It was a great year for Sinners and One Battle After Another but films with megastars like George Clooney, Julia Roberts and The Rock all struggled
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ast year’s Oscars narrative might have been more about the little films that could, from The Brutalist to Anora to Emilia Pérez, but this year has become closer to the opposite with big-budget films like Sinners, One Battle After Another and Frankenstein all leading the way.
It’s therefore not quite as easy to explain why some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, from Julia Roberts to Dwayne Johnson to George Clooney to Emily Blunt to Adam Sandler, found themselves removed from the race. So here goes …
It was Safdie versus Safdie this past autumn with the directing duo splitting to do their own thing even if their own thing ended up being kind of loosely the same. The brothers both picked to make a sports biopic just not in the way many of us traditionally expect – A24-released, focused on a figure many of us don’t know, more vibes than arc-led – and it seemed like Benny might have the more obvious awards play with The Smashing Machine. He had a Hollywood heavyweight in Dwayne Johnson doing the serious transformative thing the Academy have long loved, he had Oscar nominee Emily Blunt in support and a big Venice film festival premiere complete with a 15-minute standing ovation and a leading man in tears. But the film was a little too inside baseball, not just for the public (it staggered to a puny $21m global gross) but for critics and voters who brushed it aside for Josh’s still unconventional but far more grabby Marty Supreme. Johnson will return in Jumanji 3.
