🔮 Savage Oscars Picks

How to profit from elitism and bad taste

Jacob Savage is an LA-based writer whose essay “The Lost Generation,” an account of how DEI reshaped hiring across media and academia, was one of the most-argued-about pieces of 2025, garnering a 65 million view tweet and reshares from the Vice President.

If, like Jacob, you believe that identity politics and its attendant poor taste continues to drive Hollywood, then, why not use this knowledge to make some +EV Oscars picks?

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It’s important, before thinking about this year’s Oscar contests, to remember that last year one of the worst movies of all time nearly won Best Picture.

Emilia Pérez wasn’t just bad — it was transcendently bad, a sort of maleficent sui generis achievement in its own right. It was, quite literally, Springtime for Hitler told earnestly: a film in which an evil Mexican drug lord undergoes gender reassignment surgery and becomes an Actually Really Good Caring Person. This was wokeness as filtered through the eyes of a clueless French Boomer, who seemingly had just discovered trans issues and cartel movies and musicals, and couldn’t believe his luck that no one had combined them yet.

Netflix (successfully!) positioned this terrible film as the anti-Trump Best Picture pick and of course the Academy ate it up. You could practically hear the acceptance speeches: “a film that transcends borders, sexualities, nationalities,” etc. The only reason the worst movie of 2024 didn’t sweep the Oscars is its transgender star was revealed to be something of a Nazi.

Whoops

Bad movies have of course won Best Picture before. But Emilia Pérez represented something new: a bad foreign movie not just elevated by sentiment, but by politics and incompetence.

How Did This Happen?

The answer, like so much else, goes back to 2015. That year only white actors were nominated for acting awards, the media freaked out, and #OscarsSoWhite was borne. In the aftermath, the Academy launched its A2020 initiative with the goal of doubling the number of women and people of color by 2020. What followed was an unprecedented expansion in membership, from roughly 6,000 in 2015 to over 11,000 today.

People focus on the increase in female and minority representation, but the real story is the internationalization of the Academy itself.

Nearly 3K (50%!) of new members since 2017 are not American. As anyone familiar with the old Hollywood Foreign Press Association can tell you, international bodies are invariably more corrupt, more manipulable, and more stupid than their American counterparts. The Academy is no exception.

Three of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners in modern Oscar history have occurred since 2020 (Nomadland, CODA, and Anora). In 2020, the year Parasite won (which deserved it!), Polymarket fan favorite Uncut Gems wasn’t even nominated. Everything Everywhere All At Once — two hours of the same annoying set-piece — beat The Banshees of Inisherin and Tár and Top Gun. Oppenheimer had to gross $952 million for the Academy to acknowledge it.

So: Stop treating the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences like an American body with American tastes and norms. The key to Oscar alpha isn’t scraping box office data, or going to Bob’s Big Boy to hear a grip talking about how he overheard his DP say PTA is finished, or flying to Cannes to hear Zaslav explain why neither of his Best Picture nominees deserves to win. It’s to inhabit a different sensibility entirely.

Think instead like a new member of the Academy: you’re a middling European cinematographer with mediocre English and a limited understanding of American politics, and the keys to the kingdom have been deposited in your lap.

With that in mind, let’s get to the picks:

BEST PICTURE

One Battle After Another isn’t a great movie. It’s not even really a good movie — that ridiculous, earnest ending, the feeling that tonally everyone is in a different film — but it is a beautifully-crafted major film that didn’t suck, and that counts for something. Plus PTA has been in the game forever; he’s basically owed an Oscar for Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood.

Sinners is more interesting. The industry has been telling itself for years that representation sells, and mostly it hasn’t, and along comes Ryan Coogler and makes it sell. He took what should have been a niche period horror film — Black musicians, Mississippi, vampires— and made a studio movie that didn’t lose money. In 2025, that’s a miracle.

For the Academy’s American members this feels like a genuine toss-up, with Sinners surging at the right time. But the foreign contingent doesn’t really know what to make of either of these films, which are both more culturally American than any frontrunner since Green Book, a movie so Boomer cringe it murdered the White Savior era for good. After all, the Euros don’t know the blues and don’t know the South. But they do have vague ideas about leftist radicals — Baader-Meinhof! Carlos the Jackal!— and a Serious Film by a Serious Filmmaker is internationally legible in a way that American genre films aren’t.

CONSENSUS: One Battle probably has the edge after all, along with PTA for Best Director.

UPSET: If you’re feeling frisky, and think the Europeans still feel personally responsible for the state of American race relations, Sinners makes sense. The trade coverage of Coogler’s contract negotiation — he secured ownership of the film through 2050 — has been framed as a racial empowerment narrative, as though Hollywood deal memos were a new chapter in the civil rights movement.

But keep PTA as Best Director.

BEST ACTOR

CONSENSUS: Chalamet has been campaigning hard and somewhat embarrassingly and seems to have crippled his own chances. A few weeks ago, when Michael B. Jordan was sitting at 7%, he looked like an excellent sleeper. Now that he’s above 50%, I’m not so sure. Because here’s the thing about the foreign contingent: they don’t love Timmy, and they don’t love Michael B. Jordan.

UPSET: What they love is Leonardo DiCaprio. The glitz, the glamour, the 22-year-olds. Leo is Hollywood for them, ever since they fell in love with cinema watching Titanic for the first time at the old cinémathèque. If the American vote fractures between Jordan and Chalamet, the Euros break for Leo. His stoned, washed-up revolutionary was the best thing in One Battle — and the Academy loves nothing more than rewarding a legend for playing against type. At 6%, he’s extremely undervalued.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

CONSENSUS: The conventional wisdom is that One Battle is a sure thing: PTA will take Best Adapted Screenplay as the capstone if it sweeps the other awards, or as consolation if he doesn’t. But Hamnet has been showing signs of life (in LA circles, if not the Polymarket chart), and there’s no law that says consolation prizes land in the screenplay category. If One Battle underperforms, it will likely underperform here too.

UPSET: Hamnet is a film about the mysterious alchemy between suffering and art, which is just unbelievably Euro-coded when you think about it. Writers writing about writing, the more boring and treacly, the better. What foreigners do know is that they’re supposed to like Shakespeare, even if they don’t understand it (and here’s Chloe Zhao, admitting to not understanding it). At 3%, Hamnet is a steal.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

CONSENSUS: Similar “sure thing” situation in the Original Screenplay category, with Coogler supposed to take Best Original Screenplay as capstone if Sinners sweeps, or as consolation prize if he gets shut out of the major awards. But again, the foreign contingent doesn’t quite understand Sinners as a screenplay...not enough talking, too many vampires.

UPSET: At 2%, Marty Supreme is mispriced. The Euros, for what it’s worth, have no idea what’s going on in a writing category — which makes them true wild cards. Our hypothetical DP didn’t fly to Los Angeles to vote for a vampire movie.

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

CONSENSUS: Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, and Sirat are all well-regarded, and Sentimental Value is the consensus favorite. Foreign films are the Academy’s new home turf, and the safe money says it wins.

UPSET: The vast majority of Academy members haven’t seen most of these films. If Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, and Sirat split the cinephile vote, the political bloc gets its moment. The Voice of Hind Rajab — a docudrama reconstructing the final hours of a six-year-old Palestinian girl trapped under fire in Gaza — is currently sitting at 2% on Polymarket. It is a genuinely harrowing film. It is also a film that allows its winners to shout “Free Palestine” from the podium of the biggest awards show on earth.

Assuming a third of the Academy votes on politics — and Emilia Pérez‘s nomination suggests this may be a conservative estimate — and if the cinephile vote fractures, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a gift at 2%. Because we know how Euros feel about Palestine.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

CONSENSUS: The Perfect Neighbor is the heavy favorite — it’s a Netflix documentary, which means the Academy has already seen it, whether they wanted to or not. Mr. Nobody Against Putin feels like three wars ago. The Greenland flags have already gone up in Echo Park.

UPSET: The Alabama Solution is the best film in the category: real footage, real horror, prisoners filming their own abuse on contraband cell phones. The documentary branch has surprising taste. Unfortunately, the rest of the Academy, like the rest of us, has Netflix.

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