Final Oscar Predictions: Will 'Anora' Take Center Stage or Is 'The Brutalist' Building Towards the Upset of the Season?

Happy Saturday morning, folks!

Before we get started, I was a recent guest on the So Bad It’s Good podcast hosted by Ryan Bailey and presented by Betches, so if you can’t get enough Oscar talk ahead of Sunday night, be sure and check out our conversation, which is a fun one.

Elsewhere, Universal announced it will screen its live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon at CinemaCon, which means I’ll probably be doing mushrooms and seeing Cirque du Soleil that night. No offense. Say hello if you see me, but remember, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!

Meanwhile, what happens on set apparently doesn’t matter to the Academy, which snubbed the actual hair department head on The Substance in favor of her assistant, who took over for the final three weeks of production when she was forced to go on leave for family-related health issues. It’s a last-minute Oscar scandal, albeit after the close of voting. Womp womp!

And finally, while James Gunn doesn’t like me passing along casting rumors I hear from agencies about his precious DCU — which is why he froths at the mouth whenever he gets the chance to discredit me — I nonetheless hear that Clayface casting conversations are happening all over town, done director deal or not.

In addition to Radcliffe, I revealed Thursday that the other name I’d heard was Kieran Culkin, the star of HBO’s Succession, who is poised to win an Oscar on Sunday night. He could be a hot commodity, and he’s reasonably priced as well.

Perhaps Radcliffe and Culkin are simply listed as a “prototype” on some agency casting grid, and perhaps that prototype is wrong, but regardless, that’s what I hear. I tell you what I hear, and more often than not, it pans out. That’s why you subscribe.

If you guys only want someone to wake you up when the role actually gets cast, then read the trades, which are great at telling you what has happened, and less great at telling you what is going to happen.

They used to do “list stories” or mention who might be in the mix for a role, but then they all found themselves under the same corporate umbrella and stopped being competitive with each other, which is why those kinds of “list stories” have all but disappeared these days.

Deadline actually did run a “testing” story recently for the role of Elle Woods in the Prime Video series Elle, but that was probably because they noticed me dominating the TV news cycle for the past month and simply couldn’t stand to lose it. Why media reporters haven’t noticed the same thing beats me, but I wouldn’t trust most media reporters to recognize a good story if it was staring them in the face.

I guess I need to hire a publicist! Know any good ones?

Meanwhile, the DC fanboys who accuse me of “scamming” with this multi-thousand-word daily newsletter should know, for the record, that in the past few days, the trades confirmed Sharon Stone’s casting in Euphoria, Patrick Wilson’s casting in Cape Fear, and Oscar Nunez’s return to The Office, all of which were first reported by yours truly. Meanwhile, Deadline had the balls to slap “Exclusive” on a story about Al Pacino joining Dead Man’s Wire that I first reported several weeks ago. Go figure!

But hey, I get it… the indie film buyers around the world who need to know that Pacino is in that indie movie don’t necessarily subscribe to this newsletter. But they should, and their well-paid publicists should probably do a better job of helping their clients expand their media diets rather than strategize based on ancient playbooks. They have forgotten how to make noise, and that’s because they choose to blend into the steady white noise emanating from the trades these days — for the most part.

Every now and then, they still deliver a cool story, like Scott Feinberg’s excellent oral history about Parasite’s charmed awards journey for THR.

Today, you’ll read my absolute final Oscar predictions, as well as early predictions for next year’s Oscars. Plus, my overdue tribute to the late Gene Hackman, who may have died under mysterious circumstances, but there’s no mystery surrounding his place in Hollywood lore as one of the all-time great movie stars.

There are also items about the Crazy Rich Asians TV series, Sharon Horgan returning to HBO, Austin Butler teaming up with Saoirse Ronan, Tatiana Maslany’s new Apple TV+ series, a remake of A Walk to Remember, the original Scream star joining Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again, the latest additions to The ‘Burbs TV series, before weighing in on the trailer for Netflix’s limited series Adolescence, which is presented as a one-shot.

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