This weekend promises a Hollywood showdown with films including Sinners, Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another up for major awards
A
fter a year that was notoriously close to call (did anyone initially see Anora emerging as the ultimate victor?), this awards season feels a little easier to scope out. Paul Thomas Anderson’s idiosyncratic activism caper One Battle After Another has so far dominated, becoming only the fourth film ever to win best film at both the New York and Los Angeles film circles then the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. But how far can it go?
It leads this weekend’s Golden Globes with nine nominations but the comedy categories also feature Marty Supreme, now riding high at the box office, and its inescapable leading man Timothée Chalamet. Then on the drama side we have Sinners and Hamnet, two very different films solidifying two very different awards narratives. Here’s how I think it might all play out on Sunday:
The belated attempts to add some diversity to the Globes voting pool have been slowly paying off with this year’s major drama category boasting three films in a foreign language, two from Latino directors, one from a Black director, one from a Middle Eastern director and one directed by an Asian woman. Unlike the category-filling days of films like The Great Debaters or Bobby, each film here is enough of a contender to also make the Oscars big 10, making it slightly harder to predict. Frankenstein is perhaps the least likely, a film respected for its craft but perhaps not as loved for its emotional connection, while Sentimental Value is perhaps the opposite yet could be too modest to win. There’s growing buzz for It Was Just an Accident and The Secret Agent, both timely tales of pushing back against oppressive forces, but I think this is going to be a race between Hamnet and Sinners. Sinners has the popular vote (and is the far better film in my opinion) but Hamnet is the more traditional Globes winner and any recent backlash, from those who see it as shameless Oscarbait, has perhaps not had as much impact offline. It’s going to be tight and while I do fear a season of Sinners unfairly being the bridesmaid I think the extra heat from this week’s Actor award noms (with surprise nods for Miles Caton and Wunmi Mosaku) shows there’s still a great deal of momentum that will push it to a win this Sunday.
