Oscars 2018: favourites to win Best Picture Academy Award

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is emerging as a front runner for Best Picture at next year's Oscars

last updated 26 February 2018

With this year’s Oscars ceremony less than a week away, it’s crunch time ahead of Hollywood’s biggest night of the year.

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Written and directed by Martin McDonagh (In Burges, Seven Psycopaths), Three Billboards stars Frances McDormand as a mother who takes matters into her own hands after her daughter is raped and killed then seemingly forgotten by the local police. Xan Brooks in The Guardian called the black comedy “a bold and showboating affair, robustly drawn and richly written; a violent carnival of small-town American life”.

It has won rave reviews from critics, a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival and plenty of Oscar buzz. However, despite recent wins at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards which had cemented it place as the film to beat, USA Today says “a growing number of observers are criticising Three Billboards’ racist cop, played by Sam Rockwell, and the casualness with which the movie treats his bigoted views and history of violence” which could ultimately harm the film's chances.

Dunkirk's director, Christopher Nolan, has been passed over before for critically acclaimed and popular films such as Inception and The Dark Knight. But Kristopher Tapley in Variety says his latest movie, a "riveting account of the defence and evacuation of British and Allied forces" from Dunkirk in the Second World War, "might well be Nolan’s masterpiece". He adds that it's "one of the great entries in a well-worn genre that has never, ever seen anything quite like it" and the Academy seems to have agreed.

Joey Nolfi and Christopher Rosen in Entertainment Weekly backed Hitchcock-style thriller Get Out as an early contender that has managed to stay the course. The film "gobsmacked" Sundance critics and scored big US box-office revenues from a modest $4.5m budget. The critics say director Jordan Peele got the Academy talking, having established "a singular voice on timely issues of race" with a film that's "groundbreaking" in terms of message and style.

Stephen Spielberg’s The Post is a serious Best Picture contender, according to Esquire writer Corey Atad. The drama starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep centres on The Washington Post defending its publication of the Pentagon Papers. “The Washington Post, given its reporting on the Trump administration, has rarely been more relevant or more popular among the liberal elite,” Atad writes. “And a story about the freedom of the press couldn’t be more timely given the current political situation.” Hanks, Streep and Spielberg are all darlings of the Academy, which leads Atad to believe the film could take the top prize.

This LGBTQ romance could follow in Moonlight’s successful footsteps and win everything from Best Picture to Best Adapted Screenplay, EW’s Christopher Rosen and Joey Nolfi say. The film follows a teenage boy who forms a “passionate bond” with an older man. Rosen and Nolfi also note that 21-year-old Timothee Chalamet, the young star who shines as the film’s main character, could win for Best Lead Actor after becoming the youngest actor to receive a nomination since Jesse Eisenberg for The Social Network. The movie, directed by Luca Guadagnino, is already one of the year’s most acclaimed films.

You wait ages for a Dunkirk evacuation-themed movie and then two come along at once. But many reviewers believe Darkest Hour is a more obvious Oscar contender than Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk. Atad says a Best Picture nomination is nothing short of a guarantee as “It’s got a... giant performance from Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in his first days as Prime Minister, and a relentless pace despite its ornery parliamentary setting.”

Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy thriller about a mute cleaner who falls in love with an amphibious creature in a government laboratory has been the big surprise of this year’s awards season. While widely praised by critics, it was believed its surreal subject matter would prove too left-field for Academy members, yet it has emerged with the most nominations of any film and has a real shot at Oscar glory.

Rosen calls The Florida Project “the little movie that could” due to its tiny budget and large aspirations. It follows a six-year-old girl living in a Florida hotel with her single mother, on the strip leading up to Disney World. The child stars “deliver incredible performances, and the film’s attention to an overlooked kind of poverty is balanced out by genuine empathy for its subjects," says Atad.

Kathryn Bigelow has become something of an Oscars darling, with her war-themed movie The Hurt Locker claiming six gongs, and terrorist drama Zero Dark Thirty taking another. In her new film, based on the 1967 race riots in Detroit, Bigelow has tackled the fraught subject of race relations in America, winning both praise and criticism. Steve Pond on The Wrap believes the movie is in the running for an Academy Award. The critic calls it "a fact-based work of gripping intensity that can be difficult to watch and harder to shake".

Airing 76 years after its character was created, Wonder Woman’s fans are loyal. Viewers came in droves to see the film, causing it to cross the $820 million mark at the global box office. EW’s Nolfi describes it as a “timely status as a tale of feminine badassery - coupled with some of the best reviews of the year and the fact that it's the highest-grossing female-directed movie ever.” New Oscar voter Terry Crews had never seen anything like it, telling EW “I got choked up in the theatre because I felt like, 'This is possible now,' whereas before, it actually was not possible.” According to Nolfi the film could easily take home Best Picture and Patty Jenkins could take home Best Director.

IndieWire's Anne Thompson reckons Matthew Heineman's City of Ghosts, a documentary about Syrian activists, is another Oscars contender. Heinemen's follow-up to his Oscar-nominated look at Mexico's drug war, Cartel Land, is a "daring and timely non-fiction", says the critic. The Amazon-backed documentary uses footage from Syria taken by fearless Raqqa journalists whom the film-maker tracked through Turkey and Germany - where they learn they may not be safe anywhere. Best Documentary Feature has its own category, however, so this one wouldn't be in the running for Best Picture.

A number of smaller films have punched above their weight this year, but few more so than The Big Sick. Critics at Sundance and beyond have loved Kumail Nanjiani's romantic comedy, co-starring Zoe Kazan, Ray Romano and Holly Hunter. Silicon Valley star Nanjiani co-wrote the story with his wife, Emily V. Gordon, based on the story of their own cross-cultural relationship and struggles with illness, religious differences and the usual marital ups and downs. Vox calls it one of the year's best comedies, and "the Best Picture nomination we need".

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