Every week, we’ll take a look back in 5-year intervals at the box office past to explore how Oscar’s nominees were doing at the box office each weekend historically. The first section under each year is the positioning of all Oscar nominees during that weekend at the box office (as well as a section looking at the inflation-adjusted numbers). The third section is an alphabetical list of those films and the categories in which they were nominated. And to start each week off, we’ll be looking at the films releasing over the weekend that have the best chance of getting Oscar nominations and specifying the categories where we think they have the best shots at this stage of the game. If you have any suggestions for more data you’d like to see, please let us know.
This Year: Potential Oscar Nominees Releasing This Weekend
My Little Sister (Limited)
Oscar Potential: Foreign Language Film.
The first thing to remember about the London Critics is that they have separate awards for British & Irish actors and productions. This inevitably sways the tallies towards those kinds of films. The second is that their eligibility period is slightly wider, as any film that releases in the UK prior to the end of February are usually eligible and since studios release films internationally differently than in the US, some of these films (Les Misérables and Clemency for example were eligible for the 92nd Oscars and Rocks hasn’t even been released in the US at all) wouldn’t be eligible for the Oscars. The other thing to note is that because of the British Irish categories and the home turf advantage, some figures show up in the mainline nominations even though their Oscar chances are almost nil. This is true of About Endlessness, Rocks, and Saint Maud. What’s worse is that the blur between television and films were excepted by this group to recognize Steve McQueen’s Small Axe films even though the film specifically aired in the UK on the BBC.
Other than Nomadland in Best Feature, Riz Ahmed in Best Actor, and Time in Best Documentary (tied with A Thousand Cuts), none of these choices are really following any common path. This might be the farthest outside of the norm they’ve ever been.
For the first time in a very long while, individual critics groups are starting to show a bit of inventiveness in their selections. Perhaps inventiveness isn’t the right word as most of what’s here has been mentioned elsewhere, but certain films seem to be doing better with some groups more than others. For instance, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7 have their best showing so far with the San Diego critics.