We asked a film critic: What are the odds Tom Cruise gets a statue at the Oscars this year?

Last May we commissioned our old friend Luke Y. Thompson (AV Club) to review Top Gun: Maverick for the Underground Bunker, and we still think it’s the best written about that movie. This time, we asked him what the odds are that Scientology watchers will have to witness Tom Cruise taking home an Oscar now that the nominations for the 2023 awards broadcast have been announced. Here’s what he sent us.

If you told any film critic in the ’80s that a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced action sequel would one day be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, they’d laugh you out of the room. It would feel like the gag in the movie In & Out, where Glenn Close announces that Steven Seagal has been Oscar-nominated for the movie Snowball in Hell. But times and generations change, and while so many literate Boomers despised the producer who brought us Top Gun, The Rock, and Pirates of the Caribbean, the Gen-Xers who grew up with those movies now run the industry. Today’s middle-aged Academy voters were yesterday’s teenagers who pinned Tom Cruise posters to their locker doors. And even as they’re likely to pillory new stars like Chris Pratt for standard-issue dudebro Christianity, Cruise’s weird beliefs get a legacy pass.

So how likely is Tom Cruise to win an Oscar this year, as producer of Top Gun: Maverick, which is nominated for Best Picture? In short: not very. But there are no guarantees – in 2019, many awards-viewers presumed Best Picture would go to either the war drama 1917, or Quentin Tarantino’s alt-history satire Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Parasite, a Korean black comedy of class struggle and squatting, blindsided both to become the first non-English language film ever to win the category. This year, the smart money suggests Best Picture will likely go to either Tar, a more traditional kind of Oscar-bait drama starring Cate Blanchett as a fictional classical music conductor whose hubris prefigures her professional downfall; or Everything Everywhere All at Once, an extremely non-traditional interdimensional martial-arts fantasy that would probably be rejected by Marvel for being too far-fetched.

Could Top Gun surprise, like Parasite, and break through a split vote? It’s possible, but unlikely. Top Gun: Maverick, like Avatar: The Way of Water, is mainly in the running because it was familiar comfort food after a year and change of quarantine; a big-budget action sequel that reminded people what they liked about moviegoing in general. And the entire reason Best Picture as a category was expanded from 5 to 10 nominees was to accommodate movies just like these; it was another acclaimed sequel, The Dark Knight, that helped prompt the change after a perceived snub in the category. (Of course, Heath Ledger would posthumously win Best Supporting Actor for his role in it.)

Cruise, who hasn’t been Oscar-nominated since he impressed critics in 1999 with Magnolia and a rare performance as an outright bad person, isn’t up for Best Actor, probably because audiences don’t even really look to him for acting any more. Gone are the days when he could open any movie just by being attached; the only way he’s guaranteed money nowadays is if he does a crazy stunt and makes clear he’s doing it for real. He used to confine that to Mission: Impossible sequels, and the brilliance of Top Gun: Maverick is that they essentially marketed it as an M:I spinoff, sold on the notion that Cruise and the cast really flew those jets. To that end, perhaps the biggest surprise is that its cameras-in-cockpits gimmick didn’t score a cinematography nomination. This suggests that directors of photography are less impressed by stunts than by skillful control of the image.

Top Gun‘s best shot is for Best Sound, where it’s up against Elvis, All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, and The Batman. Frankly, The Batman does the most with sound of all of those, but considering it’s not up for much else, it’s likely to lose the popularity contest. The sound category was condensed from two separate prior categories that awarded editing and mixing individually, and Elvis‘ placement here shows the limits of that – it has great mixing of music, dialogue, and overlapping scenes, but feels likely to fall to films that create their own sound effects like jet fighter takeoffs. As for Best Special Effects, it’s insane to think anything could beat Avatar – but Oscar voters can be insane. However, if people truly believe that most of Top Gun consisted of actors actually flying planes, they may not consider that to be special effects…though there is no separate category for stunts.

Top Gun is also up for Best Adapted Screenplay, which may sound strange until you realize that all sequels are considered “adapted” from the original film. This award is often given to a film that should have gotten more nominations and everyone knows it, but it will settle for this one. In this case, Women Talking is most likely to triumph. Cishet dude-repellent title aside, it’s a powerful and timely drama about a community of ultra-religious women who must decide whether to forgive their rapists, per church orders, or leave their town forever. Other contenders include All Quiet on the Western Front (a German language re-adaptation), Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and the Akira Kurosawa remake Living. Glass Onion could surprise, as my former USC classmate Rian Johnson is both extremely literary in his references and very good at networking and shaking hands (the movie also features a non-subtle visual to Cruise’s Magnolia character). But the Academy loves to show they care about important issues, and religious oppression of women – particularly as well-explored as the theme is here – ought to trump all the rest. If a Cruise vehicle’s script somehow beats out one about religious abuses, well, I don’t have to point out the irony.

The final category Top Gun: Maverick is up for is Best Original Song, which has an unusually strong crop of nominees this year. Under normal circumstances, Lady Gaga’s “Hold My Hand” would be an odds-on favorite, even though in the movie itself, it’s still upstaged by Kenny Loggins’ O.G. “Danger Zone.” But she’s competing against a David Byrne cowritten song from Everything Everywhere All at Once, Rihanna’s mournful ballad “Lift Me Up” about the late Chadwick Boseman from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and perennial fave Diane Warren’s “Applause” from the feminist empowerment anthology feature Tell It Like a Woman. And all of those are likely to fall to “Naatu Naatu,” the standout musical number from RRR, the over-the-top Indian epic of fictionalized history that’s become a massive hit among critics and industry folks for merging insane action, song and dance, and heart-on-sleeve emotion. It embodies every stereotype you may think you have about Indian cinema, and then goes even bigger than that. India did not submit the Telugu-language film for Best International Feature, so Best Original Song is its only nomination, and its support is intense.

Had Cruise been nominated for Best Actor, he’d have found the competition quite stiff this year. Bill Nighy is one of those actors who’s fun to see in anything, from Love, Actually to the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels; in this year’s Living, he takes the lead as an uptight English bureaucrat who finds out he’s dying and decides to try being…moderately less uptight. He’s up against Austin Butler’s uncanny embodiment of Elvis, comeback kid Brendan Fraser in obese makeup as an overweight man trying to connect with his daughter before the inevitable heart attack in The Whale, Colin Farrell as an optimistic rural Irishman in The Banshees of Inisherin, and Paul Mescal in Aftersun, a movie I didn’t see. As a voter in the L.A. Film Critics Association, I’m not required to view everything, though I feel morally obliged to try. Yet Aftersun flew totally under my radar; my first indication that it was significant was when several colleagues voted for it, and by then it was too late. Cruise would at best have mustered a sentimental favorite nod; one which arguably went to Farrell here, who’s also not doing much outside his expected range, but comes across much more humbly likable. It’ll probably be Nighy or Fraser for the win as Best Non-Insufferable Dying Dude, and I’m good with either.

Everything Everywhere All At Once has the most nominations overall, and an all-but-guaranteed win for Best Supporting Actor Ke Huy Quan, best known as Indiana Jones’ sidekick Short Round and The Goonies‘ Data. Semi-retired from acting for years because of the lack of decent roles for young Asian men, he’s back in a big way now that the kids who grew up idolizing him are in positions to cast him again. The movie overall is one of the most unlikely top contenders since Parasite – it stars Michelle Yeoh as a laundromat co-owner who, during a routine tax audit, finds herself phasing between different universes, some more absurd than others, in an attempt to stop a version of her invincible daughter from destroying reality. It’s not some huge-budget sci-fi epic – it’s a weird little indie that nonetheless successfully morphs into many different kinds of movie along the way. And I think it’s most likely to take the big prize, as it should (love Avatar, but at $2 billion and counting worldwide it doesn’t need any help).

Tom Cruise shouldn’t have much of a chance against EEAO. But since I still can’t figure out what people genuinely love about his narcissistic Navy Jesus movie, I may be missing something.

— Luke Y. Thompson

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

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