Nominations voting is from January 11-16, 2024, with official Oscar nominations announced January 23, 2024. Final voting is February 22-27, 2024. And finally, the 96th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 10 and air live on ABC at 8:00 p.m. ET/ 5:00 p.m. PT. We update predictions through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2024 Oscar picks.
The State of the Race
Summer blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” are back to vying against each other in this category (along with many others, including Best Picture and Director) now that the Academy has switched two-time screenwriter Oscar nominees Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s outrageous based-on-an-unwritten-character scenario from Original back to Adapted.
Also nominated twice for screenwriting, Christopher Nolan (“Memento,” “Inception”) painstakingly created a twisty ticking-bomb timeline for “Oppenheimer,” which is adapted from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s lauded tome “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Every word counts as a gamut of real-life characters move in and out of the frame, always centered on the point-of-view of scientist Oppenheimer and his moral quandaries about creating the atom bomb that eventually fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Also a contender is animated blockbuster “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” written by Oscar-winning producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”) along with Dave Callaham, whose countless (and delightful) iterations of Spider-Man careen across the multi-verse at top speed while remaining accessible and crystal clear.
The heart-tugging and funny Judy Blume adaptation by Kelly Fremon Craig of ’70s coming-of-age story “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” scored strong reviews but modest box office, and may not be remembered by Oscar time. Lionsgate has mounted a campaign to remind voters.
As always, festivals often launch screenplay contenders. Cannes introduced Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) and director Martin Scorsese’s three-hour adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 true-crime saga “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” set in Osage County, Oklahoma in the 1920s and starring Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Lily Gladstone. The film is gaining momentum from awards group wins. Winning the Grand Prix at Cannes and gaining steam at the fall festivals was writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s chilling “The Zone of Interest,” starring Sandra Hüller, based on the Martin Amis novel set behind the scenes at Auschwitz, which was submitted by the UK for Best International Feature Film. “Barbie” may knock it out of the running.
More prospective nominees emerged from the fall festivals. Winning the Golden Lion at Venice and wowing Telluride was the fantastical (and feminist) coming-of-age saga “Poor Things” (Searchlight), by writer-director and two-time screenplay nominee Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite,” “The Lobster”), who reunites with his “The Favourite” Oscar nominee Emma Stone and co-writer Tony McNamara, adapting Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. Is it too risqué for Academy voters? They are not as stodgy as they used to be.
Winning the coveted — and often predictive of a Best Picture nomination — People’s Choice Award at Toronto was “American Fiction” (MGM/Orion), television-writer-turned-director Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” starring Jeffrey Wright.
Debuting in Venice before closing New York, Michael Mann’s sprawling biopic “Ferrari” (Neon) stars Adam Driver in the title role. Troy Kennedy Martin (“The Italian Job”) adapted the screenplay from Brock Yates’ biography “Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine.” Also a true story, written by Julia Cox: “Nyad” shows how long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (Annette Bening), after four tries over the years, at age 64 finally completed the swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida. The film marks the narrative feature debut of Oscar-winning documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (“Free Solo”).
With Telluride breakout “All of Us Strangers,” BAFTA nominee Andrew Haigh (“45 Years”) adapted a supernatural romance by Taichi Yamada about a man (Andrew Scott) who gets involved with a neighbor (Paul Mescal) and at the same time finds his late parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), not aged, living in the house he grew up in.
Opening wide in January is Ava DuVernay’s relationship drama “Origin” (Neon), which was inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Originals of Our Discontents,” and was campaigning in the Original category. The Academy decreed that the film is adapted from the Wilkerson book.
Contenders are listed in alphabetical order below. No writers will be deemed frontrunners until I have seen the film.
Frontrunners
Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (“Barbie”)
Cord Jefferson (“American Fiction”)
Tony McNamara (“Poor Things”)
Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”)
Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese (“Killers of the Flower Moon”)
Contenders
Ava DuVernay (“Origin”)
Jonathan Glazer (“The Zone of Interest”)
Andrew Haigh (“All of Us Strangers”)
Phil Lord & Christopher Miller & Dave Callaham (“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”)
Long Shots
Julia Cox (“Nyad”)
Kelly Fremon Craig (“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”)
Troy Kennedy Martin (“Ferrari”)
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