I’ll say it: 2023 was a better movie year than 2024

We’re about to bid goodbye to 2024, the awards season is in full swing, and we have a rough idea which films are favourites for the big ones like the Golden Globes and Oscars. But here’s something to ponder—there are no clear winners we can put our money on, are there? After all, 2024 has been a middling year at the movies compared to 2023, and the result is utter unpredictability and chaos.

Sure, in 2023 it felt like the top honours could be anyone’s game. It was because the competition was so neck-to-neck that people couldn’t pick favorites from all the great cinema, brilliant performances, and strong fan campaigns done for each film.

Do you remember how well we cinephiles ate in 2023? We got the great Barbenheimer phenomenon, with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer emerging as a sure thing with critical and financial success, and people certain that this was the year Cillian Murphy finally got his overdue Oscar. Meanwhile Greta Gerwig’s Barbie had the cash registers flashing pink, making itself hard to ignore in awards consideration. There was a Martin Scorsese movie in the mix; despite that audacious runtime, Killers of The Flower Moon was bound to be in the running for all the top honours. 

If someone said The Holdovers was the best film of the year for them, it was believable. If another said American Fiction—which as it proclaims on its poster—was ‘the best picture of the year’, you’d find hard to argue otherwise. And if someone was delighted by Emma Stone’s performance and Yorgos Lanthimos’ whimsical and steampunk Poor Things, you’d instantly agree that they deserved awards because you had never seen anything like it. 

And lets not forget, the festival favourites—Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest, Maestro, Fallen Leaves, Perfect Days—and the dark horses like The Color Purple, Rustin, and May December… films that further stacked the already impossible to choose categories like acting, screenplay, director, and best film. It wasn’t just the top awards that were this tightly wrung. You didn’t envy any jury that had to choose from amongst Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Boy and The Heron, and Elemental to award the Best Animated Feature, or pick between the impossible Supporting Actor and Actress nominees.

Even as many of the tentpole films fell flat at the box office, the 2023 slate of films seemed to hit the spot in every genre, budget, and release medium: Godzilla Minus One, John Wick 4, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny, All of Us Strangers, Saltburn, Priscilla, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Wonka, Air, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 3, Red, White, & Royal Blue, Joy Ride, Murder Mystery 2, Cocaine Bear, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Anyone But You, and more.

That’s not to say there aren’t any good films in the mix in 2024. We started off the year on a high note with Dune: Part Two, and it has been a good run so far. But has it been great and worth propping up against 2023? That is the question, isn’t it? The irony is that 2024 also feels like the top awards could go to anyone at this point. But the reason is quite the opposite. When compared to the stacked slate for 2023, 2024 is not even remotely close to how unequivocally excellent the films last year were.

To list a few films that have generated quite the buzz, both in popularity and awards consideration in 2024, we have The Brutalist, Conclave, The Substance, Anora, Challengers, Wicked, Gladiator II, Deadpool & Wolverine, Emilia Pérez, Queer, Sing Sing, The Wild Robot, Inside Out 2, A Different Man, Twisters, The Apprentice, A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, Nickel Boys, September 5, Babygirl, Nosferatu, I Saw The TV Glow, Heretic, Kinds of Kindness, Hit Man, The Fall Guy, Saturday Night, Maria, The Last Showgirl, All We Imagine As Light, I’m Still Here, Furiosa: The Mad Max Saga, Longlegs, The Idea of You, Rebel Ridge, Carry-On, Alien: Romulus, Trap, Late Night With The Devil, and Civil War, amongst many others.

Now, these are all good, some even great, films that have done well at the box office. We also had an almost Barbie-like frenzy around Wicked, even if they couldn’t pull off a repeat of Barbenheimer with Glicked (Gladiator II + Wicked). But think about it. If I were to ask you to close your eyes and pick a clear favourite or place your bets on who would win the top awards for the year, would the names come to you easily?

We all thought the Lisan al-gaib Dune: Part Two could be our Oppenheimer this year, with Wicked as our Barbie. But that’s clearly not the case because there’s a stark dearth of consensus on whether even the top films of the year are actually all that. Anora and The Substance are quite the awards darlings; and yet there are those who think they’ve over-performed at all the awards so far. Questions are being raised on whether Isabella Rossellini and Selena Gomez deserve their supporting actress nominations for Conclave and Emilia Pérez, respectively.

Moreover, it feels like some truly great films, like Juror #2, Dìdi, His Three Daughters, Hard Truths, The Piano Lesson, The Outrun, and I’m Still Here and more didn’t get quite the attention they deserved. Or that actors like Saoirse Ronan (The Outrun) and Josh O’Connor (Challengers) and directors like Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, Queer) were snubbed.

The lack of a gold standard in film for the year 2024 has left a lot of space for surprises and snubs, and doubts to creep in. Take a look at the recently announced Golden Globe nominations, or other regional and critics choice awards that have happened so far, and it becomes more evident that there are no sure-shots in the race this year. And frankly, the nominations feel like headless chickens without a clear favourite leading in each category.

If anything, the success of most films and their consequent nominations feel more campaign-driven and based off of social media hype around the film than their actual merit. And even then, some of the nomination patterns are a mystery. Many wondered why Wicked and Emilia Pérez had gotten more nominations than Dune: Part Two, including a snub for Best Director, when it was unanimously a technical marvel as well as an absolute spectacle, with powerful performances from its cast and vision from director Denis Villeneuve.

Now look, nobody’s downplaying the quality of these films. It’s just that in the shadow of the year that was 2023, their light seems to pale a little in comparison. And even collectively, they just cannot hold a candle to the aura of 2023 in film. So you know that feeling when you aren’t sure of the answer to a question and you flounder and add unnecessary details to make it seem like you know what you’re talking about? The current awards season feels exactly like that.