One of the first major festival awards of awards season was handed out today. Jim Jarmusch’s latest film Father Mother Sister Brother won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival this afternoon. What does this win mean for its Oscar chances down the line? Here is a deep dive analysis on the winners of the award and whether we can predict if it has a great shot to get into the race or if it’s an award we should not focus on for this season.

Welcome back to The Oscar Code! So sorry for the delay in writing articles. Since the previous awards season has wrapped up, life has gotten busy. I had started a new job in April and have been focusing on learning that as well as going away in the summer and enjoying life. Now that awards season has fully started, I will be posting articles frequently about wins in the festival season as well as critics awards and other precursor awards. Without further ado, let’s get this deep dive started in the Golden Lion.

Today, Jim Jarmusch’s latest film Father Mother Sister Brother won the Golden Lion. It was a surprising win considering the strong competition at the festival this year with other contenders such as Bugonia, The Smashing Machine, No Other Choice, and The Voice of Hind Rajab. Jim Jarmusch is an indie legend who has never been in the awards race before so this is a historic win for him. However, does this win mean the beginning of an awards cycle for him or is it an anomaly for this film and we shouldn’t expect much else from it moving forward? Based on the 20 year sample of Golden Lion winners…it is skewing more as an anomaly more than an actual awards contender.

Golden Lion Winner	Oscar Best Picture Win	Oscar Best Picture Nomination
Brokeback Mountain	No	Yes
Still Life	No	No
Lust, Caution	No	No
The Wrestler	No	No
Lebanon	No	No
Somewhere	No	No
Faust	No	No
Pieta	No	No
Sacro GRA	No	No
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence	No	No
From Afar	No	No
The Woman Who Left	No	No
The Shape of Water	Yes	Yes
Roma	No	Yes
Joker	No	Yes
Nomadland	Yes	Yes
Happening	No	No
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed	No	No
Poor Things	No	Yes
The Room Next Door	No	No

As you can see from the 20 year sample list above, only 6 of the previous 20 Golden Lion winners, which is 30%, have gone on to be nominated for Best Picture. Only 2 of those 6 (The Shape of Water and Nomadland) have gone all the way and won Best Picture, which means only 10% of the Golden Lion winners in the past 20 years have won Best Picture and only 33.3% of the Golden Lion winners that were nominated for Best Picture ended up winning. It is a fairly bleak picture statistics wise and ironically I had noticed there is a commonality with the 2 films that won both Best Picture and the Golden Lion: the same studio.

Fox Searchlight distributed both The Shape of Water and Nomadland. For years, they were a powerhouse studio to get nominations and wins. In the awards season that The Shape of Water won, it had also won the Producers Guild of America award, the Directors Guild of America award, and the Critics Choice award for Best Picture outside of the Golden Lion. Nomadland fared better its awards season with also winning the People’s Choice Award at Toronto International Film Festival, the Golden Globe for Best Picture-Drama, the Producers Guild of America award, the Directors Guild of America award, and the Critics Choice award for Best Picture outside of the Golden Lion, which combined made it an almost guaranteed frontrunner that season. As you can see, if Fox Searchlight really believes in a film for awards, they know where else to compete and gain support for it from voters.

While Fox Searchlight was a powerhouse for awards winners, Father Mother Sister Brother‘s distributor MUBI is fairly newer to the awards circuit. MUBI is a streaming service that in 2007 and did not start distributing films until 2016. Since they started distributing films, they have only had one film nominated for Best Picture and that was last year’s The Substance. The Substance was a pleasant surprise nomination wise given it was a body horror film but was also a thematic talking point throughout awards season which was close to getting Demi Moore her first Oscar win, but had lost to Mikey Madison who was in the Best Picture winner Anora. Whereas The Substance had premiered at Cannes before and won Best Screenplay there, it also premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and won the Midnight Madness award there. Father Mother Sister Brother’s only other festival premiere to date is the New York Film Festival where it is the Centerpiece film. Out of the 20 previous films to be the Centerpiece film for the New York Film Festival, only 2 (No Country for Old Men and Nomadland) won Best Picture out of 7 that were nominated for the award, or 28.6% of the 7 Best Picture nominated New York Film Festival Centerpieces and 10% of the 20 New York Film Festival Centerpieces won Best Picture. Outside of that, MUBI bought a lot of films at Cannes including Die My Love, The Mastermind, and The History of Sound which could make it difficult for the studio to prioritize which has a better shot to land with voters unlike last year with The Substance which resonated with both audiences and voters.

Saying all of that, does winning the Golden Lion bode well for Father Mother Sister Brother winning Best Picture? Truthfully, based on the historical data provided, I do not believe so at this moment. The Golden Lion-Best Picture correlation is so low based on the previous 20 years and considering last year’s Golden Lion winner The Room Next Door was also a New York Film Festival Centerpiece film, I do not believe it could even be nominated. With a newer studio that is buying several films from other festivals to compete for the Oscar, it could be difficult for Father Mother Sister Brother to stand out from that crowd and make some noise in the long run. So at the moment considering the data, I’m at a “wait and see” mode for this film but the data is leaning more on the pessimistic side of it getting nominated than winning it all. But I am happy for Jim Jarmusch, who I felt has been under appreciated by festivals over the years and felt this was a great win for him as a filmmaker more than anything.

Thank you all for reading this and please feel free to comment your thoughts! I look forward to interacting with all of you this awards season and sharing with all of you how The Oscar Code can help determine what will win Best Picture long before the awards begin.