This year’s Academy Awards race for Best Picture is a lot like last year’s race for the Republican presidential nomination. Only the stakes are so much higher!The early frontrunner, Argo may have peaked too early, kind of like Mitt Romney did. Next came Silver Linings Playbook (the cuckoo candidate, à la Michele Bachmann), Life of Pi (if only Rick Perry could roar like that tiger), Lincoln (as reserved as Ron Paul), and Zero Dark Thirty (as controversial as Rick Santorum). I hate to compare Les Misérables to Newt Gingrich, but they both polarized voters. And the much-anticipated The Great Gatsby pushed back its candidacy (like Chris Christie). As BuzzFeed’s Richard Rushfield observed last November, the Oscar race for Best Picture had never been so wide open.
But if there’s one thing the Academy loves, it’s a comeback story—and a funny thing happened on the red carpet. The early precursor awards that were supposed to go to Lincoln went to Argo instead. Ben Affleck’s film about how the CIA (and Hollywood!) heroically saved six diplomats during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis swept top honors at the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice Awards in January. Over at Gold Derby, which tracks various Oscar races, 13 pundits still predict Lincoln will win Best Picture compared with 10 for Argo. If anything, though, with a month until the Feb. 24 Oscars ceremony, the momentum seems to be moving in Argo’s direction, a movie that paints the showbiz industry as an international superpower.
