Take a breath, everybody! The war of attrition that is awards season has finally ended for another year. Michelle Yeoh, the Daniels, and the whole Everything Everywhere All at Once team triumphed in this and all other parallel universes. Now who’s ready to get started again?

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

The prospect of kicking off Oscar season already isn’t as masochistic as it sounds. No matter how much we may have loved the Oscar-nominated movies of 2022, it’s time to turn the page. There’s a bounty of potentially great movies waiting for us in the next nine months, and it’s exciting to think about new titles and new awards possibilities—no campaigning necessary (for now). For now, we get to do the fun thing: look ahead at the roster of potential 2023 releases and imagine the possibilities of what might become next year’s Oscar faves. What’s the critically lauded Tár lying in wait? Which performers will follow in Colin Farrell and Michelle Yeoh’s footsteps by getting that long-awaited first Oscar nod? Call your shot now, then reap those bragging rights in January! 

If there’s one thing we know from following the Oscars, it’s that every year operates on its own wavelength. Chasing the next Everything Everywhere All at Once will likely end in heartbreak. But there are still some lessons we can take from the just-completed Oscar season that can help make sense of the movies that lie ahead. 

Can A24 Do It Again?

Credit where it’s due to the trendy indie studio that could: A24 saw the potential awards contender in the crowd-pleasing but strange Everything Everywhere All at Once and treated the film as such all year long. I’m not sure every studio out there would have done the same thing. So what do they have up their sleeves this year? We’ll begin to find out soon enough, when Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid opens in April. Aster’s previous feature films, Hereditary and Midsommar, have been acclaimed but not seen as awards plays. His new film looks like it has a lot going on, with horror being perhaps just one element. Joaquin Phoenix plays an incredibly anxious man who embarks on a surrealistic journey home, but beyond that, it’s hard to know what to expect. If A24 wasn’t afraid of backing EEAAO’s deep weirdness, maybe they’ll do the same for Ari Aster.

Sofia Coppola’s upcoming Priscilla comes after Elvis’s big Oscar-nomination success, in the hopes that Academy voters are still into stories about the King. Mare of Easttown’s Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla Presley, whose memoir, Elvis and Me, serves as the basis of the film. Meanwhile, Euphoria star Jacob Elordi steps into the sequined jumpsuit of her husband, Elvis.

Director Sean Durkin has yet to attract Oscar attention despite two acclaimed movies in Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest. His next film, The Iron Claw, might end up being closer to Oscar voters’ taste. It’s based on the true story of the Von Erich family, whose success in the pro-wrestling business was paired with repeated tragedy. The Academy is into true stories and has even been known to embrace pro wrestling with The Wrestler, which is promising for Durkin and the film’s stars, Zac Efron, Lily James, Harris Dickinson, and Jeremy Allen White.

A24 also has at least one proven commodity in its 2023 lineup, Celine Song’s Past Lives. The romantic drama starring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo received near-unanimous praise when it premiered at Sundance back in January. It’s set for a June release, at which point the studio will have to figure out if they can get awards attention for something a lot smaller and more intimate than their recent best-picture winner.

Netflix’s Comeback Year?

Netflix’s Oscar success with All Quiet on the Western Front was all the more surprising because the German-language war film had been overshadowed for most of the year by titles like Bardo, White Noise, and Glass Onion. Despite the wins for All Quiet and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio, it was comparatively a down year for Netflix, which failed to garner more than one best-picture nominee for the first time since 2018. But with the films it has lined up for 2023, it’s easy to see how that could change. 

The big contender is the much anticipated Maestro, the Leonard Bernstein biopic directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. Between acting, writing, and producing, Cooper has amassed nine Oscar nominations, but he’s never won. He seems to be taking no chances here: real-life role, facial prosthetics (or so the photos from the set seem to suggest), both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg onboard as producers. If Maestro isn’t the year-ahead Oscar front-runner, it’s at least the movie most people are looking forward to with imaginary statuettes dancing in their eyes. 

Last year, White Noise entered the season with big buzz but never really connected with awards voters. That’s not stopping Netflix from coming back with another book adaptation about a family faced with mysterious and potentially dangerous events. Leave the World Behind is an adaptation of the 2020 novel of the same name, directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail. Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke play a couple at a vacation rental who are confronted by the arrival of another family (Mahershala Ali plays the father, Industry’s Myha’la Herrold is his daughter) who bring news of a mysterious blackout. Roberts has been great in tandem with Esmail before, on the Amazon series Homecoming, and while a December release often points towards awards ambitions, this could at the very least be a Bird Box–style hit thriller. 

After his 2020 film, Mank, earned best-picture and best-director nods, David Fincher is back with Netflix again, this time reteaming with his Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker for The Killer. Michael Fassbender plays an assassin going through a crisis of conscience, with Tilda Swinton in a costarring role. 

Netflix will also distribute a trio of true-life stories, any or all of which could capture Oscar’s attention. Director George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) is directing Rustin, about the life of gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, with a screenplay cowritten by Milk Oscar-winner Dustin Lance Black. Rustin is played by Colman Domingo, who is also set to hit theaters at the end of the year in The Color Purple (more on that later). Oscar-winner Regina King is set to play Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, in Shirley, written and directed by Oscar-winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave). And Annette Bening—who has still never won an Academy Award—will star in Nyad as long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who at age 64 became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the protection of a shark cage. Jodie Foster is set to costar. 

More Real-Life Inspiration

That bevy of biopics at Netflix is by no means the last of it when it comes to prospective Oscar players about real-life people. This past year, Austin Butler, Ana de Armas, and—depending on who you believe—Cate Blanchett all got nominated for playing real people on film. In 2023, there is no shortage of actors looking to follow in their footsteps.

Cillian Murphy will be the focal point of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, though Nolan and the massive ensemble cast will surely be up to more than merely sketching out a biography of Manhattan Project physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison (Mudbound) will make her directorial debut with Flint Strong, a movie about boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (played by Ryan Destiny) as she trains to compete in the 2012 Summer Olympics. With a screenplay by Barry Jenkins and a cast that includes recent Oscar nominee Brian Tyree Henry, this MGM production has some juice behind it. 

Michael Mann will be back for the first time since 2015’s Blackhat with Ferrari, wherein Adam Driver will continue his recent mini-trend of playing famous Italian brand namesakes in the role of Enzo Ferrari, the founder of the Italian car manufacturer (have you guessed yet?) Ferrari. In One Life, 2021 best-actor winner Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn (Emma) will play the older and younger versions of Sir Nicholas Winton, the British stockbroker who had a prominent role in the Kindertransport, the plan to rescue Jewish children from Nazi-controlled countries in the lead-up to World War II. 

Political and historical biopics could be heavily represented this year, with Joaquin Phoenix playing the title role in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and Helen Mirren playing Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in Guy Nattiv’s Golda.

It’s Auteur Season (It’s Always Auteur Season)

For as many new faces that graced the Oscars this past year, folks like Steven Spielberg and Baz Luhrmann reminded us that the established masters still have the goods. And there’s no more established a filmmaker than Martin Scorsese, whose 1920s-set Western crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon has a lot of people thinking it’s the Oscar front-runner. Apple TV+ will try to make it two best-picture wins in three years, that’s for sure. Based on the 2017 nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, the film boasts a buzzy cast that includes Jesse Plemons and Lily Gladstone, as well as a reunion for the two great Scorsese muses Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio (who previously starred together in the non-Scorsese movies This Boy’s Life and Marvin’s Room). 

Speaking of reunions, The Holdovers will reunite the Sideways team of director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti in the story of an unpopular private-school teacher who is put in charge of a smart but troublesome student. Before the 2017 film Downsizing broke his streak, Payne had directed three consecutive best-picture nominees (Sideways, The Descendants, and Nebraska). Todd Haynes has only ever been nominated for one Oscar himself, though his films (among them Carol and Far From Heaven) have earned a total of 12 Oscar nominations over the years. His next film, May December, sounds incredibly juicy, with Julianne Moore and Riverdale star Charles Melton playing a married couple 20 years after their relationship became a tabloid scandal. They’re forced to confront the realities of their past and present when an actor—Natalie Portman—who will be playing the part of Moore’s character in an upcoming film pays a visit. 

Elsewhere, Steve McQueen is back with his first feature film since Widows. Blitz is a movie about Londoners during the Blitz attacks in World War II, starring Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson. A year after Bones and All made young love look swooningly horrific, Luca Guadagnino will try for a tennis-themed romantic comedy, Challengers, starring Zendaya, West Side Story’s Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor. Jeff Nichols hasn’t directed a feature since his 2016 film Loving got a best-actress nod for Ruth Negga. He’s back with The Bikeriders, a 1960s-set movie about the members of a motorcycle club starring Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Nichols mainstay Michael Shannon.

“Too Weird” Might Not Apply Anymore

Once you’ve had a best-picture winner with a butt-plug battle, you can’t really make the argument that a movie is too weird for the Oscars anymore. That’s what A24 will be banking on with Beau Is Afraid. It’s also why you can’t really rule out Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as an awards contender, even if everything we’ve seen about its pink plastic aesthetic screams “high-concept comedy.” Gerwig’s previous two films, Little Women and Lady Bird, were both best-picture nominees, and Margot Robbie getting a best-actress nomination for playing a committed, comedic depiction of whatever Gerwig’s vision for Barbie is wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world. 

Yorgos Lanthimos is a director who’s already seen his weird impulses recognized by the Academy, after 2018’s The Favourite hauled in 10 nominations. He’s back with two films that could conceivably get released in 2023, though the far more likely one is Poor Things, which was expected to be released last year and is now rumored as a Cannes title. The film is said to be a Frankenstein-esque tale involving a young woman (Emma Stone) whose mad-scientist father (Willem Dafoe) puts her unborn baby’s brain inside her body. Sounds like a time!

Wes Anderson also could conceivably have two films ready for release in 2023, but Asteroid City is the sure bet for this year. Returning to Focus Features for the first time since Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson’s latest has been described as a “poetic meditation on the meaning of life” (sounds right) set at a 1955 Junior Stargazer competition in a fictional American desert down (sounds very right). The film features a typically sprawling cast that includes (but is by no means limited to) Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Tilda Swinton, and Scarlett Johansson. Anderson’s other film, the adventure comedy The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, is a possible late-year release from Netflix. 

Andrew Haigh directed Charlotte Rampling to an Oscar nomination for 2015’s 45 Years. He’s back with Strangers, a fantasy drama about a man (Andrew Scott) and his mysterious neighbor (recent first-time Oscar nominee Paul Mescal). Scott’s character makes the discovery in his childhood home of his long-dead parents, looking just like they did 30 years ago. The film is based on a 1987 Japanese novel and also stars Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as Scott’s parents. 

“Too Big” Definitely Doesn’t Apply

After a year where two billion-dollar movies in Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water were best-picture nominees, blockbusters are certainly welcome in the Oscar conversation. That said, Maverick had the savior-of-cinema angle, while The Way of Water was a technical marvel 13 years in the making. So you still need a pretty good angle. The most obvious option here is Dune: Part Two, since the first one was such a recent best-picture nominee and won six Oscars. Denis Villeneuve will have plenty to work with as he follows Paul Atreides on his path to desert chosen one, and newly added cast members Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux, and Christopher Walken will only enhance the grandness of scope. 

The aforementioned Oppenheimer will be another big movie looking to land big nominations, though one imagines a heady examination of the inventor of the atomic bomb won’t be as lucrative an attraction as other Nolan movies like Inception or The Dark Knight.

Meanwhile, if Tom Cruise’s high-octane battles against the concept of aging are still a hot Oscar commodity—and if sequel snobbery is a thing of the past—then is there any reason we should be dismissing Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part One as an Oscar possibility, aside from having a ludicrously cumbersome title?

There’s also The Color Purple, which is set for a Christmas-week release from Warner Bros. Musicals have been far from cash cows in recent years, but this adaptation of the Tony-winning musical—which was itself adapted from Alice Walker’s novel and the 11-time Oscar nominated Steven Spielberg movie adapted from that—has some big ambitions. Seventeen years ago, a stage-musical adaptation turned Jennifer Hudson from an American Idol contestant into an Oscar winner. Now the same could happen for Fantasia in the lead role of Celie. Tony nominee Danielle Brooks and Oscar nominees Taraji P. Henson and Aunjanue Ellis highlight a deeply talented supporting cast. 

Five More for Good Measure

If Andrea Riseborough’s best-actress nomination for To Leslie taught us anything, it’s that you don’t always need to wait for the narrative to present itself. So here are five movies that didn’t fit neatly into the above headings that are nevertheless Oscar possibilities. Jonathan Majors is already having a big year with roles in Creed III and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but his year got off to a hot start even earlier with his Sundance splash Magazine Dreams, which had festival attendees knocked out by his performance as a bodybuilder and already looking ahead to Oscar possibilities. 

Emerald Fennell, a 2021 Oscars winner, is back with her next film, an Amazon Studios–MGM coproduction called Saltburn. Not too much is known about the movie, other than that it’s a thriller centered on an aristocratic English family, but the cast is formidable, and is said to feature Rosamund Pike, Barry Keoghan, Carey Mulligan, and Jacob Elordi. 

Sony’s Dumb Money, from I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie, is based on the book by Ben Mezrich (who wrote the book that The Social Network was based on) about the GameStop stock scheme. The film will reunite The Fabelmans costars Paul Dano and Seth Rogen and Pam & Tommy costars Rogen and Sebastian Stan, along with Pete Davidson and Shailene Woodley. Another current-events-inspired film is Netflix’s Pain Hustlers, from Harry Potter director David Yates. It’s said to be an American Hustle/Big Short–style pharma-crime movie centered around a potentially juicy lead role for Emily Blunt. 

In 1997, Kevin Costner followed up his Oscar-winning directorial debut, Dances With Wolves, with the disastrous postapocalyptic bomb The Postman. More than 25 years later, Costner has found himself back on top, headlining the TV blockbuster Yellowstone, and once again he’s turning his head toward a hugely ambitious film project. Horizon, according to Costner, is the first of a four-film series of Westerns that he plans to make in the next few years. With Costner acting and directing, the film will also star Luke Wilson, Sienna Miller, and Sam Worthington and follow America’s westward expansion in the years before and after the Civil War.