(Updated 01/24/2023)
The 2023 Oscar Nominations have been released and whew! There's a lot to talk about. Suffice to say that this is one of the more exciting Oscar races in the last few years, thanks to the wide range of nominated movies. This year, the awards landscape could be unusually broad, with everything from huge sequels to one of the weirder art movies we saw in 2022.
Will this be the year that a tentpole movie like TOP GUN: MAVERICK or AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER wins Best Picture? They're both nominated. Can anyone other than Cate Blanchett possibly win Best Actress? (Probably not this year.) Is Steven Spielberg going to win it all?
Two months ago we would have given you one set of guesses about the likely 2023 Oscar winners and general awards landscape. Now it is very different, following the Golden Globes and nominations for the major guilds. Read on for the major 2023 Oscar nominations and our thoughts about the year's biggest Oscar contenders.
The Best Picture Oscar Nominees
Let's get straight to the big question. What movie will win the 2023 Best Picture Oscar? The Best Picture nominees for 2023 are:
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
ELVIS
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
THE FABELMANS
TÁR
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS
WOMEN TALKING.
Based on other awards and guild nominations, the movies most likely to win Best Picture are THE FABELMANS, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, and EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. The staying power of that third title is remarkable — most awards frontrunners open late in the year, while EEAAO debuted last April. And most are not nearly as frenetic and weird!
Even with those frontrunners, however, a different movie could still win Best Picture. Want to know how?
The Best Picture Oscar Voting System, Explained
Here's how Oscar voting works. The Academy uses a Ranked Choice Vote, or preferential ballot, to determine each winner. A movie needs 50% plus one vote to win. Each member submits a ballot with the nominees ranked in order of preference. But it's not as simple as just seeing which movie gets the most votes.
With ten films nominated, there's a good chance that a winner will not emerge based only on first choices. In that case, ballots are redistributed from the bottom up. Let's say THE XYZ MOVIE came in last based on tallies of the top picks for each ballot. Then the votes for that film are redistributed to whatever movies were ranked second on ballots that had THE XYZ MOVIE as their top pick. The video below shows how this works.
If no winner has emerged, then the lowest-scoring movie is knocked out. The tallies remain, and the ballots for the film with the fewest votes are redistributed again according to the number two movie on each ballot. If a ballot's second pick has been knocked out, then the movie ranked number 3 on that ballot gets a vote. This repeats until there's a winner.
So even many voters like TOP GUN or AVATAR enough to rank it second or third, that movie could still win.
The Acting Nominations
Here are the acting nominations for the 2023 Oscars:
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Austin Butler, ELVIS
Colin Farrell, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Brendan Fraser, THE WHALE
Paul Mescal, AFTERSUN
Bill Nighy, LIVING
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Cate Blanchett, TÁR
Ana de Armas, BLONDE
Andrea Riseborough, TO LESLIE
Michelle Williams, THE FABELMANS
Michelle Yeoh, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Brendan Gleeson, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Brian Tyree Henry, CAUSEWAY
Judd Hirsch, THE FABELMANS
Barry Keoghan, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Ke Huy Quan, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Angela Bassett, BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER
Hong Chau, THE WHALE
Kerry Condon, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Jamie Lee Curtis, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Stephanie Hsu, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
In some years, one movie sweeps many award categories. Two movies could potentially take home awards in many top categories this year. One is THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, for which Colin Farrell could win Best Actor, Martin McDonaugh could win for Screenplay, and either Brendan Gleeson or Barry Keoghan could win Best Supporting Actor.
The other possible sweep is EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. The most likely Best Supporting Actor winner is Ke Huy Quan, whose tremendous performance in the movie created a tidal wave of goodwill and a career resurgence. He's such a joy to listen to, and seems so deeply happy to be part of the movie. We're not going to opine too much here about who should win, but Ke Huy Quan should absolutely win.
Overall the Best Actor race might be owned by Austin Butler's ELVIS performance at this point, but Colin Farrell and Brendan Fraser are certainly high in the running.
The Best Actress race is almost certainly in the bag for Cate Blanchett, but Michelle Yeoh has also generated a lot of good feelings with her genre-bending master turn in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE. We expected to see Viola Davis nominated for THE WOMAN KING and Danielle Deadwyler nominated for TILL, but they were shut out. But Andrea Riseborough did get a nomination thanks to a concerted late-in-the-game campaign for the very small movie TO LESLIE.
The Director's Race
Here are the nominees for Best Director:
Martin McDonagh, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Steven Spielberg, THE FABELMANS
Todd Field, TÁR
Ruben Östlund, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS
The Best Director mirrors the other major categories, and Steven Spielberg's success in other early awards could translate into the Oscar, too. But the Daniels — aka EEAAO directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — are also going to be high in the running. And while the Director's Guild of America nominee group also features TOP GUN filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, he did not get an Oscar nomination.
A Few Other Notes
While TOP GUN did not get Best Actor or Director nominations, it did score several technical nominations and a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination, alongside the scripts for ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY, LIVING, and WOMEN TALKING.
And the Telugu-language movie RRR, which has already become a favorite on the repertory circuit, scored a nomination for Best Original Song, for the showstopping number >Naatu Naatu." It's the likely winner, and we hope for an Oscars telecast that showcases a version of that song and dance routine.
You can see every 2023 Oscar nomination at the official Academy Awards site.
The 2023 Oscar winners will be announced on March 12.
All images courtesy of A24.