Winning a best-picture Oscar is complicated, expensive, and time-consuming—and top of everything, requires a lot of math. When Oscar voters fill out their ballots, they don’t just select the film they like best; they rank all nine nominees in order, a process called the preferential ballot that makes the best-picture voting process different from any other. It gets even more complicated after that, but the short version is this: to win best picture, you don’t just need to be No. 1 on the most ballots. You also need to be No. 2 or No. 3 on even more of them. It’s a process that rewards not just the movies with a fanatical fanbase, but widespread appreciation across the board.

On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast Daniel Joyaux, a V.F. contributor who also writes at Third Man Movies, explains how this preferential ballot works, and why he’s predicting Dunkirk to win best picture. That‘s right: the war epic released in the summer but eclipsed in critical praise and awards by later releases like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Shape of Water. His prediction is not just that plenty of people will put Dunkirk first on their ballot; it also looks at the films likely to get the fewest number of No. 1 votes—Daniel predicts that will be Darkest Hour, The Post, and Phantom Thread—and then guesses where Dunkirk shows up on those ballots. In this year of extremely widespread Oscar affection, where there’s still no clear front-runner, Daniel expects that the film with the broadest base of support will win the day—and Dunkirk, for the reasons he lays out, could be it.

Also on this week’s episode, Bon Appétit’s Carla Lalli Music, food director and co-host of the Bon Appétit Foodcast joins to talk about the most important element of an Oscar viewing party: the food. She has suggestions for everything from food based around the nominees (honor The Shape of Water with deviled eggs sprinkled with dried shrimp!) to a killer gourmet popcorn recipe good for Oscar night, binge-watching The Crown, or pretty much anything else. She also has a surprising choice for the movie that made her, a food expert, most want what the characters on screen were having. A hint: it’s not food at all, but it’s best consumed while wearing a bathrobe and sitting on a rug that ties the whole room together.

Listen to this week’s episode above, and find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts, where you can rate the show and leave a review.