Globes, SAG, DGA, and More

This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. The drafting window for this season has closed, but you can still sign up to get the newsletter, which provides a weekly recap of box-office performance, awards nominations, and critical chatter on all the buzziest movies.

We’ve barely had a chance to catch our breath since Sunday night, when a new network (CBS!) with a new host (moving on!) brought us more or less the same old Golden Globes. TV people got awards, which you can read about elsewhere. We care only about the handful of films that took home armfuls of awards and thus MFL points — and it was a very big night for one major contender in particular.

Following the Globes, we’ve seen a steady drip of awards and nominations from smaller precursors, plus we had another interesting weekend of box-office action and the long-awaited disbursement of Rotten Tomatoes points. (The latter is good news for any drafters of heady documentaries that haven’t scored at all yet this season.) Huge week — let’s get to it.

Before getting into the awards-season deluge, we’ll start at the box office, which for the third time in the past four weeks saw Wonka in the top spot. Warner Bros.’ holiday hit has now pulled in $164 million cumulatively, which has the chocolate maker sitting at 334 total points for the MFL (one point for every million, plus bonuses for hitting the $50 and $100 million thresholds and three weeks at No. 1). That’s good enough to have the movie mingling with the top ten point-earners of the season so far.

Elsewhere, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom quietly swam its way to $100 million, which really must burn The Marvels’ ass, considering this too was a poorly reviewed, withered appendage of a superhero-film franchise that has run out of gas. But this one had the good fortune of opening over Christmas, when even a hobbled giant can hit the century mark. The Color Purple passed $50 million this weekend, despite having completely squandered its Christmas Day momentum, and Trolls Band Together finally hit $100 million, so maybe those poor trolls can finally go home.

Migration continues to quietly rack up dollars, now sitting at $77 million. Anyone But You ($43 million) isn’t letting bad reviews keep it from being the only movie whose audiences are getting bigger week to week. The Iron Claw at $24 million will probably end up as the sixth-biggest earner in A24 history. It currently stands in tenth place all time and will soon pass The Witch, Ex Machina, Midsommar, and Moonlight (that top five of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Uncut Gems, Lady Bird, Talk to Me, and Hereditary seem pretty secure, though). And in a little skirmish at the bottom of the list that only I care about, Wish maintains a small $62 million to $61 million lead over Napoleon.

One underrated aspect of the Golden Globes is that, relative to other award shows, the ceremony that the HFPA built doesn’t hand out that many movie awards. There are just 15 categories, and that includes the new bullshitty Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award, which by its own wording is meaningless — even if a good movie (Barbie) won it in its inaugural year. Oh, you gave your “Movies that made lotsa money” award to the movie that made the most money this year? Fascinating! Tell me more!

Anyway, the thing about the Globes not having very many movie awards is that when one movie wins fully a third of them, the fantasy points don’t get spread around much. Oppenheimer won five Globes: Best Picture (Drama), Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Score. That was good for 135 points, the best single-day performance of the season so far. Only four other movies took home multiple awards: Poor Things (60 points for Emma Stone and the film’s Best Comedy Picture win), and 50 points apiece for Anatomy of a Fall (Best Screenplay, Best Foreign Film), Barbie (Best Song for, sigh, Billie Eilish plus the fake award), and The Holdovers (acting wins for Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Lily Gladstone’s Best Actress win pulled in 25 points for Killers of the Flower Moon, as did The Boy and the Heron’s win in Animated Feature.

I expect the endearing speeches by Gladstone, Giamatti, and Oppenheimer’s Robert Downey Jr. to boost all three’s chances for an Oscar — and if Oppenheimer was able to stomp through the Golden Globes like this, it might just end up blazing a path through awards season like J. Robert Oppenheimer blazed a path through his friends’ wives.

The National Society of Film Critics also handed out awards last weekend. They’re always the last of the major critics’ organizations to vote, which may be why they tend to depart from the prior groups’ picks. In this case, that meant wins for Celine Song’s Past Lives in Best Picture (+20 points), The Zone of Interest’s Jonathan Glazer in Best Director, and All of Us Strangers’ Andrew Scott in Best Actor. Sandra Hüller, who’s been doing well in precursor season, won Best Actress for her performances in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest. Besides The Zone of Interest, the only other movie to pick up multiple awards was May December, which was honored for Samy Burch’s screenplay and Charles Melton’s Supporting Actor turn.

The year’s most prestigious precursor weighed in on Tuesday with the AARP Movies for Grownups nominations. By and large, they hew to the major contenders, which is a bit of a bummer since nothing is better than when the M4Gs step out on a limb. But they had their moments! Viola Davis (Air), Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Origin), and Taraji P. Henson (The Color Purple) finally got some notice, and that Leslie Uggams’s nomination for American Fiction is exactly what we have these awards for.

Even so, Oppenheimer was the big winner with 35 points off six nominations. (That momentum keeps momentum-ing …) Killers of the Flower Moon picked up five nominations and 30 points. The Color Purple got 25 points off of four nominations, while The Holdovers, Poor Things, and American Fiction each pulled in 20 points. Barbie earned only 15 points off two nominations, but honestly, pulling in a Best Movie for Grownups nomination for a film in which almost all the principal characters (and the director) are under AARP age is a feat in and of itself.

Tragically, the Best Grownup Love Story category appears to have fallen off the M4G ballot. If that’s a permanent change, we should take a moment to mourn the loss of an award that honored Cyrano, The Greatest Showman, and John Krasinski’s The Hollars. Gone too soon!

Wednesday’s Screen Actors Guild Award nominations were a boon to nearly every Netflix movie in the race except May December. Todd Haynes’s latest masterpiece got blanked: snubs for Natalie Portman, Charles Melton, and Julianne Moore, and while no one really expected the film to receive a Cast nomination, it certainly would have deserved it. Meanwhile, all the other Netflix offerings saw their Oscar hopes get a boost: Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan both nominated for Maestro; Annette Bening and Jodie Foster both nominated for Nyad; Colman Domingo nominated for Rustin.

None of the Netflixes managed to get into the Best Performance by a Cast category, though. Those slots were reserved for Barbie, The Color Purple (which also got a very timely nod for Danielle Brooks in Supporting Actress), Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, and American Fiction. That latter film had maybe its most promising day of awards season with three total nods, including for Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown.

The DGA Awards were about as down-the-middle as they could have been. The directors of the five films at the top of the Oscar race all got nominated: Greta Gerwig for Barbie, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer, Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon, Yorgos Lanthimos for Poor Things, and Alexander Payne for The Holdovers.

In the documentary category, 20 Days at Mariupol, Beyond Utopia, and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie picked up 15 points apiece for their nominations, and American Fiction, Past Lives, A Thousand and One, and Shayda each picked up 15 points for First-Time Feature nominations.

We welcome the new year by locking in all the films’ Rotten Tomatoes scores — and provided your film actually opened in the United States this year (and scored better than 45 percent), you got some kind of points.

Notable films falling into the 100-point top tier (96 percent or above) include several docs (20 Days in Mariupol, Every Body, Stamped from the Beginning, The First Slam Dunk, Black Ice, Beyond Utopia, and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie) and foreign-language titles (Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, the Australian film Shayda, and France’s The Taste of Things). Some of these 100-point films are firmly ensconced in the Oscar race, like The Holdovers, Anatomy of a Fall and Past Lives, while others, like Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret, Blackberry, and A Thousand and One, are out on the fringes. At a cool 96 percent, Mission: Impossible joins the list as the year’s best-reviewed blockbuster (blockbusters down BAD), while Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (96 percent) and Robot Dreams (100 percent!) duke it out for animated supremacy.

Chaos has descended upon the upper ranks of the standings. The late-week surge in points for American Fiction seems to have been the difference in pushing the identical rosters of RandomNumberss and Ares into a tie for first place. Neither of them has Oppenheimer, so you wonder how long they’ll hang on at the top — 13 teams are within 40 points of the lead and 18 are within 100 points. This is an absolute scrum at the moment, and the Oscar nominations, which are less than ten days away, will either blow it all apart or scrum it up further.

You can see the full leaderboard here on the main MFL landing page.

The Producers Guild announces its nominations tomorrow, and between right now and the next time you hear from us, the window for voting for the Oscar nominees will have opened and closed. Life, and the 2024 Academy Awards, comes at you fast.

Questions? Feedback? Can’t find your team or mini-league on the leaderboard? Drop us a line at moviesleague@vulture.com.