Awards Season / Oscar Predictions Update: Closing Out July With a Major Contender Pushing to 2023?

It’s hard to believe that July is almost over, right? Time flies when you’re having fun (am I having fun?), but it also means that coming in hot and heavy are the fall film festival announcements. In the past few days we found out what will be playing at the Toronto International Film Festival and Venice Film Festival (as well as one New York Film Festival related bit of news). That in turn also allows you to make some educated guesses about the Telluride Film Festival. At the same, as much as all of these films debuting are exciting (especially Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans going to TIFF), there’s one movie that isn’t just skipping festivals, but seemingly 2022 entirely.

As most of you likely saw (here if you didn’t), Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon apparently is a 2023 release now. Also seemingly out of the running this year is Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things, and there will be more to come, especially when official announcements of next year release dates are made. The Scorsese picture obviously was seen as a top tier Academy Award contender, so there’s a potentially big impact on the Oscar race. That’s still to be determined, but not having one of the greats in the running does shake up the dance card, at least a little bit.

So, what does any of this mean? Mostly, it means that I had to update my predictions to remove Killers of the Flower Moon, along with Poor Things, as well as longer shots for this year like Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro. Also, there’s still the possibility of surprise flicks crashing the party. We all know Clint Eastwood has been notorious for this over the years, not that we should expect him to do it again. Just know that last minute players are sometimes the biggest players of them all.

The impending festivals will tell us a lot, but obviously not everything. I’ll be at NYFF, Telluride, and TIFF, so if anything massive goes down, I’ll know about it. Last year, at Toronto I was part of the crowd that thought Belfast was almost a sure thing in Best Picture, so don’t pay too much mind to what we say, but don’t ignore it completely, either…

My prior prediction articles (found here, here, here, and here) are available for your perusal, and you’ll see more changes here than usual. I was tempted to update again last night, but I’ll save that for a future piece in the pretty near future. For the moment, this is still a very early look at what the Oscar season may hold for us.

As always, you can see my newest crack at advance Oscar predictions (which soon will just be regular old predictions, as opposed to year in advance) right here at Awards Radar. The changes are slowly coming, and will continue to come, more and more, as the fall festivals near. So, sit tight…

Stay tuned for another update to these Oscar predictions as the summer continues!