Firstly, we’ll start with the Best Actor and Actress categories, the performances that wowed audiences and lingered with us long after we left the cinema. Our team’s pick for Best Supporting Actor, despite strong competition from Delroy Lindo in Sinners and Sean Penn in One Battle After Another, went to the fantastic Jacob Elordi for his terrified and emotive performance in Frankenstein. Best Supporting Actress was an even closer race but, while Elle Fanning was in front for most of our voting period, she was eventually overtaken by Sinners’s Wunmi Mosaku. The only pity is that the sinister performance by Amy Madigan in Weapons, a rare nomination for something in a horror film, received zero votes.
Interestingly, the current favourite to win the Oscar, Teyana Taylor, only received 3 votes from us all. But one thing you’ll quickly realise is that we all loved Sinners with our whole hearts.
The Best Leading Actor and Actress categories were nowhere near as close. For Best Actor, the overwhelming winner, with 28 votes compared to the runner-up’s 9, was Marty Supreme himself, Mr Timothee Chalamet. His depiction of a fame-hungry table tennis player trounced all four other nominees, even the acclaimed Michael B. Jordan and Leonardo DiCaprio, the latter of whom received no votes whatsoever. Jessie Buckley was also the clear Best Actress favourite, with 20 votes for her raw and real performance as Agnes in Hamnet.
A new addition to our Oscars this year is voting on both the Best Original and Adapted Screenplay. The categories were stacked this year, but Sinners ran away with 21 votes for Best Original Screenplay, and for Best Adapted Screenplay, Chloe Zhao’s devastating script for Hamnet won out in a three-horse race against Frankenstein and One Battle After Another.
Before we get to the two big categories, we’ll bemoan the embarrassing selection by the Academy for this year’s Best Animated Film category, as the slim pickings we had to choose from led to K-Pop Demon Hunters being the clear winner, with more than triple the votes of any other nominee. We did have a couple of loyal defenders for Little Amelie though, so every cloud has a silver lining.
Anyway, the Best Director category is the tightest race we had this year. Paul Thomas Anderson and Josh Safdie received a handful of votes, with Joachim Trier sadly coming in last, but this race was firmly between Chloe Zhao and Ryan Coogler. Although the runner-up had a very healthy 12 votes, it was just one too few to beat Coogler, with him winning our vote for Best Director with 13.
Finally, the one we’ve all been waiting for - Best Picture. As far as the Academy is concerned, it seems to be a dead heat between a few films to bag the award. This was the case with us too - you’ll have noticed the same films cropping up in our winners such as Marty Supreme, Hamnet and Sinners. What you won’t have noticed that much is One Battle After Another. Despite Paul Thomas Anderson’s best efforts, the film didn’t win much from us. It is, however, joint runner-up with Marty Supreme for Best Picture with 9 votes each.
It finally got a good result, but perhaps it had realised it was simply never going to win against our decisive winner which is… Sinners.
And that about wraps us up. It was a truly incredible year for film, and there were certainly some tough exclusions and snubs from the nominations. Who knows how the Academy ended up voting last night? But hey, what do they know?