Jacob Elordi and Amy Madigan accept prizes at the Critics Choice Awards Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Critics Choice Association; Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Critics Choice Association Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment A lot of attention is being paid to the results of Sunday evening's Critics Choice Awards, from which I have just returned home. Among the most notable: One Battle After Another was recognized with best picture, best director (Paul Thomas Anderson) and best adapted screenplay (Anderson) prizes, while Marty Supreme's Timothée Chalamet won best actor and Hamnet's Jessie Buckley won best actress and, in outcomes that were less widely predicted, best supporting actor went to Frankenstein's Jacob Elordi and best supporting actress went to Weapons' Amy Madigan. To all of the above individuals, congratulations on well-deserved recognition! But the question on everyone's mind - including, I'm sure, theirs - is this: do the results of the Critics Choice Awards actually tend to predict the results of the Academy Awards? The answer is tricky... Related Stories Movies Timothée Chalamet Thanks Kylie Jenner, Says He's "Nervous" in Critics Choice Win TV Seth Rogen Jokes He "Can Cancel Therapy" After Critics Choice Win: "This Is What I'm Looking For" Critics Choice Award winners are determined by some 600 critics and journalists who are members of the Critics Choice Association (full disclosure: I'm one of them), whereas Oscar winners are determined by some 11,000 people who actually work on films. Plus, the vast majority of CCA members are based in America, whereas one-quarter of Academy members are based outside of the country. In other words, there is virtually no overlap between the membership of the two groups, save for Leonard Maltin. That being said, because the Critics Choice Awards is the first major televised awards show of the season, coverage of its winners - via the live broadcast and subsequently in articles, photographs, social media posts and the like - reaches quite a few Academy members, and may, consciously or not, shape their thinking about what/who is worthy of their time (they have to decide which movies to prioritize watching) and support as they head in to the Oscar nomination voting window of Jan. 12-16. But on that note, one needs to remember that most critics and journalists who cover film see, as part of their job, everything, or at least a lot more films than most Academy members, especially since the Academy's recent influx of people who are younger and still highly active in their careers, leaving them less time to, well, watch movies. As a result, the CCA tends to spread its votes around a lot of projects (it also has six nominees in most categories, while the Academy has only five), whereas the Academy tends to do a lot more coattail voting (ticking off people from the same film straight down the ballot). In some years, the CCA truly is an early indicator of which way the wind is blowing - last year, for instance, it was the first major awards body to give its top prize to Anora, two days before the Producers Guild and Directors Guild did the same, followed by the Academy. And in some years, the CCA and the Academy agree of a lot of things - eight years ago, both groups picked the exact same winners for their their six highest-profile awards - best picture, director, actor, actress, supporting actor and supporting actress. Most of the time, though, the groups diverge, in those six categories, on at least one or two categories, so I decided to put under the microscope the past decade of results to see what they tell us... Best pictureOverlaps: Six - Spotlight, The Shape of Water, Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Oppenheimer and AnoraSplits: Four - CCA went with La La Land, Academy went with Moonlight; CCA went with Roma, Academy went with Green Book; CCA went with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Academy went with Parasite; CCA went with The Power of the Dog, Academy went with CODAPattern: To me, the interesting splits are the two in which there was a marked difference between the winners: see Roma/Green Brook and The Power of the Dog/CODA. CCA went with the highbrow choice, while the Academy went with the populist choice. This makes sense given not only the groups' different constituencies, but also that the CCA uses a straight vote to pick its best picture winners, which can redound to the benefit of a polarizing film, whereas the Academy employs a preferential ballot, which boosts films that most people at least like.
Bottom line: I suppose One Battle could be vulnerable to some of the same things that probably derailed two other critical and commercial successes between the Critics Choice Awards and the Oscars, La La Land (the challenge of maintaining frontrunner status th