Puerto Rico, Spain, Portugal, and the Caribbean. Be prepared to swipe past a sunset photo from each of these destinations on Instagram every day this week. But if you are sitting at home this Sunday night and need a good distraction from the constant reminders of your friends’ sunny vacations, look no further than the 96th edition of The Academy Awards.
Before your week-long bender begins, you’ll have the opportunity to bet on over 20 different categories honoring the best films of the last year. For this special edition of Indy Sportsbook, we’ve selected a few key nominations to share our predictions for.
2023 was a monumental year for movies, with the summer blockbuster phenomenon of Barbenheimer racking up 20 total nominations across 14 categories. Late-year festival favorites like The Holdovers and Poor Things garnered lots of love, while other festival standouts like Asteroid City and May December were ignored almost entirely.
For the night’s biggest award, Best Picture, Oppenheimer is Fanduel Sportsbook’s favorite at -3500, and we at the Indy Sportsbook couldn’t agree more. With a Best Picture win for Oppenheimer, the Academy has an excuse to award a populist box office hit that doubles as the kind of prestige biopic the ceremony usually loves to honor. The Barbenheimer hype has resulted in so much critical and commercial success that it landed two of this year’s top three Best Picture favorites in Oppenheimer (-3500) and Barbie (+1600). Poor Things is Fanduel’s runner-up at +1300 odds, and were it up to us, would be this year’s winner. Yorgos Lanthimos’s surrealist film featured some of the best technical work across the board, landmark performances for its stars, and a hilarious, absurd screenplay. It was one of the boldest and most boundary-pushing of all the nominees.
Best Supporting Actor was an especially competitive category this year: Mark Ruffalo, Robert DeNiro, Robert Downey Jr., Sterling K. Brown, and Ryan Gosling’s performances were all highlights of their respective films, and RDJ is currently favored to win at -2400 odds, marking another probable lock for Oppenheimer. His performance as Lewis Strauss was his first major role since Iron Man and is the first time the actor is receiving Oscar recognition since his transformative performance in Tropic Thunder. In the opinion of the Indy Sportsbook, Mark Ruffalo is the most enticing underdog at +1800 odds. His role in Poor Things as a horny, cartoonish scoundrel is like nothing Ruffalo’s done before and brings so many laughs to the film. Sadly, Iron Man seems to overshadow the Hulk once more.
But two of the Best Supporting Actor performances of the year come from younger actors Charles Melton and Dominic Sessa for their performances in May December and The Holdovers, respectively. Both performances were filled with emotional complexity, receiving much-deserved critical acclaim, yet failing to earn a nomination at all. Best Supporting Actress, on the other hand, is a lock for Da’Vine Joy Randolph (-2000) for her breathtaking performance in The Holdovers, generally agreed to be one of the year’s best.
For the Best Actor and Actress categories, biopics seem to dominate: Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer (-1150) and Lily Gladstone’s harrowing portrayal of Molly Kyle in Killers of the Flower Moon (-160) are the favorites in Best Actor and Actress. Very close behind Gladstone is Emma Stone’s center-stage performance as Bella Baxter in Poor Things (+120), a show-stopping, age-bending display of Stone’s acting and comedic abilities. If it was not already evident, Poor Things was the Indy Sportsbook’s favorite film of the year. The strength of both Gladstone and Stone’s performances is evident in how much closer their lines are than the top picks in every other category. Gladstone was, in many ways, the heart of Killers of the Flower Moon, and Poor Things similarly hinges entirely on how well Stone is able to sell her character’s unique predicament.
Another close race between nominees is in the category of Best Animated Feature Film, between beloved superhero hit Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (-210) and The Boy and the Heron (+125), featuring Hayao Miyazaki’s return to Studio Ghibli after a decade. Both films featured striking animation styles that were a refreshing change from the vaguely photorealistic 3D style that Pixar popularized and Illumination made generic. In the current landscape of animated films, especially those produced by Hollywood, the Spider-Verse films have massively pushed the envelope in daring to step outside this tired, often lazily pushed-out 3D style. The existence of The Mitchells vs. the Machines and this year’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem—a major snub in our opinion—exhibit the same experimental, eye-popping combination of 2D and 3D animation, a trend that is hopefully here to stay. Studio Ghibli, on the other hand, hasn’t changed its iconic hand-drawn style for decades, and it remains present in The Boy and the Heron, even in this age of widespread computer graphic animation.
The final category we’ll cover is Best Director. Greta Gerwig’s lack of a nomination for her work directing Barbie proved to be very controversial, with many believing the director was snubbed for a film honored in so many other categories. The Best Director category’s historical lack of female nominees brought further criticism to this snub. Of the nominees, Christopher Nolan is heavily expected to win at a staggering -4000 odds. Despite arguably being Hollywood’s most commercially adored auteur director, delivering decades worth of thoughtful blockbuster entertainment, he has only been nominated for Dunkirk, losing out to Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water in the 2018 Oscars. A win for Nolan would solidify a night of sweeps for Oppenheimer, which is expected to win many technical categories, like Best Cinematography, Sound, and Editing, as well as Original Score.
Last weekend’s release of Dune: Part 2 also played a major role in how nominations shaped up for the 2024 Oscars. The film was originally slated to be released in the fall of 2023, but due to last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike, it was delayed to March 2024—past the eligibility date for this year’s ceremony. Had the film come out on its original release date, many of those technical categories that Oppenheimer will sweep likely would have gone to Dune: Part 2, which was a stunning display of technical mastery across the board. A release date past the eligibility cutoff but before the ceremony usually bodes poorly. But 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once faced the same scheduling issue and took home several Oscars, including Best Picture, the following year, so hope is not lost for Dune: Part 2. Be careful this week, and have fun watching Oppenheimer sweep the awards during this year’s Oscars.
Ari Desai ’27 (adesai@college.harvard.edu) and Vincent Honrubia ’27 (vincenthonrubia@college.harvard.edu) will be following their bets closely on Oscar night.