Oscar Winner Predictions 2022: Who Will Win at the Academy Awards?

As we’re writing this, Film Twitter is still dropping hot takes over the PGAs confirming that, yes, The Power of the Dog is looking like an increasingly soft frontrunner and that CODA, of all things, is poised to turn its paltry three Oscar nominations into the biggest upset best picture winner since…well, it’s actually pretty impossible to remember the last time a presumptive best picture winner had less going for it on paper.

That said, we’ve got to side with Twitter user @ethanves, who mused: “CODA winning Best Picture feels like a nice, official The End of Movies As We Know It moment so I’m rooting for it.” Anyone who’s surrendered to the Abbas Kiarostami-worthy complexities of Drive My Car or wrestled in good faith with “those scenes” in Licorice Pizza, or, hell, #OnePerfectShot-ed Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story knows that movies aren’t dead yet. But that’s not stopping all of us from making like Eric Idle’s body collector in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and prematurely clubbing it over the head in order to save us all the time and heartache.

Sure, cut more than a third of the categories from the broadcast in favor of another pointless tribute to 007, even though there have literally only been two more franchise installments since the last time the show paid him tribute. Absolutely open the show with a splashy performance of an Encanto song that didn’t even get nominated, simply because ABC/Disney knows that they can force whatever they want down AMPAS’s throats. After all, haven’t the Oscars have made it clear for years now how little respect they have for themselves?

At the granular level of the individual voter, those four deliriously encouraging nominations for Drive My Car say otherwise, which is why (spoiler alert!) we’re still comparatively bullish on The Power of the Dog’s chances. Still, we’re painfully aware of the poetic irony that this is all playing out against the release of the final print issue of Entertainment Weekly, and how that issue contains two paltry pages of Oscar winner predictions and, taking a cue from the show’s producers, doesn’t even offer commentary on half of them.

Whatever else EW did to turn entertainment journalism into a numbers game, in its first decade it painstakingly chronicled the annual awards race, with writers like Mark Harris ushering enthusiasts through each season’s ups and downs with intelligence and wit. Its passing is but another sign that, even if this isn’t actually The End of Movies As We Know It, it’s unmistakably The End of Peak Oscar. Eric Henderson

Best Picture

Belfast
CODA
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
WINNER: The Power of the Dog
West Side Story

So, back to CODA. Some of the most industry-embedded Oscar pundits, like Variety’s Clayton Davis, have for weeks been saying that this glorified Hallmark movie has been making low-key gains, even before its SAG best ensemble win—and over, it must be said, an awfully weak field—overtly signaled a shift in the winds. Unlike Davis, or Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson, or, hell, most of Gold Derby experts panel, we haven’t spent the last six months asking voters, almost daily, what’s putting sugar in their bowls lately. On that score, we have to give Davis and others pulling an “I’ve seen enough” and calling the race for CODA the benefit of the doubt.

Even though there’s no modern-day precedent for a film without a DGA, ACE Eddie, or BAFTA picture nod, or any major critics’ awards for best picture, to go into Oscar night with the fewest nominations of any best picture contender (including a miss in that telltale film editing category) and still somehow translate that into a top win. You’d have to go back to Oscar’s first decade to find any best picture winners with comparable stat sheets, and that was back when studios forced their contract players to rally their votes behind the company product.

Which brings us to the subject of studios. Some of those who are sure that CODA is going to ride the vicissitudes of the preferential ballot to a surprise win here argue that there’s still massive industry resistance to the behemoth that is Netflix—and, to hear some tell it, it’s the equivalent of Harvey Weinstein and Marvel Studios having a corporate baby and squeezing all other comers out of both the prestige and the audience bandwidth.

They do have a point. After all, if the enemy is the monopolization of information, didn’t the Academy just last year award best picture to a film that came with a (gentle) anti-Amazon sentiment baked into it? But at the end of the day, how many Academy members cashed a paycheck from Netflix in the last year, compared to how many did so for one from AppleTV+?

Now, the inevitable gut check. No, there’s no reason to panic on The Power of the Dog’s behalf given its performance in the precursors. In fact, the PGAs represented the film’s first truly concerning guild miss when engaged in a head-to-head against CODA. (It wasn’t nominated for best ensemble at the SAGs, but arguably because nearly every one of its cast members had their own individual nominations already.) That loss could either be a sea change, or it could be what a statistician would more likely call an outlier. But it’s also now impossible to deny the affection that people feel for the film, and the backlash from those of us who, as our mothers are always quick to say, can’t “just enjoy nice movies about real people” launching into high gear just as Oscar voters are getting their ballots…well, it isn’t great timing.

But there are benefits to being hopelessly cold-hearted, at least when it comes to Oscar prognostication. And even if we’re willing to admit that The Power of the Dog, despite its let’s-not-forget 12 nominations, isn’t everyone’s bouquet of paper flowers, and even if we’re willing to accede that Oscar is breaking precedent more often these days than it’s sticking with business as usual, take a closer look at the films that the Academy Awards have been favoring as of late—Nomadland, Parasite, Moonlight—and tell us again that The Power of the Dog’s momentum is just a mirage in the mountain. Henderson

Best Director

Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza
Kenneth Branagh, Belfast
WINNER: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, Drive My Car
Steven Spielberg, West Side Story

“History-making.” We’ve lost count how many times that word has been bandied around this Oscar season. It’s certainly easy to be cynical about it given how studios capitalize on the media’s free publicity train, though less so when the stars just so happen to align behind a truly deserving talent. In this case that’s Jane Campion, the first woman to now be twice nominated for best director, and whose impeccably controlled direction of The Power of the Dog is among the few shoo-ins heading into Oscar night. Ed Gonzalez

Best Actor

Javier Bardem, Being the Ricardos
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog
Andrew Garfield, Tick…Tick, Boom!
WINNER: Will Smith, King Richard
Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth

Pundits have spent the last six months looking for weak spots in the ever-powerful “he’s overdue” narrative that Will Smith’s backers have been pushing ever since King Richard bowed to raves at Telluride. The justifications ranged from questioning whether a filmography tilted far more toward the After Earth and Men in Black 3 end of the quality spectrum truly deserves career achievement consideration, to ludicrously posing a win for Andrew Garfield’s bug-eyed musical theatrics as a low-key, backdoor tribute to the Spider-Man reunion that ABC wishes Oscar voters had nominated across the board. But the writing has been on the wall since BAFTA’s otherwise freewheeling acting nominations still made room for the man of the hour. One suspects that he’d have even Bronco Henry’s vote this year. Henderson

Best Actress

WINNER: Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter
Penélope Cruz, Parallel Mothers
Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos
Kristen Stewart, Spencer

This year’s Oscar season has been so protracted that it’s easy to forget that way back at the start of it Jessica Chastain was the one favored to take this award. Every other best actress hopeful with the exception of our beloved Penélope Cruz, and more than a few who didn’t make the cut, was pegged as a frontrunner since then. No need to rehash the drama that’s brought us to this moment, so let us just say that SAG’s coronation of Chastain was essentially a confirmation of what we already knew: that when it comes to winning an acting Oscar, and campaigning for one, there’s no greater aphrodisiac to the AMPAS voter than a class act delivering face-saving work in a film that isn’t worthy of their talent. Gonzalez

Best Supporting Actor

Ciarán Hinds, Belfast
WINNER: Troy Kotsur, CODA
Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog
J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos
Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

Jesse Plemons’s mildly surprising nomination here indicates just how deep the affection for The Power of the Dog runs within the voting body. That should have been great news for the critics’ groups clear frontrunner in this category, Plemons’s co-star Kodi Smit-McPhee, who hulas a mean hoop and, throughout the film, walks a rope so tight many viewers emerge from the film still unable to process its plain-as-day denouement. Smit-McPhee’s silence is truly golden, but nothing has been quite so thunderous leading into the final stretch of this year’s Oscar season as the buzz surrounding CODA. As that film’s grimy-warm deaf patriarch, Troy Kotsur has become the odds-on favorite to stand alongside Will Smith on the Dolby Theater stage, twin purveyors of prestige cinema fart scenes. Henderson

Best Supporting Actress

Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter
WINNER: Ariana DeBose, West Side Story
Judi Dench, Belfast
Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog
Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard

Hollywood adores a good story about itself almost as much as it does elevating a virtual unknown. As Anita, West Side Story’s electrifying center of gravity, Ariana DeBose has won every award that matters heading into Oscar night, proving that West Side Story’s box office underperformance ain’t no thing. And that so much has been made by the media about what a win for her and Troy Kotsur would mean has turned at least two of this year’s categories into the stuff of self-fulfilling prophecy. Gonzalez

Best Original Screenplay

WINNER: Belfast
Don’t Look Up
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
The Worst Person in the World

I’ll be blunt. Predicting the screenplay categories has long been our biggest albatross, as our track record isn’t stellar. And given how much this race has turned into complete chaos in the final stretch, we’re not expecting that narrative to turn around this year. Last week, BAFTA, of all organizations, bypassed Kenneth Branagh—in the category most likely to convert to a token win for Belfast—in favor of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza.

That win was almost instantly answered with a viral tweet showcasing the most un-woke sequences from Anderson’s film: John Michael Higgins’s pair of appearances as the owner of the Valley’s first Japanese restaurant. While, like so many of the stories transposed from Gary Goetzman’s personal stories, the exasperating character and his consecutive marriages to Japanese women were based on a real-life figure, the ongoing controversy about those scenes’ inscrutable comic tone got predictably revived just as Oscar voters got their final ballots.

But is this not the category where Oscar typically awards auteurs who somehow never make it to a win in the director category (Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, Jordan Peele)? The discursive, episodic nature of Licorice Pizza at times feels akin to the explicitly chapter-marked The Worst Person in the World, and since both films are courting the same highbrow pool of voters and both explicitly focus on vibrant women struggling to figure out their place in the world, it’s easy to imagine them splitting the vote.

Meanwhile, the WGA muddied the waters further, bypassing Anderson (amid a field that was sans Belfast) in favor of Don’t Look Up, an anti-favorite among Twitter wokesters and cinephile aesthetes alike. So what does this ultimately tell us? That all stats aside, this category is a four-deep bloodbath of movies fighting to earn likely their sole, token Oscar win. History suggests that the more confusion a race holds, the more voters retreat into safety, and this year, that frankly feels like Belfast to us. But, as previously mentioned, the screenplay categories aren’t our strong suit. Henderson

Best Adapted Screenplay

CODA
Drive My Car
Dune
The Lost Daughter
WINNER: The Power of the Dog

At once an adaptation and extrapolation of Murakami Haruki’s short story of the same name, Drive My Car, beyond being profoundly moving and unfathomably rich in meaning, is a writer’s film through and through. It’s our favorite out of this bunch, and it certainly has a chance at winning, but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario on Oscar night that doesn’t end with Jane Campion holding three statuettes in her hand, especially given how much has been written about her process of adapting Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, from burying more of its meaning into subtext to her drawing inspiration from her earlier and much-maligned film In the Cut. Unless, as in the original screenplay race, the highbrow vote gets split and allows the simple, Hallmark movie platitudes of CODA to slip through. Gonzalez

Best International Feature

WINNER: Drive My Car
Flee
The Hand of God
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
The Worst Person in the World

Would Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s breakthrough triumph Drive My Car have been the incontestable frontrunner here had all the major critics’ groups not lined up to give it their top prize? Much to the chagrin of the Sasha Stones and Jeffrey Wellses, we’ll never know. Henderson

Best Documentary Feature

Ascension
Attica
Flee
WINNER: Summer of Soul
Writing with Fire

Of the three “secondary” feature film categories in which Flee is competing, best documentary feature probably represents its best shot for a win, if only because it’s the category that both has the comparatively softest frontrunner and is also the category that most often ignores consensus favorites and, instead, goes its own merry way. (We’re still shaking our heads over the Discovery Channel tentacle porn that took the prize over Time and Collective last year.)

There are plenty of other things working in Flee’s favor here, chief among them the fact that it centers on the story of one person’s struggle—in a category that often focuses on individual’s stories over movies that widen their societal lens like Ascension and Attica both do—and that that person also just happens to be a refugee. At a time when the world is witnessing the obscenity of a mass-refugee crisis play out in real time, that could be enough.

But Summer of Soul has all the goodwill in the world. It’s scooped up most of the precursor wins, and it’s got that Ted Lasso “what we need right now” mojo, even as it speaks to the importance of reclaiming suppressed narratives—even, especially, those within the world of entertainment. Perhaps most crucially, how many Oscar voters haven’t met and been thoroughly charmed by first-time director (and former Oscar broadcast DJ) Questlove? Henderson

Best Animated Feature

WINNER: Encanto
Flee
Luca
The Mitchells vs. the Machines
Raya and the Last Dragon

This was The Mitchells vs. the Machines’s race to lose for a while, but then Encanto became an unlikely viral phenomenon after “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” and the film’s soundtrack both soared to the top of the Billboard charts and, now, we’re looking at another done deal. Pity, though, that we don’t get to finally stop talking about Lin-Manuel Miranda getting his EGOT this year. Thanks Billie Ellish por nada. Gonzalez

Best Cinematography

Dune
Nightmare Alley
WINNER: The Power of the Dog
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story

Dune is the sixth film in Oscar history to be nominated in all seven technical categories—and it would’ve been eight if Oscar hadn’t recently combined the sound categories. While many pundits are betting on a clean sweep, that’s highly unlikely given that even James Cameron’s mighty Titanic couldn’t pull off that feat. We’re not even sure that it can break Cabaret’s 50-year record for most wins without a best picture victory. And cinematography is one of three categories where it’s most vulnerable. Greig Fraser, previously nominated for Lion, faces some tough competition here, from six-time nominee Bruno Delbonnel to two-time winner Janusz Kaminski (who even has Guillermo del Toro in the tank for him) to Ari Wegner. The Power of the Dog entered this Oscar race with more nominations than any other film and a victory here for Wegner, only the second woman to ever be nominated for cinematography, is an obvious chance for AMPAS to check off another square on their history-making bingo card. Gonzalez

Best Costume Design

WINNER: Cruella
Cyrano
Dune
Nightmare Alley
West Side Story

ABC/Disney knows the score. There’s a reason why best costume design, of all technical categories, is making the cut for the main show this year while eight other Oscars are being cast aside to the preshow, doomed to be clipped down to 10 seconds each and slotted in between the eminently more imperative tributes to The Godfather and James Bond. Even Cruella would call the network’s self-promotional intentions a little transparent. Henderson

Best Documentary Short

WINNER: Audible
Lead Me Home
The Queen of Basketball
Three Songs for Benazir
When We Were Bullies

No film in this category bites off more than it can chew than Audible, a portrait of football player Amaree McKenstry-Hall from the Maryland School for the Deaf and his team’s efforts to defend their winning streak, but no other is as immersive in its artistry or sincere in its intentions. (One of its plot strands, about the suicide of one of Amaree’s friends, is practically a rebuke to the mind-boggling tone-deafness of When We Were Bullies.) Watch out, though, for The Queen of Basketball, Ben Proudfoot’s infotational but moving tribute to the achievements of women’s basketball pioneer Lusia Harris, who died last month at age 66. Gonzalez

Best Film Editing

Don’t Look Up
Dune
King Richard
WINNER: The Power of the Dog
Tick, Tick…Boom!

Those who know their Oscar trivia—that best picture winners, more times than not, also win for their editing—knew that Belfast was likely down for the count when it didn’t turn up in this category. Yes, best picture and editing haven’t synced up since 2010, but Dune conspicuously (not to mention mercifully) lacks the freneticism of recent winners in this category, while The Power of the Dog is diamond-hard in its construction and editing, and in ways that recall some of the classiest winners in this category, most recently The Social Network. Gonzalez

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Coming 2 America
Cruella
Dune
WINNER: The Eyes of Tammy Faye
House of Gucci

Last week, Jessica Chastain announced that, due to the Academy’s decision to bow to ABC pressure and not air all 24 categories during the broadcast, she would be skipping the red carpet in order to cheer on, in person, the team whose latex and wigs turned her into International Falls, Minnesota’s most notable Jesus-freak drag queen. Not only is it a noble gesture, a show of solidarity, and an acknowledgement for one of the main reasons that she’s currently considered the frontrunner, it’s a pretty safe bet on her part to boot. Henderson

Best Original Score

Don’t Look Up
WINNER: Dune
Encanto
Parallel Mothers
The Power of the Dog

Even proponents of the notion that Dune stands poised to possibly tie Cabaret’s “eight Oscars, no best picture” record recognize best original score could be one of its toughest battles. Hans Zimmer’s track record here is, flatly, not great, with his sole win to date coming on the considerable coattails of Elton John’s The Lion King ditties. But unless The Power of the Dog’s coattails are longer than even we think they are, or unless voters mistakenly think that Lin-Manuel Miranda can complete his EGOT punch card here as well, we’re betting on Zimmer’s sandy percussion finally putting an end to his—and, as per Vanity Fair’s recent man-behind-the-curtain article, his incredibly deep bench of ghostwriters’—dry streak. Henderson

Best Original Song

“Be Alive,” King Richard
“Dos Oruguitas,” Encanto
“Down to Joy,” Belfast
WINNER: “No Time to Die,” No Time to Die
“Somehow You Do,” Four Good Days

The fact of the matter is that none of the other four songs nominated are working as hard against Encanto’s chances here as the un-nominated “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” So pervasive is the perception that “Dos Oruguitas” is a poor substitute for the song that’s since become a #1 hit (something even Frozen’s ubiquitous “Let It Go” couldn’t manage), that even if it wins, the sentiment will remain that it won amid a rigged playing field. Then again, it’s possible that even “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” wouldn’t have had anything to say in the face of Oscar’s persistent fondness for Grammy powerhouses singing Bond ballads. Henderson

Best Production Design

Dune
WINNER: Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story

There’s an effective, if chilly, sparseness to Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune that makes it surprising that so many are predicting it to persevere here, especially given that AMPAS, more times than not, tends to equate “best” with “most.” (That The Power of the Dog scored a nomination here speaks to its broad appeal, but you can count on one hand how many times a sci-fi film and a western have won in this category.) Sometimes, though, the best is the one with the mostest, and this award is for the gloriously ostentatious Art Deco stylings of Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley to lose. Gonzalez

Best Animated Short

Affairs of the Heart
Bestia
Boxballet
WINNER: Robin Robin
The Windshield Wiper

An unusually adult-oriented slate this year, with animals just as likely to be shown sexually assaulting political prisoners as they are breaking into song. The former happens, however obliquely, in Bestia, a wordless depiction of the daily routine of a Chilean war criminal who’s trained her loyal dog to perform the most unspeakable acts on her victims. That so much as one short this ice-hearted got through is miraculous enough, but nearly all of the nominees this year are awash in decapitations, sagging genitals, and hipster malaise over the meaning of love in a swipe-left culture. Which is why Netflix should have no problem adding one more trophy to its pile this year with the very simple charm of Robin Robin, a sweet-natured parable for being who you are, whether that’s inside or out, which understandably plays even better since Florida passed its “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Henderson

Best Live Action Short

The Dress
WINNER: The Long Goodbye
On My Mind
Please Hold
Take and Run

The sacred and the profane coexist as they always do in this category, which year in and year out boasts some of the nicest surprises and the nastiest screeds in any Oscar race. Somewhere in the middle, and quirkily presented enough to feel like a winner, is Please Hold, a wholly believable dystopia that gets its points across bluntly but effectively. It’s a creepingly plausible social non-justice allegory whose point—that the justice system, already rigged against black and brown people, will remain as such in the future, just more automated—neatly takes the baton from last year’s winner, Two Distant Strangers. But then again, so does the equally blunt, equally outraged The Long Goodbye, which puts the multi-talents of Riz Ahmed on full display and feels far less negatively impacted by its ultimately muddled message given, once again, real life hasn’t been making a lot of sense these days either. Henderson

Best Sound

Belfast
WINNER: Dune
No Time to Die
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story

The Power of the Dog’s presence here is further proof that its chances are being underestimated in many of the below-the-line categories, but it’s difficult to imagine it persevering here given this category’s track record when it comes to rewarding overtly action-oriented foley work. This, then, is Dune’s to lose, but watch out for Belfast, whose team includes Nivi Adiri (a previous Oscar winner for Gravity) and whose evocation of a city being explosively scarred by a period of sectarian violence is the film’s strong suit. Gonzalez

Visual Effects

WINNER: Dune
Free Guy
No Time to Die
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Spider-Man: No Way Home

Regardless of their scale, Dune’s special effects are disquietingly eerie, none more so than the practical ones that brought Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron Harkonnen to life. If there’s a category where Oscar often opts for the less-is-more route, it’s this one. Sorry Marvel fanboys. Gonzalez