All Bets are on for Best Picture, Oscars 2024

All bets are on for Best Picture, Oscars 2024

The dust has yet to settle on the Oscar trophies for this year’s winners but bets are already on for Best Picture 2024. According to predictions on DraftKings.com, currently, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is Martin Scorsese’s true crime story starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro is favourite, followed by Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan.

Killers of the Flower Moon premiered at the Cannes Film festival last May and will be released worldwide later this year in October. It is based on the 2017 non-fiction novel of the same name and features the 1920s Oklahoma murders linked to oil being discovered in the Osage Nation, a Midwestern Native American tribe. It is currently listed at +250, followed by Oppenheimer with +500 (see Table 1 below).

There are several other potentially strong contenders, although they have long odds of landing the Best Picture award. These include Past Lives with +600 and just making the Top 10 list is Asteroid City with +1400.

 Oscar Nominations and Awards Unpredictable

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Oscar jurors are notoriously unpredictable, and just because sportsbooks have early expectations, this does not mean current bets are any indication of the eventual winners or indeed how the odds will stack closer to the awards night. The winner of Best Picture 2023 at the Academy Awards, Everything Everywhere All at Once was the favourite in the run up to the awards night. However, this was not the case with early predictions, in spite of glowing reviews as early as March 2022. Therefore, much can change from the list below, featuring the Top Ten favourites on DraftKings as of the time of writing. This is even more apparent considering that most films in the Top Ten have not yet been released.

Table 1: DraftKings odds as of July, 3, 2023, 12:35 p.m. CEST

Paddypower.com has slightly different predictions to DraftKings.com, most noticeably with the inclusion of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse at the tenth spot, with the exclusion of Asteroid City.

Table 2: Paddypower.com odds as of July, 3, 2023, 2:00 p.m. CEST

In his 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, screenwriter and novelist William Goldman wrote his now famous quote “nobody knows anything”, referring to the lack of certainty that pervades the motion picture industry. Early odds may not be accurate, but they are a sure bet when it comes to generating early interest and buzz.

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