The Zone of Interest, the Holocaust drama directed by Jonathan Glazer and adapted from the novel by Martin Amis, could pull off a shock upset in the best picture Oscar race and beat Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, as a series of interviews with anonymous Oscar voters appears to indicate a surge of support for the film.
After the voting window for the Academy Awards closed on Tuesday, the intervening period before the results are announced on Sunday week is filled with fevered speculation. Much of the fuel is provided by anonymised interviews with Oscar voters, known as the Brutally Honest Oscar Ballots, in which real-life Academy members talk through how they arrived at their particular choices, and in doing so shed much light on how individual films and performers benefit or are disadvantaged in the process.
The brainchild of Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg, the Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot is in fact contrary to Academy regulations, which bars “shar[ing] your voting decisions at any point … includ[ing] speaking with press anonymously”. But it has been a fixture for more than a decade, with revelations including the studio executive who said he never got around to seeing Mad Max: Fury Road and the actor who proclaimed she was “just sick of” Meryl Streep. And the verdict on the 2024 crop is that The Zone of Interest is making an unexpectedly strong challenge for the Oscars headline award.
Since its five-award victory at the Golden Globes, and the subsequent announcement of its status as Oscars nominations leader, the received wisdom is that Oppenheimer, the Christopher Nolan-directed biopic of atomic weapon scientist J Robert Oppenheimer, is the most likely winner of the best picture prize and is far ahead in the bookies’ ratings. The vote-transfer system used by the Oscars is still expected to deliver a victory for Oppenheimer. However, enthusiastic endorsements from unnamed voters are a sign that The Zone of Interest should be taken seriously as a player in the race. The Academy voter interviewed in the Hollywood Reporter described it as “what film-making is supposed to do”, and said he had voted for it over Oppenheimer, while Variety magazine, which is also conducting its own anonymous interviews, said that two out of its five interviewees named The Zone of Interest as their choice for best picture – the same amount as for Oppenheimer – with one participant saying it “haunted me ever since I saw it”.
With its largely German dialogue, The Zone of Interest is also nominated for the best international feature film Oscar, where it is the strong favourite to defeat the likes of air-crash drama Society of the Snow (selected by Spain) and toilet-cleaner character study Perfect Days (selected by Japan). The Zone of Interest’s chances in this category were considerably improved after Cannes winner Anatomy of a Fall, its main non-English-language rival on the awards circuit, was not put forward for the international feature Oscar by its home country France, who opted for foodie romance The Taste of Things instead.
However, the dynamic between The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall is expected to find an echo in the fortunes of Sandra Hüller, who is nominated for best actress for her role in the latter, as a woman on trial for her husband’s death; she also features in the former as Hedwig Höss, wife of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), but for which Hüller did not receive a supporting actress nomination. The weight of both performances saw Hüller named by the Hollywood Reporter’s Brutally Honest voter for best actress, in a category considered hitherto as a contest between Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon and Emma Stone for Poor Things, and by two of Variety’s five anonymous interviewees.
Given the tiny sample size, the views of the Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot does not make for a conclusive poll, but it is indicative that the race is far from done and dusted.
The 96th Academy Awards will take place at the Dolby theatre in Los Angeles on 10 March.