Predicting the Oscar Nominations in a Wild and Wide-Open Season

You can count on films like “Emilia Pérez” and big stars like Timothée Chalamet and Ariana Grande, but this year may hold some surprises, too.

Sometimes, when I poll Oscar voters about the films and performances they plan to nominate, they turn the tables on me.

“What do you want to happen?” they ask.

Maybe they’re expecting me to advocate for an underseen movie or steer them toward a performance that hasn’t gotten its flowers. Usually, though, my answer is simple: I want them to surprise me. Don’t adhere to the conventional wisdom. Take a chance on things that no one would expect to be nominated.

That goes double for this season, which has remained fairly fluid after back-to-back years when the names of the best picture winner and many of the acting victors felt engraved on statuettes months in advance. No single film has yet dominated this season and many still have a plausible path to victory at the Oscars. It’s fun!

That’s why I hope that more surprises are in store when the Oscar nominations are announced on Thursday, even though part of my job is predicting exactly which way the wind is going to blow. Here is what I project will be nominated (with my predictions in bold) in the top six Oscar categories after taking into account industry chatter and the nominations already bestowed by influential precursors like the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild, Producers Guild of America and Directors Guild of America. I hope I’m right, but I’d enjoy being wrong.

At the beginning of the season, it felt like the five strongest best picture contenders came from what I called the A-B-C-D-E tier, since they happened to begin with the first five letters of the alphabet.