Which movie is the 2022 Oscar frontrunner based solely on nominations?
Awards season in Hollywood often follows a familiar pattern, but it rarely plays out the same way twice. A series of smaller awards role out their nominations, solidifying which movies are and are not in serious contention. Studios run aggressive behind-the-scenes campaigns with everything from strategic billboards to lavish parties. It’s a constant up-and-down game looking for the end result of an Oscar, the prize which matters above all others.
The Producers Guild of America is the latest group to set the table for the Academy. As the PGA helpfully notes in its own press release, its awards are “are often a bellwether for the Oscars.” Since the PGA’s inception, the PGA says, “the PGA has predicted 22 of the past 32 winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture.” That’s around 68 percent, not too shabby.
Awards season during the pandemic has only heightened the discrepancies it normally faces: nominees are rarely the movies which most people have seen. The PGA Awards nominated two movies which took off with giant swaths of audience last year, Don’t Look Up and Dune. But beyond the meteor and the planet Arrakis, movies like CODA, King Richard, Tick, Tick, Boom and West Side Story have only quietly debuted, hoping to be discovered as the awards get handed out.
If there’s a frontrunner this year, it’s Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. Taking place during very violent time and place in history, 1960s Northern Ireland, the movie takes a lighter approach to the conflict known as The Troubles than, say, Steve McQueen’s Hunger or Paul Greengrass’ Bloody Sunday. Rather it focuses on the perspective of 9-year old Buddy (Jude Hill) from a working class Protestant family. The LA Times called it “the sweetest movie about the Troubles
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