Oscars 2025: ‘Wicked’ Defies Gravity, But Exactly How Popular Will It Be With Oscar?

First things first, Wicked is going to, in my opinion, make an obscene amount of money.

Jon Chu’s film soars as a 4-quadrant entertainment (male/female over/under 25). That means it will appeal to the kids, their parents, and their grandparents not just over the Thanksgiving weekend but well into the lucrative week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. That’s largely due to incredible amounts of Wizard of Oz fan service, the fan-friendly songs, and co-star Ariana Grande-Butera’s masterpiece of a comedic performance. Yes, it’s too long. Yes, the crafts are inconsistent (largely, I suspect, thanks to the desire to craft a Oz-inspired experience with modern day tech). There are incredibly silly moments that, upon reflection, don’t play as well in the memory as they do in the moment. And I found it a little annoying that the citizens of “Munchkinland” towered over Grande-Butera. But there’s absolutely no denying that it sends the audience out on a massive high with a near 20-minute extended “Defying Gravity” sequence.

And that should be good enough to bring audiences to theaters in droves, saving Hollywood again with some of the best box office we’ve seen since 2023’s Barbie. Anything else is just the cherry on the sundae.

So, now that I’ve seen the film, what will the Academy think?

The closest thematic and epic fantasy analogy to Wicked that comes to mind is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It too opened just before the holiday season with a rabid fan base frothing at the mouth to see it. It features similar themes, an epic runtime, and a family-friendly PG rating. However, Potter translated its box office rewards to initial awards success with guilds, including the Producers Guild, before hitting a brick wall with the Academy. It failed to win a Best Picture nomination and only received three bids: Art Direction, Costume Design, and Score (oh that lovely John Williams score).

So what makes Wicked different?

For one thing, Wicked – for better or for worse – does break free from the anchor of its Broadway source material. That was an accusation that Harry Potter could never outlive thanks to the creative team’s (and I would argue the fan’s) drive to remain slavishly faithful to J.K. Rowling’s original novel. Not with Wicked, though. Quite the opposite, in fact, because the over 2.5-hour running time for the first half of a 2-film project is nearly as long as the original stage production. Chu and team chose to expand the material, ironically giving us a few Potter-esqe moments as Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) teaches Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) how to channel her emotions and control her witchy powers.

Wicked also manages to connect with its characters in a way that Potter never really did. Erivo and Grande-Butera imbue Elphaba and Galinda, respectively, with vitality and complexities. Yes, even Grande-Butera with the plastic Galinda who eventually finds her shiny veneer cracked by Elphaba’s tragic arch. The biggest difference between Wicked and something like Harry Potter is Grande-Butera’s luminescent performance. She understands this character to the core and embodies a tricky blend of absent-minded blondness and deeply repressed insecurities. Grande-Butera floats through the film in a metaphorical (and literal) pink bubble, anchoring every scene in such a way that you can’t take your eyes off her and wonder where she is when she’s not on-screen. This performance belongs in the pantheon of great blond performances like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday or Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch or even the late Teri Garr in Tootsie.

Take Grande-Butera out of the film, and it would crumble.

So, aside from a near-certain supporting actress nomination, what else pops? Paul Tazewell’s costumes seem certain for a nomination as does the makeup and hairstyling. Musicals tend to do well in the sound race, so that makes four. Beyond that, it becomes a little more tricky. Cynthia Erivo is very good as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, but the character is kind of a drag, as completely intended. Perhaps her arc would have been more powerful if the two halves of the musical were fused together. As such, I suspect she suffers most from half of the story as Grande-Butera benefits here from having her strongest material come first.

This is probably the best film that Jon M. Chu has directed. His kinetic staging of the musical numbers energetically propels us through the narrative, but it’s probably not enough to get him into the top five. We’re not going to discuss the cinematography here (those interior, back-lit scenes are tough), but the visual effects are good and, most importantly, serve the story well. The Production design is a marvel in the Emerald City but less so in Munchkinland. That would total around five nominations plus Best Picture, which to me seems fairly certain. In my opinion, it’s not a top five pick, and it certainly won’t win. But, if it’s the box office phenomenon that I think it will be, then it deserves to be nominated.

Wicked is a broadly entertaining film that diverse audiences can celebrate together. If that doesn’t deserve a Best Picture nomination, then what are we even doing here?

A Few Words On Juror #2…

On Friday, Warner Bros. shared Clint Eastwood’s latest (last?) film Juror #2 with members of the Critics Choice association. After seeing the film, I’m confident that, had WB not essentially tried to bury the film and given it the wide release that a filmmaker of Eastwood’s stature deserves, no one would be talking about it. It’s a good film: a potboiler about a juror who discovers the case he’s been assigned is a crime that he actually committed. Eastwood knows how to make a film, and Juror #2 is never boring.

Is it a great film? I certainly didn’t think so.

There are several plot twists that defy all logic, and no one seems to know how to end it satisfactorily. It has good performances across the board, but no one especially stands out. It’s just a very solid, capably made film that works well at home.

But thanks to WB’s mishandling of Juror #2, the film seems to have become an international must-see. Overseas box office numbers are coming in well above what this type of film would traditionally gross. Does that mean the Hollywood Foreign Press recognizes it with a Golden Globe nomination somewhere for Drama or Director or Screenplay? Does the Academy want to honor Eastwood and publicly support him with a thumbing of the nose at WB’s “mishandling” (their strategy was so bad that it really nearly feels deliberately mishandled to give the film some kind of heat)? Can Juror #2 become the latest “cause célèbre” in the vein of To Leslie‘s Andrea Riseborough?

Stranger things have happened.

No predictions this week. Instead, check out The Contending Consensus for the latest.