For our eighteenth and final Rundown article, it’s the final category. After the jump, you’ll find our winner and runner-up predictions for Best Pictureas well as general commentary about the race.

Best Picture

Winner Predictions

• Arrival
• Fences
• Hacksaw Ridge
• Hell or High Water
• Hidden Figures
• La La Land (WL O) (PP O) (TB O) (TL O)
• Lion
• Manchester by the Sea
• Moonlight

Runner-Up Predictions

• Moonlight (WL O) (PP R) [New] (TB O) (TL O)

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Wesley Lovell: In the end, La La Land has no competition. The film has run the table of precursors and shows no signs of slowing down. With the number of prizes it’s likely to pick up, it would be an absolute shock for it to lose out on Best Picture.
Peter J. Patrick: This one’s a forgone conclusion with La La Land finding reason room for celebration. Nothing else has much of a chance, although Moonlight will probably score the most run-up votes.
Tripp Burton: At this point, there seems little doubt that La La Land will triumph on Sunday night. The question really is how big of a sweep it will have, and can it come close to any records (I don’t think so — I have it down for 8 wins, still a very healthy haul these days).
Thomas La Tourrette: This one feels like a slam dunk. I find it hard to picture anything but La La Land winning the big prize. It has the most precursors and has won many of the major ones, Golden Globes, Producers Guild, and the British Academy. The one major award it did not win was the Best Cast from the Screen Actors Guild, but it was not nominated there. It may have been viewed as so much a two-person movie that they did not feel it deserved a cast nomination. It is rare for a film to win Best Picture without that precursor, but that will happen this year. It was a strong year for films and a case could be made for almost any of the other nominees to win, but they just will not be able to beat the juggernaut that La La Land has become. The film that likely has the second most votes will be Moonlight, the personal coming-of-age drama. It has the second most wins, but it is probably too edgy and too different to win. It will most likely take the awards for Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor, but I just do not see any scenario where it wins here. Hidden Figures won the SAG cast award, but this well liked film will not succeed without the director being nominated so it will probably end up going home without any awards. The other six nominees have even less chance of winning. La La Land easily wins. The main question remaining will be whether it can tie or best the films with the most wins. It was my favorite movie of the year, but I do not think it was that good, but it stands a definite chance to tie Ben-Hur, Titanic, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with 11 wins each. It may also fall short of that goal, but the Oscar for best film is one that it will take home.

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