Oscars 2024: Film critic Dann Gire predicts who will win and who should win

Christopher Nolan’s historical epic “Oppenheimer” will dust the competition during the 96th Academy Awards broadcast, airing live at 6 p.m. Sunday, March 10, with host Jimmy Kimmel on ABC.

Not only will “Oppenheimer” win most of its 13 nominated categories, it stands to do something that hasn’t occurred since “Ben Hur” in 1960 — win a triple crown of best picture, actor and supporting actor Oscars.

Only three films have done it so far. Will “Oppenheimer” make it an even number?

Here are my annual Academy Awards predictions, an educated distillation of sagely industry sources combined with unscientific gut feelings.

Note: No “should win” appears in categories where I have not seen all nominees.

As usual, the following predictions have been placed into probability categories, each labeled after actual movie titles. We begin with …

THE SURE THING

Best International Feature

Will win: “The Zone of Interest”

How do we know this will definitely win the Oscar?

Easy peasy. It’s the only International Feature nominee also up for Best Picture.

“Zone” tells the story of a Nazi commandant who moves his family into a dream home — next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. We never see the Holocaust atrocities, but we hear them in the background of relatively normal domestic scenes.

“Zone” also is a strong contender for Best Sound. More on that later.

Best Picture

Should win: “Oppenheimer”

Will win: “Oppenheimer

Spoiler Upset: “The Holdovers”

“Oppenheimer” won the Darryl F. Zanuck Award at the recent Producers Guild Awards, the most important precursor to the Best Picture Oscar. It won seven categories from the BAFTA awards, plus best picture from multiple critics groups (including the Chicago Film Critics Association). Stunning visuals, superbly nuanced special effects, razor editing and a gripping score elevate this biopic into what should become a timeless classic.

Call it the Godzilla of Oscar nominees, because it cannot be stopped.

Best Director

Should win: Christopher Nolan for “Oppenheimer”

Will win: Christopher Nolan for “Oppenheimer”

Spoiler Upset: No way.

Nolan has demonstrated he possesses the cinematic chops to be the closest filmmaker to the late iconic Stanley Kubrick, as a director whose works are anxiously anticipated, then voraciously analyzed and usually admired, despite Nolan’s sometimes trademark difficult-to-decipher soundtracks.

Nolan also makes more movies much quicker than the other movie master.

Best Editing

Will win: “Oppenheimer”

Should win: “Oppenheimer”

Spoiler Upset: “Killers of the Flower Moon”

Best Score

Will win: “Oppenheimer”

Should win: “Poor Things”

Spoiler Upset: “Killers of the Flower Moon”

Best Cinematography

Will win: “Oppenheimer”

Should win: “Oppenheimer”

Spoiler Upset: “Killers of the Flower Moon”

“Oppenheimer” cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema didn’t just create a master work of light, shadow, composition and texture in a visually resplendent narrative. Nolan needed to shoot part of his large-format movie in 65 mm black-and-white filmstock. But it didn’t exist.

So, van Hoytema persuaded Kodak to create this filmstock just for Nolan. That’s not all.

He had to rebuild the cameras to correct the metal pressure plates so they could accommodate black-and-white film stock, which is much thinner than color film stock.

Then he had to persuade Fotokem Labs to convert its entire color workflow system to process black-and white footage, which it had never done before.

Hoyte van Hoytema definitely earned this one.

Best Supporting Actress

Will win: Da’Vine Joy Randolph in “The Holdovers”

Should win: Da’Vine Joy Randolph in “The Holdovers”

The SAG award winner in this category has gone on to take the Oscar 21 of 28 times, including last year, when Jamie Lee Curtis won for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Randolph recently won it and has earned more than 35 awards for her performance. Time for her to rehearse her acceptance speech.

• • •

DEFINITELY, MAYBE ...

Best Production Design

Will win: “Poor Things”

Should win: “Poor Things”

Spoiler Upset: “Oppenheimer”

“Poor Things,” “Oppenheimer” and “Saltburn” won Art Directors Guild Awards in separate categories for Fantasy, Period and Contemporary live-action features.

Not exactly a clear signal on which will win the Oscar, as both “Poor Things” and “Oppenheimer” are nominees. In five years, the winner of the ADG’s period film prize has gone on to win the Oscar for production design only twice.

Best Costumes

Will win: “Barbie”

Should win: “Barbie”

Spoiler Upset: “Poor Things”

“Barbie” and “Poor Things” both won at the Costume Designers Guild (in the Fantasy and Period categories) with the latter winning a BAFTA and the former winning a Critics Choice award. No crystal ball clarity here. Just a hunch that stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling make everything they wear look amazing.

Best Song

Will win: “What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie”

Should win: “What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie”

This category could be the safest bet for a “Barbie” win. It’s nominated twice here for “What Was I Made For?” and “I’m Just Ken” (which Gosling will perform live Sunday). Of the two, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell‘s “What Was I Made For?” holds the advantage.

Best Original Screenplay

Will win: “Anatomy of a Fall”

Should win: “Past Lives”

Best Adapted Screenplay

Will win: “American Fiction”

Should win: “Barbie” (which should not be considered an adaptation)

Best Animated Feature

Will win: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”

Should win: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”

Best Hair, Makeup

Will win: “Maestro”

Should win: “Poor Things”

Best Visual Effects

Will win: “Godzilla: Minus One”

Should win: “Godzilla: Minus One”

Spoiler Upset: “The Creator”

The Visual Effects Guild loved “The Creator,” even though it lost a BAFTA to “Poor Things,” which didn’t even get nominated for a Visual Effects Oscar. Go figure.

Although the ending is a cheap, happy sellout, “Minus One” reigns as the king of all Godzilla movies. Shouldn’t it get something at the Oscars? The radioactive countdown on the monster’s spine is ultracool.

Best Supporting Actor

Will win: Robert Downey Jr. in “Oppenheimer”

Should win: Ryan Gosling in “Barbie”

The SAG winner in this category has won the Oscar 18 times in 27 years, including the last seven. Downey will a make it 19 times in 28 years.

• • •

TOO CLOSE

Best Actress

Should win: Emma Stone in “Poor Things”

Will win: Lily Gladstone in “Killers of the Flower Moon”

Gladstone won the SAG Award, which has predicted the Oscar winner 21 of 29 years.

If that changes to 22 of 30 years, she would make history as the first Native American to win this category, which would earn the Academy voters kudos for diversity.

But hold on.

She appears in less than a third of a 3½-hour movie with a character who’s pretty much a supporting part, not a strong lead.

Her interior performance creates a charismatic, nuanced Native American character, not exactly a massive creative challenge or severe deviation from her real-life experiences.

Meanwhile, Yorgos Lanthimos’ trippy, visionary, coming-of-age surrealistic fantasy “Poor Things” features a bold and daring high-wire act by Emma Stone as a free and independent female Frankenstein’s monster with a voracious appetite for life, sex, discovery and purpose.

One slip, one miscalculation or one misjudgment in tone or content could have turned this movie — and her full-tilt go-for-broke performance — into an embarrassment and a disaster. Instead, it’s a monstrous, mind-blowing feminist delight because of Stone’s 150% committed performance.

Best Actor

Should win: Paul Giamatti in “The Holdovers”

Will win: Cillian Murphy in “Oppenheimer”

“Oppenheimer” features a tour-de-force performance from Cillian Murphy as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose work on the top-secret Manhattan Project leads to the development of the atomic bomb. He creates a complex, tightly wound character that just won the SAG Award, a most reliable indicator of Oscar victory considering that the winner in this category has predicted the Oscar recipient an impressive 23 out of 29 times.

Giamatti’s prep school teacher has a greater range of emotions and stronger dramatic arc. He’s heartbreaking and funny. But the Oscars love historical figures to win this category, even though as Oscar expert Lloyd Rutzky points out, only three times has the Leading Actor Oscar gone to a scientist.

And this one definitely has chemistry.

Best Sound

Should win: “The Zone of Interest”

Will win: “Oppenheimer”

The Cinema Audio Society Awards gave “Oppenheimer” top honors for sound mixing. But if you consider the movie most driven by sound design to create its emotional impact, the winner should be “Zone of Interest.”

Loads of detailed research went into making sure that the sounds of motorbikes were of that time period (World War II) and that the birds and the bees sounds were proper for the season and location. As for the film’s muted gunshots, sound designer Johnnie Burn went to Auschwitz and measured the distance between the real garden and Auschwitz’s Block 11. He found a firing range on the Isle of Wight in the U.K. to replicate the sloppy, echoey sound that made gunshots credible.

“Zone of Interest” already bested “Oppenheimer” for best sound at the BAFTAs. But Academy voters will likely go for the explosive sounds of an A-bomb over the nuanced sounds of banal evil.

• • •

ANYTHING GOES

Best Documentary Feature

Will win: “20 Days in Mariupol”

Best Documentary Short

Will win: “The Last Repair Shop”

Best Animated Short

Will win: “Letter to a Pig”

Best Live-Action Short

Will win: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”