Who Are You Rooting Against at the Oscars This Year?

Who Are You Rooting Against at the Oscars This Year?,‘The Whale,’ Elvis,’ and ‘To Leslie’ are case studies in three different ways a film can become an Oscar villain. Which one will come out on top?

Who Are You Rooting Against at the Oscars This Year?

There’s one hallowed awards-season tradition I treasure above all others. It’s not discovering which European auteur will sneak into the Best Director race or which elderly British man Sony Pictures Classics will power to a lifetime-achievement nom. For me, nothing compares to the excitement of learning which bright-eyed contender will emerge from the awards race as our official Oscar villain. A movie goes into Telluride with dreams of gold statuettes dancing in its head; by January, it’s the subject of fierce debates over whether it’s “fascist” or merely “anti-anti-fascist.”

Choosing an Oscar villain takes commitment. As Bobby Finger wrote in 2018, it’s the art of “picking a least favorite movie and dumping on it so hard for five long months … perceiving the movie not only as a piece of utter shit, but as my sworn enemy.” Tastes being what they are, everyone’s Oscar villain might be different. If you’re from Ireland, your Oscar villain may be The Banshees of Inisherin for deploying “the hoariest Irish stereotypes.” If you’re Richard Brody, it’s Tár, “a regressive film” that “lampoons so-called identity politics.” If you’re one of a surprisingly large number of film critics, it’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which David Ehrlich dubs “Come and C/C+.”

But when we talk about Oscar villainy, we’re usually talking about consensus villains, the films it becomes the duty of every right-thinking person on the internet to root against. Past Oscar villains displayed a conservative subtext, handled hot-button issues in a ham-fisted way, or were made by someone accused of terrible misdeeds. Or maybe they simply had the bad luck to get caught in a psychological restaging of a contentious presidential election. The unpredictability is part of the fun!

As this website’s most dedicated chronicler of Oscar villainy, I have identified three qualified candidates in the class of 2023. Together, they form a case study in the myriad ways a film can become an Oscar villain. One was the preseason favorite that stumbled down the stretch. One is positively vintage, a classic of the form. And one has innovated a totally new method of villainy that will be studied for years to come. None of them are Top Gun: Maverick, which is sad news for right-wingers hoping to sing their favorite tune, “Liberals Are Out of Touch With the Common Man (And I’m Not).”

The Whale

Photo: Momentum Pictures

Director Michael Morris’s kitchen-sink drama about an alcoholic lottery winner was almost entirely unheard of prior to January, when stars such as Edward Norton and Gwyneth Paltrow began gushing about the performance of its lead, Andrea Riseborough. Soon boldfaced names from the A-list down to the D-list were following in their footsteps, many of them using suspiciously similar language. What was happening? As was later revealed, Riseborough’s manager, Jason Weinberg, and actress Mary McCormack, Morris’s wife, had taken it upon themselves to personally bug members of the Academy’s acting branch to post in support of her bid. Astoundingly, it worked: On nomination morning, the English actress cracked the Oscar lineup.

Unfortunately, she’d made it in over The Woman King’s Viola Davis and Till’s Danielle Deadwyler, two Black actresses whom many assumed were locks. Although Blonde’s Ana de Armas had also been nominated against expectations, it was Riseborough who became the face of the awards circuit’s bias against Black actresses. In the aftermath, Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood spoke about the difficulties she faced getting Academy members to consider her film in contrast to the fervor a largely white group of celebrities had created around the To Leslie campaign: “There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women.”

Amid the uproar, the Academy announced, without naming names, that it was investigating the To Leslie campaign. (At issue was whether the film violated bylaws against lobbying inpidual members and hosting promotional events without a screening attached.) To the pro-Leslie camp, the investigation was the Academy’s way of deflecting blame for the Davis and Deadwyler snubs; to the anti-Leslie camp, the film was using its underdog status as an excuse for not playing by the same rules as everyone else. In the end, the Academy uncovered tactics that “raised concern” but did not rescind Riseborough’s nomination.

There’s a hint of tragic irony here: The movie’s team launched the campaign because it wanted To Leslie not to be forgotten, and now it never will be — at least among awards nerds. But there’s a difference between a villain and a punch line. While To Leslie has supplied us with great memes, beautiful memes, I don’t get the sense too many people are rooting against the woman who stars in it. As Robert Daniels put it in the Los Angeles Times, “Although it’s easy to point a finger at Riseborough for taking a slot from Black women, broken systems persist when we focus our ire on inpiduals.” Who needs to take down a movie that made less than half the median U.S. income at the domestic box office?

To that end, are we heading into Oscar night with no Oscar villains? If so, I can’t help thinking that’s a loss for the Academy. It’s all well and good to use the Oscar race to celebrate the movies that uplifted us, made us laugh, or transported us to another world. But it’s simply much less fun to root for something without also knowing what you’re rooting against. Which is why I’m going into Sunday night quietly hoping that All Quiet on the Western Front will be able to pull off a few upsets. After all, decades of Hollywood history tells us that if you need a villain, you can’t go wrong with the Germans.