The time has come to close the curtain on the films of 2023 with this Sunday’s crowning of the 96th Annual Academy Awards! Honoring the very best cinematic achievements of last year, this year’s Oscars sees Jimmy Kimmel return for his fourth stint as Oscars host, and you can catch all the action on ABC beginning at 7pm ET.

Last year’s ceremony capped off an incredible and improbable awards season run for the multiverse genre-hybrid Everything Everywhere All at Once, as it won Picture/Director/Screenplay, and became only the third film in Academy history to snag three of the four acting Oscars. Its seven total wins set a new record for Best Picture winners since the expansion of the Best Picture lineup in 2009, though that record is likely to be toppled by this year’s juggernaut: Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan’s biopic is the total package and checks off just about every box an Oscar frontrunner can check: critics’ favorite, box office behemoth, pop cultural impact, acclaimed and overdue director and stars, prestige subject, and impressive crafts on displayed recognized by nearly every branch of the Academy. I think it’s locked and loaded for eight wins from its thirteen nominations, though between seven and ten is possible depending on how the night goes.

In other categories, there’s the usual mix of sure-things (the United Kingdom will win its first International Feature Oscar for Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest), close contests (which “Stone” takes Best Actress: Emma or Lily Glad-?), and wide-open races (Visual Effects could go any number of ways). Despite the impending Oppenheimer steamroll, it looks very possible that almost all of the pretty excellent lineup of Best Picture nominees will walk away with a statue (sorry, Past Lives - I love you!), so I’m looking forward to a lot of worthy artists getting some recognition.

Settle in, mix yourself a cocktail or two (in lieu of our traditional Oscar Menu, we’ll be downing dirty gin martinis all evening), make sure you have enough hot dogs (that’s a May December reference, btw), and follow along with my predictions below!

With the Oscars just a week away, it’s past time I went back and assessed the nominations and how I fared with my predictions! The nominations for the 96th Annual Academy Awards were unveiled back on January 23rd by Zazie Beetz and Jack Quaid. As expected, Christopher Nolan’s megahit Oppenheimer led the pack with 13 nominations in just about every eligible category (it likely would’ve tied the record of 14 if the visual effects branch had shortlisted the film). There weren’t too many big surprises among the nominee list, certainly nothing as big as last year’s Andrea Riseborough nomination - though many would argue the misses for Greta Gerwig in Best Director and Margot Robbie in Best Actress for Barbie were shocking (not in the least to this longtime Oscar predictor).

I correctly predicted 93/120 of this year's nominees (77.5%), which landed me in the top 3% of prognosticators over at GoldDerby (347th place finish of 10,893 participants). A very respectable finish, though when I’ve tasted victory and outright won twice (including just last year) and finished within the top twelve 3 others times in the past decade, the accomplishment feels less sweet.

Read on for a list of the nominations and my predictions results.