MOVIE NEWS – The Oscars are still a long way off, but experts and film fans are already weighing up the odds. Yahoo Entertainment has 19 experts in its GoldDerby section weighing in on the odds, and registered users can vote.

So far, Martin Scorsese’s new film, Choked Flowers, is leading the Best Picture category, despite only having been screened at Cannes. However, the reviews, the trailer and the big names associated with the film (Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro) made the quirky western look like an absolute winner – but now it has been overtaken by Oppenheimer. Already the nuclear bomb film leads Scorsese’s epic by 11:1.

And the trend continues: Cillian Murphy, the title character in Oppenheimer, has also come on strong, beating DiCaprio 4:1.

The opinions on Yahoo are not representative, of course, and there are still six months to go until the Oscars, but they do reflect the public mood to a certain extent. Factors such as the fact that one of the greatest actors of our time, Cillian Murphy, has yet to win an Oscar, while DiCaprio has (The Return of the Oscar winner) and has been nominated four other times, may also play a role in the final result.

In the meantime, Oppenheimer’s total revenue has reached $778 million, estimated to be somewhere around $1 billion. This is probably close to the other big sensation of the summer, Barbie. The performance of the two films together is worth evaluating because their interaction – the Barbenheimer phenomenon – has set the tone for this summer’s movie-going patterns and is certainly setting a new direction for film distribution.

With Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese has made a real-life case. In the 1920s, the Indians of the Osage tribe of Oklahoma were killed for their oil fields. This time, Scroese is not interested in the criminal story itself, but in the character of the perpetrators and victims.

(Killers of the Flower Moon – domestic release: 19 October 2023)