‘And the Worst Film To Watch With Your Parents is…’: Our alternative 2024 Oscar winners

The traditional Academy Awards formula could do with an update – and it doesn’t take four hours to find out our winners

Every once in a blue moon, something vaguely interesting happens at the Academy Awards. John Travolta mangles a not-even-particularly-tricky name. The wrong Best Picture winner is announced. Somebody is slapped, hard. Generally, though, a successful Oscars means a boring Oscars. 
At the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood this weekend, the usual formula will be followed. The red carpet arrivals coverage will feel as if it might never end, or at least join up with the start of next year’s ceremony. When it eventually does cease, the safe-as-they-come host, Jimmy Kimmel, will make some gentle jokes about Barbenheimer and AI and how films are now all so long and, don’t worry, the bathwater’s safe to drink…! And then the show will get going.
Cillian Murphy will win. Christopher Nolan will win. Robert Downey Jr will win. In fact, just generally, Oppenheimer will win. Da’Vine Joy Randolph will also win. Emma Stone will possibly win, but Lily Gladstone will probably win. Ryan Gosling will likely steal the show by performing ‘I’m Just Ken’ mostly deadpan while Mark Ronson pretends to play the bass. And I don’t know how and definitely don’t know why, but Barry Keoghan will appear naked. These are facts.
Yet when all is said and done, when the stars have gone home with their £140,000 goodybags and we wake up on Monday morning to scroll through the galleries, absorb the expertise of lip-readers and titter at the memes, how much will we really have learned about cinema in 2023? It was an excellent and interesting 12 months for film, but an argument could be made – it’s this, I’m making it now – that the traditional Oscars formula could do with an update. 
We could have better, alternative awards to better, alternatively reflect the big screen year. There were hits, there were flops, there was sex, there were hats. There was sex in hats. Oh god, there were so many hats. Why were there so many hats? A question for another time. But here are those awards. The Alternative Oscars 2024 – the good thing is it doesn’t take four hours to find out the winners.
A remarkably strong year for Dad Movies, potentially rivalling 2019, when Hollywood responded to a film called Little Women being successful by producing 1917, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit and Joker for any precious fellas out there. 
Every few months in 2023, a new testosterone-fuelled Bloke Movie arrived, all sticky engine oil and swaggering genius. Ferrari is a nominee. Gran Turismo is right up there. Oppenheimer, a film both about brilliant men talking and a massive explosion coming too early, would win in almost any other year.
But the victor must be Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Battle strategies, occasional but not uncomfortable sex scenes, accents that make no sense in their setting, and such a long running time that you could conceivably fall asleep at the Battle of Austerlitz and wake up before Waterloo. Almost the perfect Dad Movie. If only Napoleon drove a Porsche.
Barry Keoghan, this one’s for you. Please, rest.
The Barbie campaign was entertaining but, given it started with on-set paparazzi shots in June 2022, felt exhausting by the end. A special mention must go to Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s commitment, however. No two people that attractive need ever develop personalities as well, but they charmed the world for months and months. Will Robbie suffer PTSD whenever she sees the colour pink for years to come? Probably, but it was worth it.
No, despite a late and largely metallic surge by Dune: Part Two, which may be entered next year, the winner is obviously Marvel’s Madame Web, a film so bad even its own star, Dakota Johnson, clearly thought it was absolute drivel even while she was being paid to sell it. As Ellen DeGeneres knows all too well, Johnson occasionally feels overcome by the urge to ignore all showbiz mores and say precisely what she thinks.
So it was with Madame Web, a terrible film Johnson had a terrible time making, and couldn’t be bothered to pretend otherwise. After the critical pannings, she just said the quiet part out loud. 
“I’m not surprised that this has gone down the way it has,” she told Bustle. “I had never done anything like it before. I probably will never do anything like it again because I don’t make sense in that world. And I know that now. But sometimes in this industry, you sign on to something, and it’s one thing and then as you’re making it, it becomes a completely different thing, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’” 
Priscilla, Saltburn, He Went That Way, and The Sweet East’s Jacob Elordi, you tall and versatile drink of bathwater, come on down. Paul Mescal is always in the conversation but, owing to his victory in another award below, ruled himself out. We’ll next see Elordi in Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, which feels fitting, since Hollywood has evidently created a monster. Here’s a fun fact: Elordi is actually not in Dune: Part Two. It just feels as if he is. That’s impact.
For so long it seemed like this was wrapped up by Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which managed to dominate the entertainment pages for months with a row about a prosthetic nose despite Leonard Bernstein’s own children thinking it was fine, the nose in question being barely noticeable in the finished film, and Cooper looking so very crestfallen and apologetic all year.
Then it looked like Barbie, a fundamentally light and charming movie about a toy, had it sewn. Barbie didn’t really require any more thought than “That was a very fun film!”, but definitely didn’t deserve an entire summer of internet debate about the patriarchy, capitalism and feminist waves. When Matt Hancock created a parody video, Barbie mania died. 
But the eventual winner is Saltburn, a watchable but quite tacky satire that takes Brideshead Revisited, the collected works of Patricia Highsmith, an undoubtedly superb cast, the second best Sophie Ellis-Bextor song, three vaguely gross scenes pre-prepared to sicken Gen Z, and the Hugh Grant dancing scene from Love Actually… and set the internet alight. Apparently it was a treatise on class in Britain in the 21st Century, or something? Come on.
A very easy win here for Foe, a sci-fi romance starring two of the greatest young stars of their era, Irish Oscar-nominee and generational icon Saoirse Ronan and Irish Oscar-nominee and generational icon Paul Mescal. On paper, it had it all. Was the sci-fi element so powerful that it was set in a different dimension, which human memory cannot penetrate? It’s the only explanation.
A possible winner is Poor Things, the rumpy-pumpy film of the year. But the clear victor, again, is Saltburn, which not only contained numerous sex scenes but might have also provoked an urgent tightening-up of wills the following morning.
What a year for hats on film. GQ astutely called them 2023’s “best supporting actor”. (Hactor?) Oppenheimer, Wonka, Asteroid City, Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, and obviously Napoleon… It was all happening up top. 
But is there a better hat than Jesse Plemons’ in Killers of the Flower Moon? Answers on a postcard. It’s just such a hat, you know?