Has the Conclave Theory of the Oscars Gone up in Smoke?

Peak Conclaveposting.

On the day Oscar nominations were announced, I was texting a friend about the Best Picture race and how it was shaping up to be one of the more chaotic awards seasons in recent memory. Unlike the past few years, there was no obvious winner, with five or six movies with serious potential. It felt much like the plot of Conclave, a Best Picture nominee where Catholic Cardinals vie to become the next pope, each undone by some kind of scandal. A thought came to me: what if the Academy voters were in their own conclave? I could map each film onto a Conclave character and it would make for a fun, lighthearted blog post.

Three weeks after having that idea, I finally sat down to write this and realized two developments kinda wrecked it:

1. This past weekend, Anora just took home the top prizes from both the Directors and Producers Guilds, making it the strongest frontrunner¹. My Conclave theory is up in smoke (pun intended), especially if it wins Best Film at Sunday’s BAFTA Awards. If Anora ends up winning on March 2, then this year was really an analog to the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary, where Mitt Romney held firm as a rotating cast of second-place candidates rose and fell in the polls. But I do not think there is an audience for a piece that compares The Substance to Rick Santorum.

2. At least two other people beat me to publishing this concept. Vulture had a piece by Rebecca Alter on January 23, the day nominations were announced (that was fast!), complete with fun Photoshops. A week later, Michael Schulman tackled the same subject in the New Yorker, layering in historical context and had the benefit of incorporating all of the drama surrounding the star of Emilia Pérez and her bad tweets, which really launched the Conclave conjecture. So uh, there goes my first-mover advantage. Don’t procrastinate, friends!

But as David Thorne once wrote, “opinions are like nipples, everybody has one.” No one can stop me from Conclaveposting. So here is my own list of Best Picture contenders as the Cardinals of Conclave. This was devised well before last night, when I Googled “oscars movies conclave cardinals,” though there’s quite a few commonalities to the Vulture and New Yorker articles. Big thanks to my movie buddies Jason and Keith for spitballing with me and I must confess than the most inspired ideas were theirs.

Side note: voting on the Oscars winners began earlier today and ends at the end of next Tuesday… then it’s another two weeks before the main event. Why so long? It doesn’t take that long to tabulate electronic ballots!

Beyond this point, there are plot spoilers for Conclave! If you haven’t seen the film yet and plan to do so… come back to this later!

Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) is Anora

American, progressive, and fun. Much like its paired Cardinal, the Palme d’Or winner was considered an early favorite, but had seemingly fizzled out as the season marched on. Where this diverges from Conclave is that Anora has suddenly come back into contention; those big Directors and Producers Guild wins last weekend make it the favorite to win, if you look at betting markets or Gold Derby. But it’s an open question as to whether those guild prizes signal similar strength amongst the other branches of the Academy.

Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) is Wicked

The Nigerian conservative had the most votes during the first few rounds of balloting but fell short of the two-thirds supermajority needed to be anointed the Pope. His social views, stuck in the 20th century, sort of align with how in the old days, Broadway musical adaptations like Wicked were consistently nominated for Best Picture (particularly in the 1930s and 60s). Both Adeyemi and Wicked suffered from gossip about an illicit relationship, but since most Academy voters do not adhere to Catholic morality in their decisionmaking, Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater’s mutual adultery has not hurt the film’s Oscars chances.

Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) is Nickel Boys

Neither can win, but both are above the fray² and way better than everyone/everything else. (Nickel Boys is now out on VOD, btw.)

Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) is The Brutalist

The moderate highbrow choice. Tremblay hails from Montréal, aka North American but wants to be European, just like The Brutalist. Would be a sensible winner but doesn’t seem to have enough passion behind it to power through. Both were involved in a money-related controversy: Tremblay bribed his colleagues in the Church, The Brutalist had that micro-scandal about the use of AI in post-production. While those payoffs doomed Tremblay’s papal prospects, apparently it’s no big deal if you’re the mayor of New York City.

THANKS JASON

Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is Emilia Pérez

More than any of the other pairings in this list, Tedesco is his representative film: he’s just as brash, loud, and chaotic as Emilia Pérez. He also shares the noxious beliefs of that movie’s creatives. “Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants.” Who said that, the reactionary Italian character in Conclave or the director of Emilia Pérez? Both men are also nicotine enjoyers: Tedesco hitting the vape is one of the few times that Conclave dares to verge on camp, and the Jacques Audiard is French, so I just assume he smokes a pack a day.

And don’t forget Karla Sofía Gascón’s Islamophobic tweets, which the Italian traditionalist would approve of.

The film’s score is Dune: Part Two

This comes from Keith, and while I disagree with his views on Dune Two, I do agree with the assessment of the music that Volker Bertelmann wrote for Conclave: “Regressively loud blusterer who’s really kinda boring. Very Zimmerian.”

Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is Conclave

This is the most obvious Cardinal to movie pair, and for good reason. Conclave is milquetoast and unexceptional, same as Lawrence, the “manager” of the flock. Nobody loves this movie. But nobody hates it either, and the Oscars’s ranked choice voting system could favor such a victor in a year of polarization.

While it would be fitting that an awards season that felt like the events Conclave would end with that movie actually winning, the more Cardinal Lawrence thing would be for it to snatch up some surprising wins in the earlier categories (keep an eye on Score and Screenplay), making everyone think that it has a real chance at Best Picture. Except…

Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is A Complete Unknown (or is he?)

Benitez was literally A Complete Unknown at the start of the film, and he winds up becoming the dang Pope. This whole narrative was predicated on my now very shaky belief that the Bob Dylan biopic wins Best Picture. While this film wasn’t expected to do quite this well with getting so many Oscar nominations, it wasn’t surprising that it got nominated for Best Picture.

But there’s one Best Picture nomination that almost nobody had predicted, and the late-breaking contender has steadily gained passionate backers both inside and outside of the Academy. If this interminable awards season does end up following the plot of Conclave all the way to the end, then the decision is clear. The Oscar goes to I’m Still Here.

Let me know your thoughts on the Conclave theory of the Oscars, or if you have different Cardinal-movie pairings.

1. “Frontrunner” is a common term used in awards punditry, which borrows a lot of vocab from how the media covers political campaigns. But the Oscars race is not directly analogous to a presidential one. In the leadup to an election, we have multiple polls that sample the same group of people who will vote for the real thing. The “precursors” to the Academy Awards — the Golden Globes, the DGA Awards, the SAG Awards, and so on — are not nearly as representative. Zero members of the Golden Globes organization are also in the Academy (though they are useful in drawing attention to the movies that Oscar voters haven’t seen yet). A subset of the guilds are Academy members, giving them a stronger correlation, but it’s a biased sample. The last words in “DGA” and “PGA” are “America,” and there now are enough international Academy members that could tilt the vote towards another film, if you believe that Americans and non-Americans have different tastes. OK, enough Oscars punditry!

2. Above the Jomo Fray, perhaps.