Drumroll, Please: Ranker Predicts the Winner of 2023’s Oscar for “Best Picture”
Hollywood loves these ten nominees, but what about everyday moviegoers? Our crowdsourced rankings reveal how movie fans really feel — and they might even be able to predict a winner
It’s that time of year again: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will declare one movie the “best picture” of 2022, and writers, analysts, and gamblers everywhere are trying their best to predict exactly how members will vote ahead of the March 12 awards ceremony. We at Ranker might not have any special insight into the minds of the academy’s voting members, but we have tons and tons of insight into the opinions of everyday movie fans. We’ve used that insight to successfully predict two out of the last three best picture winners: Parasite in 2020 and Nomadland in 2021 (we weren’t quite so lucky last year, when we picked The Power of the Dog over CODA).
“Middlebrow” may be a term that critics of the Oscars use disparagingly, but from a quantitative perspective, we’ve found that it’s more or less an accurate one. The movies that end up winning best picture are consistently not the most popular nominees among regular audiences, nor the least popular — the winner is usually somewhere close to the exact center. How do we determine where that center is? Take a look at our (very rudimentary) system for finding the perfectly “middlebrow” movie for each year, and read on to learn which movie we predict will end up taking home best picture in 2023.
Our Process
Every year, we track the Oscar nominees’ positions on our list of the best movies to be released the previous year. For example, when we looked at how the 2022 Oscar nominees were positioned on our list of The Best Movies Of 2021 the night before the Oscar ceremony, they (at the time — rankings have shifted since we looked last year) appeared in this order:
Dune (#1 overall)
Don’t Look Up (#12 overall)
West Side Story (#17 overall)
The Power of the Dog (#21 overall)
CODA (#27 overall)
King Richard (#55 overall)
Licorice Pizza (#148 overall)
Belfast (#197 overall)
Drive My Car (#257 overall)
Nightmare Alley (#341 overall)
We predicted that The Power of the Dog would win in 2022 based on a fairly consistent and clear historical trend:
In 2014, there were 9 nominees for best picture. The winning movie, 12 Years a Slave, was ranked fourth among them.
In 2015, there were 8 nominees for best picture. The winning movie, Birdman, was ranked fourth among them.
In 2016, there were 8 nominees for best picture. The winning movie, Spotlight, was ranked sixth among them.
In 2017, there were 9 nominees for best picture. The winning movie, Moonlight, was ranked third among them.
In 2018, there were 9 nominees for best picture. The winning movie, The Shape of Water, was ranked fourth among them.
In 2019, there were 8 nominees for best picture. The winning movie, The Green Book, was ranked fifth among them.
In 2020, there were 9 nominees for best picture. The winning movie, Parasite, was ranked fourth among them.
In 2021, there were 8 nominees for best picture. The winning movie, Nomadland, was ranked fifth among them.
Photo: Coda, Apple
As you can see from these results, the placement of the winning movie isn’t totally consistent from year to year: It moves like a pendulum back and forth from the popular to the unpopular side of the spectrum. Given that the furthest the pendulum has swung is third place in one direction and sixth in the other, it’s clear that our Best Movies lists have effectively highlighted the “middle” that academy voters tend to aim for.
Last year we were off in our prediction, but not by much: noticing that the pendulum had swung closer to the bottom of the list in 2021 (the fifth-ranked nominee out of eight movies), we guessed that 2022’s best picture would be closer to the top. As it turned out, the winner was one spot closer to the center, the fifth-ranked nominee CODA rather than the fourth-ranked The Power of the Dog.
Our 2023 Prediction:
We’ve been watching the results of our list of The Best Movies Of 2022 (6K votes) pour in for some time. And with votes still coming in for movies released in the last months of 2022, the order of this year’s Oscar nominees on the list is frequently changing. That said, as we draw closer to the ceremony, we’re taking a snapshot of the results now and making a tentative prediction:
Top Gun: Maverick (#1 overall)
Everything Everywhere All At Once (#2 overall)
The Banshees of Inisheran (#4 overall)
The Fabelmans (#7 overall)
Avatar: The Way of Water (#8 overall)
Elvis (#10 overall)
All Quiet on the Western Front (#19 overall)
Triangle of Sadness (#42 overall)
Women Talking (#69 overall)
Tár (#92 overall)
One thing worth noting about the results of this year’s list is that the Oscar nominees are ranked much higher than in previous years. Seven of these best picture candidates are in the Top 20 of our Best Movies list, with both the #1 and #2 movies both up for the academy’s biggest prize. Compare that to 2022, when just three movies were in the Top 20 (Dune, Don’t Look Up, and West Side Story). That’s the result of two complementary trends: first, that the academy has some crowd-pleasing blockbusters, including two sequels, among its list of nominees; and second, that superhero movies, and especially MCU entries, play a much less prominent role on the Best Movies Of 2022 list than they had in previous years. The highest-ranked Marvel movie on the list, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, sits all the way down at #34 — though it should be noted that The Batman has a coveted #3 spot.
Photo: The Fabelmans, Universal Pictures
And the winner is…
We were chastened a bit by our missed prediction last year, having overestimated the tendency of the academy to swing back and forth between the higher- and lower-brow nominees. Will we learn from our mistake in 2023? The short answer is: no.
We’re again picking the fourth-ranked film out of 10 nominees: the Steven Spielberg-directed drama The Fabelmans. Our decision this year is less inspired by trends and more by the fact that the nominees closer to the center of the list — Avatar and Elvis — are considered unlikely to take home the award by most Oscar prognosticators. The films regarded as the favorites to win are either too high on the list, like the #2 Everything Everywhere All at Once, or too low, like the #92 Tár. The only real contender our formula points to is The Fabelmans.
It could be that shifting trends in the film industry have affected our results and rendered our prediction formula less useful. But the academy does love movies about movies, and they love Spielberg. We’ll soon find out whether Ranker’s system for Oscar prediction scores another win or drops down to .500.