When The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King dominated the 2004 Academy Awards, winning all 11 of its categories including best picture, it made history. Yes, it was the biggest Oscars sweep ever. But it also was probably the first best picture winner with its own toy line.
Until then, well-regarded blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark weren’t able to win the big one. And it hasn’t happened since LOTR, despite worthy efforts from Black Panther, both Avatars and Barbie (the only best picture nominee actually based on a toy line).
But this year’s best picture winner could finally herald the resurgence of commercial-juggernaut cinema.
No, not Dune: Part Two, though it could earn a picture nomination. In terms of going all the way, it’s Wicked of which I speak, that Jon M. Chu movie musical about misunderstood witches and talking animals. Though, granted, its toy rollout has not been without its hiccups, as the Mattel toys contained a….highly unfortunate packaging misprint. (Whatever you do, don’t google “Wicked.com” around children.)
Why the fixation on toys? Because it speaks to a number of prejudices that Academy members are assumed to have against a movie like Wicked: It’s too childish. Too frivolous. Too commercial. Too plastic.
Perhaps that’s why the movie may struggle to earn a spot in the Oscars discussion. In a recent survey of awards insiders by The Los Angeles Times, Wicked ranked 18th overall in its best picture chances — three-quarters of those surveyed didn’t cite Wicked at all — though that was taken before the movie became a phenomenon. The Hollywood Reporter’s own Wizard of Odds, Scott Feinberg, ranked it a far more optimistic 6th out of his top 10.
A week into its release, however, Wicked is starting to shape up as a serious contender. Now, Elphaba isn’t flying off to the Western sky with statuette in hand quite yet. But there’s no denying that Wicked has a lot going for it in its bid to win best picture.
Let’s start with the obvious. Academy members don’t just like Wicked — they love Wicked. At the Directors Guild, PGA and SAG screenings in both Los Angeles and New York, as well as at the Academy screening, capacity crowds burst into applause after many songs and gave the film a rapturous standing ovation after the cliffhanger finale.
Guild members are known to give standing Os — they did last year for Oppenheimer when Christopher Nolan emerged for his Q&A — but according to those in attendance, the effusiveness for Wicked has been at another level.
Then there’s those grosses. We are coming off a near extinction-level event for cinema — i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic, during which small streaming-friendly films like CODA and Nomadland won best picture.
But in the post-plague era, some voters seem to be hungry for spectacle. Last year, Oppenheimer was the perfect mix of IMAX-sized visuals and weighty subject matter — a billion-dollar earner the Academy could proudly point to and say, “This is the cinematic gold standard.” That bodes well for Wicked.
While skeptics and campaigners on other films will cite Wicked as inarguably less serious than Oppenheimer, Universal and its consultants will lean into the material’s darker and politically resonant themes to show that it can hold its own on the substance front.
The film actually has political roots. It began as a best-selling book by Gregory Maguire, who wrote it during Operation Desert Storm in 1990 after seeing the headline “Saddam Hussein: The Next Hitler?” Maguire envisioned a dystopian Oz where the Wizard is a fascist despot.
Some years later, when Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz teamed to adapt the novel into a musical, George W. Bush was in power and beating the drums of war ahead of a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Holzman and Schwartz laced the script with allusions to ideas like “regime change” (how Glinda refers to the house falling on the Wicked Witch of the East).
In 2024, there can be no mistaking who the Wizard is meant to evoke. And while Universal didn’t specifically plan for the film to open just weeks after Donald Trump’s election, here we are nonetheless. And if there’s one thing that could unite many members of the disparate and far-flung Academy electorate right now, it’s post-election depression — and a desire for action. That could lead them to the Emerald City. As at least one voter said, “If your vote for president didn’t count, you’re going to make it count for Wicked.”
There will, of course, be buckets of water for Wicked to sidestep along the way. One is the preferential voting system, which requires voters to rank best picture choices and generally has enabled smaller films like Moonlight, which presumably draw a broad consensus, to take the big prize. Wicked could end up being too big and splashy and divisive for its own good, resulting in a smaller film winning.
The film is also the first of a two-part series. Voters might think to hold off on feting Chu’s achievement until after the second film’s release, bestowing one best picture prize on the entire vision. That, after all, is what happened with Return of the King: All three chapters of Peter Jackson’s fantasy epic were nominated for best picture, but only the final installment won, as voters in a sense rewarded the canon.
Still, the Wicked case has its merits. With this year’s Oscars coming off both the devastation of COVID-19 and the SAG and WGA strikes (and the ongoing specter of streaming and AI), it could lead many Hollywood-employed voters to reward a humane (and human-made) blockbuster that validates the traditional studio system.
In other words, it could just be a matter of months before we say “move over, Mattel’s Glinda and Elphaba Poseable Fashion Dolls — time to make room for Oscar.”
