Numlock Awards: It's always a boring year until it's not

Do you remember when I came to you with those calculations, that we thought we might have an exciting Oscar race this year? I believe we do.

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Every week, join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Walter.

Just a quick post-DGA and post-BAFTA check-in! We’ve got just the Screen Actors Guild and the Producers Guild on the docket in terms of the major prizes we care about that can really shift the momentum here. That said, all but one of the acting categories now has a firm favorite heading into Oscar night, and it’ll take both the SAG and PGA breaking in another direction to undermine the lead of the film we’ve got.

Some more fun stuff is coming this week!

The clear-cut favorites

Best Director

Yeah, this race is over. If Nolan (Oppenheimer) loses it’d be a shock.

There’s nothing else coming here, so this race is settled.

Best Supporting Actor

Robert Downey Jr. will be going into Oscar night as a favorite. The SAG could shake this up, if De Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon) or Gosling (Barbie) is going to surprise on Oscar night, we’ll see the tip then, but Downey’s going into this one a frontrunner.

Best Supporting Actress

Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers) is going to be our frontrunner on Oscar night. The SAG award is pretty consequential here, but right now any of the people who are up at SAG won’t be getting enough momentum from it to put them over the top.

The favorites

Best Actor

Right now, Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) is ahead. It’s possible that Paul Giammati (The Holdovers) wins at SAG, which would make it closer, but not close enough to say that it’s not Murphy’s to lose.

Cillian just became the first Irishman to win Best Actor at BAFTA, so let’s just say the guy can win under all sorts of challenging conditions. A win at SAG seals it up, a loss muddies it a bit but not enough to wrest him from the pole position.

Also, reminder: the Golden Globe for Comedy is indeed represented in that chart. It’s 0.3 points. It really is rather bad at tipping off who wins an Oscar.

Best Picture

Oppenheimer is in the lead, and I don’t see that lead slipping. If the film runs into bad luck and loses the PGA as well as at SAG, it could see its lead swept away, but that would take a tremendous bit of bad luck given the roll it’s been on. It’s not entirely clear if there’s a sufficient consensus on a rival to make that count, either. .

Killers of the Flower Moon seems like the best contender, but it hasn’t even been able to maintain leads in the categories it’s truly fighting in, like Actress. Barbie has been up against Oppenheimer all year, but if it had a support base anywhere we probably would have noticed it by now

Moreover, Oppenheimer is very well suited in the remaining awards. It’s the most ensemble cast in the history of ensemble casts; they’ve got Oscar winners in this flick with like two minutes of screentime, and SAG awards the ensemble. It’s a biopic of a physicist that made $950 million going up against the biggest movie of the year, which is a hell of a performance for a producer. Even the editing and the writing are strong categories for the movie, and the editors will throw some pocket change on to the final score here.

Excitement!

Best Actress

This one isn’t over. Emma Stones (Poor Things) is up, but not by enough to categorically fend off Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) or, less likely in my estimation, Carey Mulligan (Maestro). If Gladstone or Mulligan were to win at SAG, the former of which I think is well within the realm of possibility, then Stone will remain ahead going into Oscar night, but by a sufficiently slim margin that I don’t think she’d be something so robust as a frontrunner.

Stone won at BAFTA, but Gladstone wasn’t nominated against her. Normally, I’d say it’s bad that Gladstone wasn’t even nominated for an award, but the BAFTA has a nominating procedure — three nominees by vote, three nominees by blue-ribbon committee — that is only instructive for my purposes half the time, the voted-in ones. As a result, I don’t hate her chances if she does in fact win at SAG.

There’s a pretty good chance this one is still a bit of a nail-biter come Oscar night.