Oscars 2024 Predictions: Who Will Win & Who Should Win at 96th Academy Awards
After a year dampened by the actors’ and writers’ strikes, Hollywood is ready to turn the page and celebrate the best films, performances, and cinematic artistry of last year.
The 96th annual Academy Awards, aka the Oscars, is Hollywood’s big night, airing Sunday, March 10 at 7/6c/4p, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. For that keeping score at home, we’re breaking down the frontrunners and contenders in the hottest races, from Best Picture (does Oppenheimer have it on lock?) to Supporting Actress (can favorite Da’Vine Joy Randolph from The Holdovers take it home?) and Adapted Screenplay (will Barbie win for something?).
Scroll down for predictions for who will win and who should win in the top awards categories.
2024 Oscars, Sunday, March 10, 7/6c, ABC
Best Supporting Actress
Will/Should Win: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Also Nominated: America Ferrera, Barbie; Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer; Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple; Jodie Foster, Nyad
Ugly Betty and Superstore star America Ferrera earned a much-deserved nod as the harried mom who inadvertently causes Barbieland to go on the fritz and bring the statuesque doll out of her fantasy world and into the harsh reality of the human realm. But Da’Vine Joy Randolph winning for The Holdovers is one of the surest bets on Oscar night. Randolph brings a sad-eyed soulfulness and an astringent sense of humor to the doleful Mary Lamb, the Barton prep school head cook mourning the death of her son, a promising Barton grad, in Vietnam. Stuck on a deserted campus over the holiday break, Mary bonds with Giamatti’s disgruntled teacher and Dominic Sessa’s arrogant screwup-student Angus Tully, and Randolph spices her heartbroken grief with an appealing saltiness and an undercurrent of warmth in what’s shaping up to be an Oscar winning role.
Best Supporting Actor
Will Win: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Should Win: Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon
Also Nominated: Sterling K. Brown, American Fiction; Ryan Gosling, Barbie; Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things
Gosling’s needy himbo beefcake Ken, who goes from supportive beau to a swaggering torrent of toxic masculinity, is a riot of meta-cinematic fun in Barbie. Two-time Oscar winner De Niro is the picture of insidious evil as the mendacious, greedy William “King” Hale, who ingratiates himself into a native community and stuffs his bank accounts by any means necessary. But the nearly unrecognizable Downey Jr. makes the most stunning transformation in this race. As Lewis Strauss, the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission and Oppenheimer’s enduring nemesis, he seeks to have Oppenheimer’s security clearance revoked after he leaves Los Alamos, by digging into his personal life, exposing his secrets and painting him as a communist sympathizer. Downey Jr. plays Strauss as a venal, envious, coldly calculating bureaucrat hellbent on discrediting the famed physicist in the eyes of the public. It’s a villainous role that should finally earn Downey the gold statuette after two previous nominations.
Best Actress
Who Will/Should Win: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Also Nominated: Emma Stone, Poor Things; Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall; Carey Mulligan, Maestro; Annette Bening, Nyad
If there’s an upset brewing, it could come in this category. In her role as a pioneering swimmer in Nyad, beloved Hollywood veteran Bening has now been Oscar-nominated five times, with zero wins. Hüller is a marvel of incongruity and contradiction as a hard-to-read woman facing accusations that she killed her husband after he fell from the window of their house. But this race shapes up as a face-off between a history-making Lily Gladstone, the first native North American woman to earn a Best Actress Oscar nomination, and Emma Stone’s bid to pocket this award for a second time (she won in 2016 for La La Land and has been nominated twice for supporting actress). As Mollie Burkhardt of the Osage Nation, Gladstone brings a steely determination and soulful resilience to Killers of the Flower Moon as she confronts the heartwrenching betrayal and complicity that’s infested her exploited native community like a rotting disease. In Poor Things’ phantasmagoric allegory that riffs on the Frankenstein myth, Stone plays the experimental creation of a mad-scientist who escapes his control, and the actress moves from guileless wonder to intellectual and sexual liberation as she discovers the intoxicating pleasures—and sadistic cruelties—of the human world. Stone has been gaining momentum, but this still feels like a groundbreaking night for Gladstone.
Best Actor
Will Win: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Should Win: Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Also Nominated: Bradley Cooper, Maestro; Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction; Colman Domingo, Rustin
In American Fiction, Wright is riveting as a stymied literature professor, frustrated that his books have been ignored, so he pulls a sort-of prank/dare and pens an outlandish, stereotypical “Black” novel, then suddenly finds himself thrust into the spotlight as his fictional alter-ego. Meanwhile, Giamatti has a shot to pull off an upset here for his performance as Paul Hunham, an acerbic sourpuss teacher, who takes a young student under his wing, in The Holdovers—after he was overlooked by the Oscars back in 2004 for his equally cantankerous turn as a wine-loving, depressed writer in Alexander Payne’s Sideways. No one does eye-bulging apoplexy and irritated scorn quite like the Emmy-winning Giamatti, and he deserves an Oscar at this point, but this award seems most likely to go to Murphy. In the film’s harrowing close-ups, Murphy’s haunted face and crystal blue eyes offer a window into the soul of a man struggling with his ambitions and desires, his inner turmoil, and the shattering impact of his decision to head up the Manhattan Project and build the atomic bomb, which threatens humanity’s existence in the process.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Will Win: Cord Jefferson, American Fiction
Should Win: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Barbie
Also Nominated: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer; Tony McNamara, Poor Things; Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest
Jefferson’s trenchant satire American Fiction, based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, and Nolan’s towering Oppenheimer, based on the biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, are running neck-and-neck in the adapted screenplay showdown, and it could go either way. While Nolan could ride his Oppenheimer wave, look for Jefferson’s emotionally resonant drama about a man re-discovering his roots while performing a different character for the world, to pull out the victory. The winner for this award, though, should be Gerwig and Baumbach’s bombshell of a script for Barbie, with its strange, meta-cinematic daring, breezy satirical edge, feminist subversion, winking nods to pop culture, and overall dazzling infectiousness. Pretty in pink, indeed.
Best Director
Who Will/Should Win: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Also Nominated: Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things; Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon; Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall; Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest.
In any other year, Gerwig (if she hadn’t been snubbed) or Scorsese (who’s remarkably only nabbed one Oscar in his illustrious career) would have been the favorites to capture the best director prize. But this is finally Nolan’s time to be recognized by the Academy for his masterpiece about the conflicted “American Prometheus” Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist credited as the father of the atomic bomb. Nolan has sometimes been derided as a cold technician more obsessed with cinematic flourishes and puzzle-box narratives than deep characterization and real people. With Oppenheimer, the director marries his masterful technical skills to a biopic character drama, using the chain reaction as a metaphor for the way historical events and individual choices create domino effects, while illuminating humanity’s penchant for self-destruction.
Best Original Screenplay
Will Win: Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, Anatomy of a Fall
Should Win: Samy Burch, May December
Also Nominated: David Hemingson, The Holdovers; Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer, Maestro; Celine Song, Past Lives
Hemingson’s feel-good screenplay for The Holdovers and Song’s soulful writing in her directorial debut Past Lives are both worthy contenders. But the favorite in this race is Triet and Harari’s intricately structured, keep-the-audience-guessing script for the riveting Anatomy of a Fall, which examines the realities of marriage and the limits of what we can know about other people. Still, it’s Samy Burch’s screenplay (with a story by Burch and Alex Mechanik) for the Todd Haynes-directed May December, that should be getting more love and will likely emerge as a cinematic classic in years to come. Haynes, a consummate auteur, brings all of his visual creativity to bear on the film, and Burch’s psychologically twisty screenplay—about an actress (Natalie Portman) spending time with the real-life, controversial inspiration (Julianne Moore) for the film she’s about to star in—mines themes and questions about identity-as-performance, secrets and lies and past trauma.
Best Picture
Who Will Win: Oppenheimer
Who Should Win: Oppenheimer/Barbie (tie)
Also nominated: American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Past Lives, Poor Things, The Zone of Interest
In the year of the summer blockbuster two-fer “Barbenheimer,” it figures that either the daring inventiveness of Greta Gerwig’s feminist fable Barbie, the highest grossing film of last year, or Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s epic story about the father of the atomic bomb, would stand out as the frontrunners. Barbie got snubbed in a few key categories, notably Gerwig for best director and star Margot Robbie for best actress, and has lost some heat in the awards race. Alexander Payne’s 1970s-set throwback The Holdovers, about a curmudgeonly, acerbic prep school teacher stranded on campus over winter break with two fellow lost-souls (Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph), is a feel-good crowd-pleaser, in the vein of 2022 winner CODA, and has growing support in this category. And it’s still surprising that Martin Scorsese’s pulse-pounding masterpiece Killers of the Flower Moon, chronicling the unsolved murders of the native Osage people in the 1920s, didn’t gain more traction among voters. So look for the swooping historical narrative and dazzling visuals of Oppenheimer to win out over the candy-colored subversion and brain-tickling creativity of Barbie.
