Well, the 2024 nominations for the Academy Awards are officially in, read as always at the crack of dawn by two actors in the industry who are morning people — this year the honor went to Atlanta's Zazie Beetz and Jack Quaid (Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid's son). Since the nominations are already more than a couple hours old, it's time for our way-too-early predictions for who will be declared the big winners at the 2024 Academy Awards. Let's do this!

2024 Academy Awards predictions

Let's start with the most obvious — or “obvi” as the kids haven't said in years — predictions. For this, we kind of have to begin with the biggest category, Best picture itself.

Best Picture

Just as we had a general idea of how Oppenheimer would end as we watched the film and enjoyed it anyway, so too is the case with its Academy Awards fortunes. Oppenheimer will most likely win best picture.

It checks all the Academy's boxes for the ideal top prize winner — the perfect blend of artistic ambition, recognizable performers in the lead roles, and it's a bona fide blockbuster. Of course fortunes could change between now and March 10, but you don't have to be a nuclear scientist or split the atom to know that Oppenheimer is the most likely big winner.

Best Director

In a word… ditto. Christopher Nolan's career has been building to this moment. For all the tears (and calories) he shed on his Peloton bike listening to his instructor's savage review of Tenet, he never stopped getting back on the bike and now he's finally climbed to the top of the cinematic leaderboard with his magnum opus Oppenheimer.

Now he's ready for his personal shoutout during an awards telecast that his Peloton instructor will undoubtedly refer to afterward as three to four hours of her life she'll never get back. Hopefully Nolan will use the opportunity of his acceptance speech to definitively explain the ending of Memento once and for all.

Best Actor

This category is pretty interesting. At the Golden Globes earlier this month, Cillian Murphy won for best actor in a drama for Oppenheimer, while Paul Giamatti won on the comedy side for The Holdovers (and then pricelessly celebrated with an In-N-Out burger for his alternative after-party). It seems that prognosticators are split pretty evenly between these two worthy performances.

I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that, due in large part to those votes being split, a surprise third party candidate could emerge in this race — Jeffrey Wright for American Fiction. He's a respected actor by his peers and this performance was one of his most compelling… so if he somehow pulls off this upset, you heard it here first!

Best Actress

This will be another competitive Oscars category between the two front runners. Emma Stone, who already won best actress in 2017 for La La Land, is back in the mix again for her performance in Poor Things. Her challenger, Lily Gladstone from Killers of the Flower Moon, is making history as the first Native American to be nominated for best actress.

Stone probably has the slight edge in this one because of name recognition, but if Killers of the Flower Moon is going to win in any of the major categories, it's most likely this one. What the heck, let's give it to the underdog here — Lily Gladstone for the surprise win at the buzzer!

Best supporting actor

Great performances all around in this category — including two Avengers in very non-Avenger-y roles, Robert Downey Jr. for Oppenheimer and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things. The third Oscar nomination should be the charm for Downey this year, with his unforgettable anti-hero Lewis Strauss foil to Murphy's Oppenheimer. Plus after his fate in Avengers: Endgame, the least we can do is exchange Iron Man's metal suit of self-defense for a golden metal statue of self-esteem.

Best supporting actress

Nice to see America Ferrara get nominated for Barbie after being snubbed by the Golden Globes, but that's probably as far as she'll go for this role. That's because The Holdovers' Da'Vine Joy Randolph stirred up an Oscar-worthy performance for her culinary role as a sweet-and-sour cook reluctantly stuck at the boarding school she works at over a holiday break. This is another case of all the good mojo surrounding a likable film coalescing in one category to get the film recognized with a little Academy Award love, and Randolph deserves to be the recipient of that effort.

Original song

This is the Oscars category where summer juggernaut Barbie is most deserving of recognition. The only surprise here really is that a third anthem from the Mattel adaptation isn't in the mix as well, Dua Lipa's disco-pop hit “Dance the Night”.

That tune may have suffered from being the first major breakout single from Barbie after being featured heavily in the trailer and promotional material well before the film came out. It still feels like the best song from the movie in my mind, and it did get a Grammy nomination from Dua Lipa for song of the year.

However, the Academy is leaving us to decide between the two songs from Barbie that did get nominations — the heavily campaigned for “I'm Just Ken” and the considerably more understated, hauntingly beautiful Billie Eilish ballad “What Was I Made For?”

It's probably obvious where my preference lies on that one, and I think it will be for the Academy voters too. “I'm Just Ken” feels like Mattel's attempt at being the Barbie equivalent of the Lego Movie's funny breakout “Everything Is Awesome” tune, but to less successful effect. The thirsty campaigning for the nomination feels on point for Ryan Gosling's Ken character, but having an abundance of Kenergy does not equal an Academy Award.

“What Was I Made For?” on the other hand is a work of art from one of the rising stars of her generation, and Billie Eilish is very worthy of some Oscars love for this one.

Best original and adapted screenplay

We'll round things out with the wordsmiths. It may seem counterintuitive, but I'm going to keep predictions here short and sweet — Oppenheimer for best adapted screenplay and The Holdovers for best original. Barbie might have made things interesting if it had qualified for the original category (but I side with the Academy on keeping it in the adapted category), and even still, The Holdovers probably deserves this one more.

Tune in on March 10 to the Academy Awards and see how many of these Oscars 2024 predictions pan out!