Drumroll, Please: Ranker Predicts the Winner of 2022’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 2021, and writers, analysts, and gamblers everywhere are trying their best to predict exactly how members will vote ahead of the March 27 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 the previous two best picture winners: Parasite in 2020 and Nomadland in 2021. 

“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 2022.

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 2020 Oscar nominees were positioned on our list of The Best Movies of 2019 the night before the Oscar ceremony, they appeared in this order:

1. Joker (#2 overall)

2. Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood (#6 overall)

3. 1917 (#8 overall)

4. WINNER: Parasite (#11 overall)

5. The Irishman (#16 overall)

6. Little Women (#21 overall)

7. Jojo Rabbit (#31 overall)

8. Ford v. Ferrari (#35 overall)

9. Marriage Story (#41 overall)

We predicted that Parasite would win in 2020 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.

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. That said, given that the farthest 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.

Our 2022 Prediction:

We’ve been watching the results of our list of The Best Movies Of 2021 (22K votes) pour in for some time. And with votes still coming in for movies released in the last months of 2021, 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:

1. Dune (#1 overall)

2. Don’t Look Up (#12 overall)

3. West Side Story (#17 overall)

4. The Power of the Dog (#21 overall)

5. CODA (#27 overall)

6. King Richard (#55 overall)

7. Licorice Pizza (#148 overall)

8. Belfast (#197 overall)

9. Drive My Car (#257 overall)

10. Nightmare Alley (#341 overall)

If you look at the position of winning pictures over the years, with the exception of some less-than-wild swings, the pendulum has been swinging between fourth- and fifth-place films. The nomination of 10 movies this year instead of nine or eight complicates things a little by moving the center of the list slightly downward.

That said, given the pattern we’ve seen in the last four years, we can confidently guess that The Power of the Dog will be 2022’s best picture winner. The Jane Campion-directed film is heavily favored to take home the prize, so it’s not our boldest prediction yet. Still, if the trend we’ve observed in the past holds up, the fourth-place film is the strongest possible bet (though the presence of 10 nominees would make CODA a relatively plausible bet, as well). We’ll return to this list and give updates as we get closer to the awards ceremony!

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.