Who Was 11th Place for Best Picture in 2023?

One of the best parlor games to play when it comes to the Academy Awards, one that has no wrong answers (but near constant debate) is-what was in sixth place at the Oscars?  It's one of those situations where they never release the results (I know there's debate on this, but I think they should release the results after a certain amount of time-maybe release it after fifty years like they do with government documents so Oscar nerds can parcel through each year), but it's a fun debate.  Looking at something like Best Supporting Actor this year, for example, you could easily make a case for Willem Dafoe being in sixth place for Poor Things.  In fact, that's the most likely outcome given how close he was with the precursors.

But few things intrigue me more than the film that was in 11th place in Best Picture.  This year's Best Picture contest was ten-wide, as we're done with the "random number of nominees" nonsense, and it was stark because virtually every single person correctly guessed the ten nominees (including me).  It's honestly not entirely clear what of the ten nominated films (American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Poor Things, and The Zone of Interest) was even in tenth place it was such a static set, though my gut says it was either Maestro or Past Lives.  But in a year that uniform, it's worth a discussion before the season is over over who was in eleventh place.

There are certain guidelines when it comes to predicting the 6th/11th place, and the first is to look to the precursors and the other Oscar nominations to get clues as to who else was in the running.  While the PGA was a carbon copy of the Oscars, and the DGA's also all got in, there are a few films that were close that got Oscar nominations in other categories to invite guesses at Best Picture.  The one that makes the most sense is The Color Purple.  The film was nominated for an acting Oscar (one of only three films nominated for acting prizes without a corresponding Best Picture nomination this year), and most importantly-it was cited for Best Cast at the SAG Awards.  That's usually a valuable precursor, one that almost always comes with a Best Picture nomination.  The Color Purple will sit as the most conventional answer to this question in the years to come.

Looking at precursors and Oscar nominations, there's two other films that kind of fit the bill, though not to the same degree as The Color Purple: Nyad and May December.  Nyad scored two acting nominations, the only film to do so without a Best Picture nomination, it did relatively well in the tech precursors (scoring a Visual Effects Society statue), and was nominated for a WGA Award, which is a decent indicator of larger industry support.  May December, on the other hand, is the only movie that Oscar cited for a writing Oscar this year that wasn't up for an Oscar, and had a Best Picture nomination from the Golden Globes.  Both of these, on their surface, make sense on paper.

But here's the problem with making guesses based on what's on paper-it only makes sense on paper.  I see this a lot online when I see Oscar races of the late 1990's or the 2000's discussed (i.e. Oscar races I lived through but most younger people online only know retroactively), and people dismiss films that were in the discussion but didn't have a lot of traditional precursor recognition.  Just because a film makes sense by today's very stats-based guessing of the Oscars doesn't mean that they were actually doing well in that season.  Buzz for The Color Purple was dying so fast due to its rough box office that Danielle Brooks' nomination was in question by the time the Oscars came around.  May December had three serious acting options, including two former Oscar winners, in its corner, and couldn't land three-it likely only got into the writing citation due to Barbie switching to Adapted.  And Nyad was not seriously considered by anyone as a Best Picture option...this was an acting play by Netflix, and a lack of a nomination for Makeup (hell, it didn't even make the shortlist) shows just what Oscar thought of it.

So I will posit that the actual 11th place was something we haven't seen since 1943-a film that would have only been nominated for Best Picture.  This was at one point a relatively common situation in the 10-wide fields, but after The Ox-Bow Incident, and Oscar going to only 5-wide races the year after, it went the way of the dodo.  Since the re-expansion in 2009, some films have come close (A Serious Man & The Blind Side both only got two nominations, including Best Picture), but no film has pulled this off yet.  Given how weak the films with Oscar nominations were in terms of actual buzz, I suspect that it was actually something that was completely alien to the other nominations that was in 11th place.

Three names come to mind when we're thinking about this.  The first is Air, which was nominated for Best Picture at the Golden Globes, and was in the running for the Screenplay & Supporting Actress Oscars.  It's a traditional biopic, one with a few Oscar-favored actors (Viola Davis, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon), and has a lot of the feel-good elements we normally associate with a Best Picture nomination.  Its inability to get nominated in other categories when it clearly had a shot might indicate a lack of support...but if it was just under the cuff in those races (which is possible), why shouldn't it be just missing here?

The other two names that come to mind for me are Origin and All of Us Strangers.  These are films where it's difficult to tell how much of it was online buzz (Film Twitter can just as often make a contender come to the surface as they can make complete nonsense out of nothing-just ask Penelope Cruz & Carey Mulligan about their recent Best Actress statues for an example of the latter), but they both have the makings of a late-breaking contender.  Lots of buzz at exactly the right time, both were critically-acclaimed but were too late to get precursor traction.  Both featured performances that were in contention for lead statues (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Andrew Scott), to the point where you could make a serious argument they were both in 7th and 6th place, respectively.  And both are the kind of genuinely quality movies where, if you love them, you're putting them on your list no matter their chances.  

I honestly think that one of these two movies was the actual 11th place in 2023...but alas, that will become something I'll have to lose the argument for in about ten years when all of the nuances of this race will have been forgotten and we just gut-check think it's The Color Purple or May December.  Before that happens, share in the comments for posterity what you think was 11th place-and who was the film it came closest to beating.