With the announcement of the Producers Guild and SAG Awards over the weekend, the Best Picture race took shape—and thanks to the Academy’s compressed schedule, there isn’t a lot of time left for momentum to shift or for a dark horse to surge. At the very least, it seems clear that the Best Picture nominees have sorted themselves into two tiers. In the happy-just-to-be-included category, we have Ford v Ferrari (the film with the lowest nomination total—4—of the nine nominees), Marriage Story (too New York, too modestly scaled, too mean to hypersensitive West Coasters), Jojo Rabbit (a well-liked movie that never became the breakout it needed to be to vie for major prizes), and Little Women, a strong and still-growing box office hit that could give Greta Gerwig an Oscar if it takes Best Adapted Screenplay. But any of the other five nominees could actually win. Here’s how they rank, in ascending order.

5: JOKER

Every year, one or two contenders for Best Picture can lay claim to representing our perpetually fractious American moment. Last year, it was BlacKkKlansman; two years ago, it was Get Out, or perhaps Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; four years ago, it was The Big Short. Generally, those movies lose, because most Academy members pick the film they like the best, not the one they’d be most inclined to place in a time capsule. In the what’s-the-movie-of-its-time contest, the violent, aggrieved, about-to-boil-over Joker wins; it’s also the most nominated film and the highest grosser in the contest. The trouble is, those stats have no real historical correlation with winners. Although I don’t think there’s all that much difference between fifth place and first this year, Joker is a divisive movie that many voters will leave off their ballots altogether; it doesn’t feel like a consensus choice. To vie for the Oscar, it would have had to win something major along the way. Instead, its status has been that of a sturdy, respected across-the-board nominee that is destined to get its reward with what looks like the near-certainty of a statuette for Joaquin Phoenix. Nonetheless, the strength of its support across nearly every Academy branch means it can’t be counted out.

4: THE IRISHMAN

The awards narrative for Martin Scorsese’s massive career-and-genre summation never quite gained altitude the way it needed to. Some found the movie too long or too familiar; some were put off by the technology that endowed Robert De Niro with a young man’s face (that is, some young man’s face but certainly not what we know to have been his own), then placed it on an old man’s body. For a dark, challenging three-and-a-half-hour movie to win Best Picture, the vote has to feel somehow necessary; for The Irishman, the vote feels optional. While a win is still possible, this phase of voting may be one in which the Netflix factor hurts; this weekend, six of the nine Best Picture nominees were among the top 20 grossers, making The Irishman and Marriage Story feel relatively invisible.

3: ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

Quentin Tarantino’s apparently penultimate film would have been an easy favorite even five years ago. It boasts the kind of immense ensemble cast that the actors’ branch loves, spiffy production values, an American auteur who’s made it clear he’s not planning to give voters many more chances to reward him, and a Hollywood-gazes-upon-itself storyline that has powered Argo, The Artist, and Birdman to wins in the last decade. But a close race can be decided by the smallest of factors—a cluster of voters who don’t like the explosion of orgiastic violence at the end, a handful of New Yorkers who are Marty guys, not Quentin guys, a bunch of spread-the-wealthers who feel this is a movie they can take care of with a vote for Brad Pitt, or director, or screenplay. No Tarantino movie has ever won Best Picture, and he’s never won Best Director, but—possibly because he has two screenwriting Oscars and possibly because he tends to come off at the podium as if he couldn’t care less—a “He’s owed” narrative never clicked in this season. For all that, a win for Once Upon a Time would shock nobody.

2: PARASITE

The historical forces militating against a win for Bong Joon Ho’s widely admired breakout are so obvious they barely need pointing out. Could it win anyway? You bet it could. While only a dozen foreign-language films have ever been nominated for Best Picture, five of those nominations have come in the last 15 years, and with the Academy’s voting membership becoming ever more international, it’s only a matter of time before a movie edges one step past Roma (last year’s winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, and Best Cinematography). The fustiest members of the Academy’s old guard are unlikely to vote for Parasite. But newer members, foreign members, members who want to vote for a movie of the moment and prefer this take on the class war to Joker’s, and voters who would like to support a movie with several decent roles for women (and thus find themselves seriously short of options in the top 5) could form a substantial coalition, and Parasite also seems likelier to benefit from second-place votes than many other contenders. As the roaring standing ovation for the Parasite cast even before its stunning win at last night’s SAG Awards showed, supporting the film is also a statement vote—a vote for an Academy with a bigger, broader vision of what “best” means—in a way the other contenders can’t equal. That alone isn’t enough to secure a win, but it doesn’t hurt.

1: 1917

To some extent, most Best Picture frontrunners seize the position by default; the ability to become the last movie standing is as legitimate a way to win the Oscar as any other, and this year, Sam Mendes' 1917 is the movie no controversy or competitor has dented. Its Producers Guild of America Best Picture win is not, on its own, enough to put it over the top—the PGA and the Oscars used to be perfect matches but have diverged twice in the last four years. But throw in the Golden Globes for Picture and Director, and the fact it’s been making a mint at the box office during the foreshortened voting season, and a sense of inevitability begins to grow. 1917 is, in a way, a classic compromise choice for Best Picture—it’s a war movie, and thus sews itself into an Oscar history that stretches back to Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front, the top winners at the 1st and 3rd Academy Awards. It combines a classic sense of seriousness with up-to-the-minute production values and technology. And the knocks against it—it’s a gimmick, it’s a video game, I didn’t feel anything—feel too scattered to amass themselves into a coherent opposition, or to coalesce around a single alternative. 1917’s biggest deficit is thought to be its lack of support from the Academy’s largest branch, the actors (it wasn’t even nominated for SAG’s ensemble award). But it’s easy to mistranslate that as “Actors hate the movie,” and there’s no evidence of that; in a less crowded year, or with an earlier release date, George Mackay might well have contended for a Best Actor nomination. The ranked voting system by which the Best Picture winner is picked usually favors a movie that some people love and a lot of people like. By that definition, in the absence of any serious backlash (and there’s barely any time left for one to develop), 1917 is still the movie to beat.

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