‘CODA’ vs. ’The Power of the Dog’: A Messy Oscar Season Gets a Messy Homestretch
thewrap.comor Best Film Editing, whereas every winner since the latter category was created in 1934 has been nominated for at least one of those awards – and the vast majority has been nominated for both of them.
It only has three total nominations, which would be the least of any winner since “Grand Hotel” won with only a single nomination in 1932, when the Oscars only had 12 categories.You can use plenty of other stats against it, but really, fancy Oscar statistics don’t mean squat anymore. “Birdman” shouldn’t have won because it didn’t have an editing nomination, “The Shape of Water” shouldn’t have won because it didn’t have SAG ensemble, “Green Book” shouldn’t have won because it didn’t have a Best Director nom and “Parasite” shouldn’t have won because it wasn’t in English.
But they all did win – and as the Academy has gotten much bigger and far more international because of its post-#OscarsSoWhite membership push, there’s less value in the typical markers and less overlap with the American guilds on which we used to rely for a reading of what the voters were thinking.
And in this new atmosphere, a film with only three nominations and no visible support from the Academy’s below-the-line branches can actually win Best Picture, and the biggest corporation in the world, Apple, can successfully sell its $25 million Sundance acquisition as a scrappy underdog (which it was, in a way, before it landed that record-breaking deal from Apple on Park City).The key thing about the Producers Guild win is that in the 12 years since the Academy and the PGA expanded to 10 best-film nominees and introduced the preferential system, the PGA has predicted the Oscar winner all but three times.
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