Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was the big winner at the 96th Academy Awards, winning 7 of its 13 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr. The runner-up was Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, which won four Oscars. This includes a surprise Best Actress win for Emma Stone, as the award was heavily expended to go to Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon, a film that ended up being shutout in its ten nominations.
Less surprising was Da’Vine Joy Randolph winning Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Holdovers. The Zone of Interest won two awards, for International Feature Film and Best Sound. The Palm D’or winner Anatomy of a Fall took home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Justine Triet and Arthur Harari. With a win that surprised me personally, Cord Jefferson ended up winning Best Adapted Screenplay for his debut feature American Fiction, making the red carpet interview I conducted with him at TIFF 2023 all the more poignant.
Some other notable wins during the Oscars include Hayao Miyazaki winning his second Best Animated Feature Oscar for The Boy and the Heron. The Best Animated Short Oscar went to War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko, which had Sean Lennon wishing his mother a Happy Mother’s Day during his acceptance speech. Wes Anderson became an Oscar winner for his live action short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, though he was not in attendance to accept. The overtly sentimental The Last Repair Shop won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short and the very timely 20 Days in Mariupol was for Best Documentary Feature. Finally, in what was probably the most pleasant surprise of the night, Godzilla Minus One ended up winning its single Oscar nomination for Best Visual FX.
This year I got 16 out of 23 of my Oscar Predictions correct, which is a better than average result for me. Some of my biggest misses include Emma Stone’s unexpected Best Actress win and both writing categories. I also expected Killers of the Flower Moon to win some of the technical categories, most of which went to Poor Things. In addition, The Zone of Interest winning Best Sound over Oppenheimer is probably an effect of the Academy consolidating the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories a number of years ago, since The Zone of Interest is much more about the latter.