Knock on Wood

Every year, when the Academy Awards are done and over with, the minds of curious cinephiles are always thinking ahead. It will be nearly a year before next year’s ceremony, but it’s never too early to start predicting – especially when so many suitable candidates readily present themselves!

Obviously, it’s impossible to know what will be on the awards radar and what will slip to the wayside by the end of the year. Release date changes also tend to happen, and there is a whole host of films with yet-to-be-announced dates that will undoubtedly become major awards contenders. The films discussed in this article will most likely be a fraction of the whole.

It’s safe to start with a film that’s already been released and become a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and that is Dune: Part Two. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune became an Oscars favorite in 2022, winning five of the ten awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture. I expect Part Two to follow suit, sweeping the technical categories like Sound, Visual Effects, Production Design, and Original Score, and might even score Timothée Chalamet his second Best Actor nomination. It’s rare for a genre film to garner that much recognition, but it’s warranted for Dune; if Part One was big, expect Part Two to be even bigger.

An Academy favorite this year was Yorgos Lanthrimos’ Poor Things, which won many of the technical categories and Best Actress for Emma Stone. Stone herself might be heading toward her next nomination very soon for Lanthrimos’ next film, Kinds of Kindness, which will be released theatrically in just three months, on June 21. Lanthrimos described Kinds of Kindness as “a contemporary film, set in the US – three different stories, with four or five actors who play one part in each story,” and with an excellent ensemble cast that includes Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Hunter Schafer, there’s virtually no way Academy darling Yorgos doesn’t get recognized for the second year in a row.

Director Luca Guadagnino, who last appeared on the scene with Bones and All in 2022, will be back next month with Challengers, a romantic drama centered on a tennis championship. Those familiar with Guadagnino’s work (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria) know that nothing in his films is as it seems, and based on Challengers’ promotional material, there’s likely a lot about it we don’t know yet. A trio of lead performances from Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mika Faist is compelling on its own, but when you think of the year Zendaya is having (starring roles in both Challengers and Dune), there is an even chance she’s heading towards her first Oscar nomination, which has been a long time coming. Guadagnino actually has another film releasing this year, Queer, based on a 1985 novel, which follows an American (Daniel Craig) who becomes infatuated with a younger man (Outer Banks star Drew Starkey) in Mexico City in the 1940s.

With 2000’s Gladiator making such a splash at the Oscars (winning five, including Best Picture), it only seems right that its sequel, also directed by Ridley Scott, would be a surefire awards contender. High expectations might get in the way, but performances by Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, and many others might guarantee attention on that front at the very least.

Jason Reitman’s SNL 1975, a comedy-drama about the events leading up to the premiere of the first episode of Saturday Night (Live), could be a strong contender if it ends up being released this year, especially featuring rising stars like Gabriel LaBelle, Cooper Hoffman, Rachel Sennott, Ella Hunt, Andrew Barth Feldman, Kaia Gerber, Finn Wolfhard, and an excellent supporting cast to boot that might be up for the acting categories. The same goes for the Denzel Washington-produced adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, which features John David Washington and Samuel L. Jackson (who starred in the stellar 2022 Broadway revival), in addition to Ray Fisher, Danielle Deadwyler, and Cory Hawkins. With production commencing almost a year ago, a 2024 release date is inevitable.

Recent Oscar nominee Colman Domingo stars in A24’s Sing Sing, which premiered at last year’s Toronto Film Festival to rave reviews. Domingo was nominated for the titular performance in Netflix’s Rustin, but hopefully, Sing Sing gives him the chance for another crack at Best Actor. A24 has been a reliable awards contender, proving that they are the arthouse studio to beat. This year, they’re also releasing (among others) Alex Garland’s Civil War, the Sundance darling I Saw the TV Glow, and Annie Baker’s directorial debut Janet Planet. They’re also distributing Brooklyn director John Crowley’s romance We Live in Time, starring Oscar nominees Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project Megalopolis has been in various stages of development for nearly four decades, but with production wrapped in March 2023, it looks like it will finally be released this year. Coppola financed the entire film himself, and with a grounded sci-fi premise and a marvelously stacked cast, it looks to be a triumphant return to form for the legendary director.

Steve McQueen, who was nominated for directing and won Best Picture for 12 Years a Slave, is releasing his first film in six years, Blitz, sometime this awards season, via Apple TV+. Based on their approach to Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon, it’s likely that Blitz will receive a theatrical release of some kind, and with Saoirse Ronan in the lead, we may be looking at the next big historical drama.

Oscar nominee Joshua Oppenheimer (who may luck out by surname recognition alone)’s new film The End will likely be released sometime this year by Neon. The “apocalyptic musical” follows a wealthy family in their underground bunker twenty years after the end of the world, which is a direct result of their personal actions. Neon, like A24, has exhibited a strong showing of awards material in recent years, and The End, along with fellow Neon 2024 releases Stress Positions, Presence, and Anora are all promising for awards season.

Sebastian Stan will step into former President and current criminal Donald Trump’s shoes in The Apprentice, a biopic that examines Trump’s career as a real estate businessman in 1970s and ’80s New York. Succession’s Jeremy Strong, Borat’s Maria Bakalova, and character actor Martin Donovan co-star. If nothing else, The Apprentice seems like it will be a star vehicle for its leads, but whether it has Oscar potential remains to be seen.

Conclave, the latest from All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger, is also a strong contender, as well as Jeff Nicholas’ The Bikeriders, which was delayed from its 2023 release due to the strikes. The Nickel Boys, based on the Colson Whitehead novel of the same name, is also worth considering.

Sundance favorites like Dìdi, a coming-of-age comedy/drama written, directed, and produced by Sean Wang in his feature directorial debut, and Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, starring Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, could be contenders as well. I’d say it’s very likely that the surrealist comedy Sasquatch Sunset will earn a nomination for Makeup and Hairstyling because of the meticulous transformation of stars Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and more into unrecognizable sasquatches.

If this wasn’t inevitably the year of Dune: Part Two, I would say Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes would be a shoo-in for Best Visual Effects; the motion-capture technology seems to have only improved over time, and it would be a long time coming, especially after the last Apes trilogy (2011-2017) was nominated for, but never won, the award at the Oscars.

After major upsets in 2020, it would be impossible to discount Joker: Folie à Deux at next year’s awards; Lady Gaga might be in contention for Best (Supporting?) Actress, and Joaquin Phoenix may make another bid for Best Actor. Since the film is ostensibly a musical, it’s possible an Original Song nomination is in the cards as well. Another musical releasing this fall, Wicked: Part One, also has a chance, but since it is theoretically only using songs from the original musical, it would not have a chance for Original Song.

The current slate of animated films in 2024 is mostly a collection of prequels and sequels; Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 are guaranteed to make some box office dough, but whether they’re Oscar-quality is yet to be determined – but honestly, if Elemental can get in, either of these can as well. Netflix’s Lord of the Rings anime, War of the Rohirrim, would be a cool nomination, but as of right now, I’d put my money on Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot, a sci-fi adventure drama featuring Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames, and a score by recent Oscar winner Kris Bowers.

I would also love to see Robert Eggers’ long-awaited Nosferatu to be considered, if only for Production Design or Cinematography. Seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice somewhere in the lineup would be fun (especially for the technical categories), and if the Academy does decide to recognize stunt work – not likely, at least for the 2025 awards season – Dev Patel’s Monkey Man would definitely secure a spot.

And, finally, here’s how All of Us Strangers can still win Best Picture…