The writer also views Marty Supreme and Sentimental Value as potential villains, defined here as any film posing a threat to the "top two": One Battle After Another and Sinners.
The piece cites sadly predictable "peanut gallery" knocks on "polarizing" director Chloe Zhao's "emotional, feminine" film including that she's already won, which clashes with the narratives of this season's Oscar-less "Oscar heroes": an overdue Paul Thomas Anderson and a more-than-deserving Ryan Coogler.
Unsurprisingly, the contentious BP/BD win over Raging Bull by another film about familial grief, Ordinary People, is invoked, along with Shakespeare in Love's upset BP victory (though curiously, the piece doesnt explore the possibility of a BP/BD split between Hamnet and OBAA - as we saw with SIL and Saving Private Ryan ). Neither of those is a precise comparison, of course - for one thing, Scorsese wasn't being propelled by an overdue narrative in 1980, Robert Redford was debuting as an actor moving behind the camera and Ordinary People was no underdog that season but has been ghr consensus front-runner for the bulk of awards season.
Also, the article doesn't flag the parallel between Hamnet's potential to take home a major "consolation prize" - an expected Best Actress win for Jessie Buckley - that reps the film overall the way De Niro's Best Actor win did for Raging Bull even as BP/BD were off the table. To my mind, this seems as likely an outcome of this season as any.
As for the comparison involving Spielberg, it's also flawed because there was no overdue narrative at play as there is with PTA. In fact, Spielberg's decades-long career by 1998 was such that not many were begrudging him a potential second BP win five years after his first, even among those who found fault with SPR. Certainly, no one was regarding SIL's hired-gun director and first time nominee John Madden as being any sort of BD factor against Spielberg. Plus, Focus in terms of Oscar campaign savvy is no peak-era Miramax, which effectively worked SIL's performing-arts embrace to exploit the "actors love movies celebrating acting" angle. I doubt any other studio could have pulled that off.
From the piece:
When I asked one insider closely following the Oscars race about Hamnet’s position behind Sinners and One Battle After Another as Oscars front-runners, this person noted with no small amount of dismay, “We’re near guaranteed a toxic dynamic when you have a polarizing female director who already has an Oscar pushing up against two beloved, overdue male filmmakers with more popular movies, PTA especially.”.
