Why Black Panther Won't Win Best Picture

The Best Picture race has never been less certain. I said that in 2018 and 2016 too. In 2017, I felt pretty confident then picked the wrong winner. There hasn't been a certain winner going into the ceremony since The Artist won for 2011. This year, literally all 8 nominees feel like they have a chance to win, so I'm going to do a series on why they won't (and how they could). These will drop as each nominee runs out of precursor awards to learn anything from.

First up is the official selection for the country of Wakanda. Somehow, despite being snubbed for the Best Foreign Film award, Black Panther managed to get an historically unlikely Best Picture nomination.

Most Similar Best Picture Winner: None

Literally every Oscar contender I can think of to compare this too didn't win. I can try the box office phenomenon angle with Avatar, but that lost. I can try the auteur-driven superhero angle with The Dark Knight, but that infamously wasn't even nominated. I thought about the craft-driven angle with Mad Max:Fury Road, but that didn't win Best Picture and had a lot more key nominations. The closest comparison available is The Return of the King, and that took three years and many more nominations to finally break through.

Path to Victory:

The reason that Black Panther can win Best Picture is simply that no one else seems all that likely to. Barring some last minute consensus developing from the few remaining guilds, the winners of all the precursor awards will be as split as ever. Black Panther just won the SAG Ensemble Award (or whatever they are calling it now), which is one of the bigger awards. The Actors branch of the Academy is the largest by far. If the SAG Award is an indicator of which way the Actors' branch is leaning, then you can do the math. The movie also got nominated for the PGA Award and the Golden Globe. It's a real player. The harder to quantify element is that Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon inside a larger cultural phenomenon. It's the third highest grossing movie of all time in the United States. An Oscar voting body that's been plagued by accusations of institutional racism the last few years is sure to consider the mostly Black cast and the greater significance of that.

Then there's the fact that we don't really know the Academy as well these days. They've been adding hundreds of new members over the last couple years, mostly minority, female, and/or international members. The idea of what is an "Oscar movie" is changing, and we don't know what the new look is. In a way, that makes all the research I do pointless. Precedent doesn't mean as much at this point. So why not Black Panther?

Why That Won't Work:

I'm sorry to say this - I'd  love a Black Panther win for so many reasons - but Black Panther won't win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Let's start with those hard to quantify factors that most of the "Black Panther for Best Picture" argument rides on. Being the highest grossing movie of the year doesn't help the Best Picture odds. Just ask American Sniper, Avatar, or Saving Private Ryan (the only other movies in the last 20 years to lead the yearly box office and get a Best Picture nomination). Oscar voters don't care if a movie is a cultural phenomenon. The diversity angle won't get it that far either. BlacKkKlansman is also in the field, looks more like a conventional Oscar movie, and has a legendary director who is long overdue recognition by the Academy. Every progressive reason to pick Black Panther applies to BlacKkKlansman as well. And, if I'm being cynical, there isn't the same urgency to vote progressively at this point. You'd have to be naive to think that two years of #OscarSoWhite backlash didn't play some small part in the Moonlight win* (an upset by nearly any metric). After that, and to a lesser extent 12 Years a Slave a few years earlier, the focus has shifted to getting better representation in other categories.

*Just a reminded: any reference to "upsets" are referring to the horse race aspect of it. I'm not making an assessment of the quality of one movie vs. the other.

The SAG win is nice but doesn't mean all that much. It is much more of an award of disqualification these days. Certain movies really need to win the SAG Ensemble Award to be considered viable Best Picture contenders. Losing it, doesn't mean much to other movies. The Shape of Water was never about the cast. It didn't need an ensemble nomination, so when it didn't win, that didn't hurt its odds. Moonlight's directing and writing carried it, so a loss for the ensemble award didn't sting that much. However, Spotlight or Birdman were more carried by their ensembles and needed the SAG Ensemble wins to signify they could win the Oscar. You look at something like Fences losing in 2016 or The Big Short losing in 2015. Those needed ensemble wins badly to stay in the race. Of course, this is always easy to say in hindsight. I picked The Big Short to win in 2015, after all. The SAG win is nice for Black Panther, but it's especially meaningless when no individual actors were nominated (cough - Michael B. Jordan - cough).

Say what you will, but no Best Picture winner is really a total surprise. I won't suggest that there's a single metric to measure Best Picture odds with. Instead, I think there are about several great indicators. A single outlier is fine, but missing on several of these indicators is damning. Let's check how Black Panther is with those:

-All Best Picture winners in the last 50 years have had Oscar nominations in 3 of these 4 categories: Director, Actor/Actress (lead or supporting), Film Editing, Screenplay. Black Panther has 0. That's really hard to do and reeks of "token nomination".

-In 20 years (technically more, but that's where I stopped), all Best Picture winners have at least one "Big 8" win*. Black Panther meets that criteria barely with the SAG win.

-All Best Picture winners have had at least 6 "Big 8" nominations or wins. Black Panther has only four. One is the SAG (although that came with no individual performers being nominated). The other two are the PGA and Golden Globe, which each have 10 total nominations, meaning it's easier to make the cut.

*Golden Globe - Best Drama or Comedy Film (1), BAFTA - Best Film (2), Producers Guild - Best Feature (3), SAG - Best Ensemble (4), Directors Guild - Best Director (5), Writers Guild - Best Original or Adapted Screenplay (6), Editors Guild - Best Drama or Comedy Film Editing (7), American Society of Cinematographers - Best Cinematography (8).

Black Panther isn't even close to making the cut for some of those. I could see a path to victory with maybe only 2 of the 4 Oscar nominations or 5 "Big 8" nominations. The numbers that Black Panther has suggests a level of unlikelihood that would render all Oscar prognostication useless if it somehow managed to win. Remember, even the surprise Oscar wins in the past are still cases when the second or third most likely movie manages to win; never the 8th most likely. Moonlight's win might've looked surprising at the time, but it actually had one of the best Oscar profiles of any winner. It just so happened that La La Land looked historically dominant. Black Panther is no Moonlight. It's not even a Crash or a Million Dollar Baby. No 8th nominee has ever been this likely to win Best Picture, but we are still talking about the difference between a 1% chance and a 5% chance. Even with the preferential ballot that the Oscars use, there's still no indication that Black Panther has the kind of overall support needed to win Best Picture.