Best Picture: Who Will Win vs. Who Should Win
Every Oscar season eventually narrows to the same essential question:
Are we rewarding consensus, or are we rewarding cinema?
This year’s Best Picture race makes that question especially clear. The film most likely to take home the Academy Award is Sinners. It has the nominations, the momentum, and the broad institutional support that typically defines a Best Picture winner. It is serious, ambitious, and widely respected.
But the film that should win Best Picture is Frankenstein.
These two films represent very different ideas of what the top prize in cinema is meant to honor.
Why Sinners Will Likely Win
There is no denying the strength of Sinners as an awards-season contender. It has performed exceptionally well across categories, drawing support from nearly every branch of the Academy. It feels “important” in a way that Oscar voters are comfortable rewarding: socially conscious, well-crafted, and carefully calibrated to appeal across tastes.
Sinners benefits from being the film that no one strongly opposes. It is ambitious without being alienating, challenging without being confrontational. In a preferential ballot system, that matters. Consensus often wins Best Picture, and Sinners is the clearest consensus choice in the field.
If Sinners wins, it will make sense. It will feel correct. And that is precisely the problem.
Why Frankenstein Should Win
Frankenstein is the film in this lineup that most fully understands cinema as a visual and emotional language — not just a storytelling medium, but an art form.
This is not a dialogue-driven prestige drama, nor a film designed to reassure its audience. It is image-forward, atmosphere-driven, and unapologetically cinematic. The camera placement, the production design, the use of light and shadow — all of it reflects intention. This is a movie made by someone who understands that how a story is told matters as much as the story itself.
Adapting Frankenstein is inherently risky. The material is iconic, overexposed, and deeply ingrained in popular culture. Most versions lean on familiarity. This one does the opposite. It strips away nostalgia and uses the myth as a mirror for modern anxieties: creation without responsibility, isolation, and the cost of ambition. It doesn’t ask the audience to admire it — it asks them to sit with it.
This is director-driven cinema in the strongest sense. The film trusts silence. It trusts restraint. It trusts the audience to engage without being guided by constant exposition or emotional signaling. That confidence is rare, and it’s exactly what distinguishes Frankenstein from much of the field.
Legacy vs. Safety
In ten years, Sinners will be remembered as a solid Best Picture winner — a film that reflected its moment and satisfied its voters.
Frankenstein, on the other hand, will be remembered as a film that pushed the medium forward. It will be cited for its visual language, its bold reinterpretation of classic material, and its refusal to play by awards-season rules.
Best Picture should not merely reflect what the industry agrees on in a given year. It should stand as a statement of values — a declaration of what cinema can be when it takes risks.
Final Verdict
Who will win: Sinners
Who should win: Frankenstein
One film represents safety and consensus.
The other represents ambition, artistry, and belief in cinema itself.
If the Academy wants to honor a film that will endure — not just one that feels correct in the moment — then Frankenstein is the Best Picture choice that truly matters.
