Oscars predictions with Gemma Gracewood in Los Angeles

The 96th Academy Awards - the Oscars - take place on Monday. The event is the final ceremony of the awards season which started almost a year ago at the Cannes Film Festival.

Oppenheimer will likely dominate the awards as it leads with 13 nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Actress. 

• RNZ will be live-blogging all the Oscars action approximately 11am on Monday. The ceremony starts at 1pm NZT

Following closely behind is Poor Things with 11 nominations. Killers of the Flower Moon, a historical drama about a large conspiracy to rob the Osage Nation of its oil wealth, has gained 10 nominations including best actress for Lily Gladstone. A potential history-making moment if Native American actress Gladstone wins. 

For the first time, three of the Best Picture nominations have been directed by women - Barbie by Greta Gerwig, Past Lives by Celine Song and Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet. But Triet is the only female to receive a nomination and the eighth woman ever, to be nominated for the best director category. 

The red carpet has been laid out for the evening, and Culture 101 finds out what it's like behind the scenes and the atmosphere in Los Angeles with writer, producer and editor-in-chief at Letterboxd, Gemma Gracewood.

She says there is a strong atmosphere in Hollywood in the lead-up to the Oscars, of "an industry that was hit really hard by Covid and then two strikes, the WGA and the SAG strikes - wanting to be back in business and that business being very much led by Christopher Nolan and Margot Robbie, with Barbie, and Emma Stone with Poor Things.

"But Christopher Nolan who's the stalwart of big cinema and theatrical experience and getting out of your house and going to a cinema in a sense that Hollywood's kind of back in business as much as it possibly can be, with all of this streaming competition and cost of living and so on."

There was also a jarring sense of "cognitive dissonance", she said, as the film industry picks how it relates to the war in Gaza.

"This is a really tricky topic for artists who are usually generally progressive in their sentiments about what's going on in the world, and usually generally able to turn up in the red AIDS ribbon or whatever the industry has agreed that it's  collective cause is this year, but this is not that.

"This is really tricky, and people have been losing their jobs for speaking out about it."

Gracewood's predictions

Gracewood is not under any doubt that Oppenheimer will take Best Picture: "It fits into that great American category of biopic with political resonance and a really stacked cast," she says. 

"And likewise, I think Cillian [Murphy] will take Best Actor, and Robert Downey Jnr will take Best Supporting Actor for their roles in that film."

Though she says she grapples somewhat with the idea of art in competition with itself, and says the other contenders for Best Picture are strong: Killers of the Flower Moon "could and should win", Anatomy of a Fall "should win", and Barbie "should win for income alone". 

"But Barbie's prize is a billion-dollar box office, so there you go!"

The big contest will be for Best Actress, Gracewood says. Lily Gladstone - the first Native American woman nominated for an Oscar - won the SAG best actress place this year for Killers of the Flower Moon, but Emma Stone took home the BAFTA equivalent for Poor Things.

"It's a tricky one... it could be either of them, they are both extraordinary performances.

"But for Lily Gladstone ... it would be a history-making win for a story that is so important for America and other Western countries to watch and reckon with their own histories. She's beautiful in it." 

Gracewood says one interesting contender this year is French film Anatomy of a Fall, which has gathered steam and praise through the year, culminating in its nomination for both Best Picture and Best Screenplay despite not being France's entry for Best International Feature.

And the nominees for Best International Film are particularly diverse, with many of those films each containing strong elements from multiple countries and cultures from around the world.

Two songs from Barbie are up against each other for Best Song, 'I'm Just Ken' and 'What Was I Made For?'

On the night, Ryan Gosling is set to perform 'I'm Just Ken', but Gracewood's prediction is that brother and sister team Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell will scoop the award for 'What was I Made For?'  It would be Eilish and O'Connell's second win in the category after they claimed it in 2022 for a James Bond film.