V and My Week with Marilyn) but with no success. His film Belfast, earmarked earlier this year as one to sweep the boards, has gradually fizzled out of serious contention. It’s up for seven Oscars and it won’t win any of them except, possibly, this. It’s the one they give to Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained) to block him from the bigger prizes. Branagh would fit nicely here.
Who should win The Worst Person in the World. Because the screenplay for this Norwegian coming-of-age movie (about a woman who finally “finds herself” in her thirties) is a thing of literary beauty, broken into 12 “chapters”, plus a prologue and an epilogue, and with some sections unfolding entirely as searching and sublimely crafted exchanges. KM
Who will win One of the few truly competitive categories at this year’s Oscars, one is spoilt for choice. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza will make a deserving winner for his zany, picaresque coming-of-age tale set in the San Fernando valley in 1973.
Who should win Joachim Trier’s screenplay for The Worst Person in the World — sad, funny, truthful — is the still greater achievement. TS
