There’s really no such thing as a typical “Oscar movie” anymore. Not when Hollywood’s highest prize can go to a half-comic, dimension-jumping science-fiction jamboree featuring talking rocks, metaphysical bagels, and butt plugs. All the same, it’s still surprising when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences ignores a movie that seems to check as many of its usual boxes as The Iron Claw. Sean Durkin’s heartbreaking melodrama about the Von Erichs, a real-life Texas pro-wrestling dynasty beset by unspeakable misfortune, is a sports drama rolled into a family drama with a plain emotional hook. And it’s anchored by a movie star, Zac Efron, making a bid for serious-actor bona fides, in part by undergoing a radical physical transformation. If you could somehow merge onetime Oscar competitors Ordinary People and Raging Bull into a single powerhouse production, it would look like this.
What’s more, The Iron Claw is a commercial and critical success. Fueled by mostly glowing reviews, the film has climbed to a rock-solid $34 million and counting at the U.S. box office — a domestic gross only five other A24 releases have surpassed, and about half of what the distributor’s biggest hit, Everything Everywhere All at Once, made in the States. So why did this admired dramatic piledriver fail to pick up a single Academy Award nomination? Or, for that matter, much from the precursor guild awards or other voting groups? Why wasn’t a movie with a gut punch this strong ever in contention for the title?
One potential culprit is the simple fact of how late in the season The Iron Claw premiered. Durkin is said to have finished the film as late as early November, mere days before its world premiere in Dallas. That meant it wasn’t ready in time to play any of the major fall festivals, like Venice, Telluride, or Toronto — events that have become annual launching pads for projects with awards aspirations. For a sense of how important festival buzz is to a film’s Oscar chances, consider that only two of this year’s ten nominees for Best Picture skipped a major fest premiere. (You know the two. You may have watched them back-to-back last July.) “Unless you’re on the level [of box-office success] of an Avatar: The Way of Water, releasing late in December without a film-festival run is a very difficult route to an Oscar nomination,” says writer-editor Matt Neglia, who runs the awards-analysis website Next Best Picture.
Claw was one of the final Oscar hopefuls critics and award voters saw last year. While the film was screened in time for most voting deadlines, physical screeners — that is, DVD copies of the movie, which is how members of the Academy and other groups often watch the films they end up nominating — went out weeks later. The only other perceived contender voters were waiting on by that point was The Color Purple, which had the benefit of being released by a major studio, Warner Bros. (The Broadway adaptation missed out on Best Picture, too, but did pick up one nomination, which is one more than The Iron Claw.)
Conventional wisdom tends to hold that opening a movie too early can hurt its Oscar odds; a summer or spring release runs the risk of being forgotten or losing out to recency bias as flashier prestige productions dominate the fall calendar. In a less crowded field, a push around Thanksgiving might pay off. But The Iron Claw came to a party that was already winding down; this was one of those years when the major awards players were firmly entrenched by November. “This year, there were no big movies with major Oscar buzz that fell out, like White Noise, Cyrano, and The Harder They Fall in previous years,” says one awards strategist who worked on a successful Oscar campaign for a different movie this fall. “It seemed every major contender was met with praise and therefore it became harder for a latecomer to wiggle its way in.”
Among the established players were two other A24 titles, neither resembling the kind of movie that historically goes over big with the Academy: Celine Song’s intimate Sundance sensation Past Lives and extreme art-house provocation and Cannes prizewinner The Zone of Interest. There’s no resource for tracking how much studios spend on their respective Oscar campaigns, including parties, publicity events, and “For Your Consideration” advertisements placed in the major Hollywood trade publications. But it’s safe to assume that a relatively smaller company like A24 does not have the resources to make big pushes for more than a couple titles. And by the time The Iron Claw was ready to be shown to audiences, those two other movies had the momentum. Both would end up scoring Best Picture nominations.
“A24 is very strategic with how they campaign,” says Neglia. “They go hard when they know they’ve got something.” They certainly had something in 2016–17, when Moonlight defied the odds — and a historic snafu at the podium — to take home Best Picture. And of course, we’re only a year out from the unstoppable phenomenon that was Everything Everywhere All at Once, which rode a yearlong campaign to victory, parlaying popularity, critical acclaim, and lasting social-media interest into a long game that paid off handsomely.
Internally, A24 saw The Iron Claw as a commercial prospect — more of a potential Christmas hit than a late-breaking Oscar threat. According to Neglia, who follows awards buzz pretty much year-round (he’s one of several Oscar authorities whose predictions are tracked on the website Gold Derby), that writing was on the wall as early as September. Whispers that the studio wasn’t banking on Claw to become a major awards-season player likely shaped early Oscar predictions, which of course shape the race itself. “There is a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to this,” grants Neglia.
Even if The Iron Claw had launched earlier, there are elements of the film itself that might have worked against it. For one, it’s a sports drama about a sport considered disreputable in plenty of circles. Of course, bias against wrestling didn’t prevent The Wrestler from scoring two Oscar nominations back in 2009, including a Best Actor nod for Mickey Rourke. But that rapturously reviewed movie couldn’t crack the Best Picture race either. And The Iron Claw isn’t exactly trading on pro-wrestling nostalgia: Despite the bizarrely tragic circumstances of their story, the Von Erichs aren’t household names outside fan circles. This is a biopic with none of the name recognition of, say, the Hulk Hogan or André the Giant story.
There’s also the Efron factor. While the Academy has participated in career makeovers before, helping usher movie stars like Sandra Bullock and Will Smith into the respectability club, some popcorn reputations prove harder to shake. Just look at the failed Oscar campaign of Adam Sandler, who did the best acting of his career in another well-regarded, moneymaking A24 movie, but couldn’t quite secure the Best Actor nomination. Is Hollywood similarly reluctant to see Efron as a serious leading man? “He’s not just the High School Musical kid people remember,” says Neglia. “He’s evolved into someone much more than that. But people would need to see [Claw] to know that.”
“Rarely does Best Actor go to someone who isn’t seasoned and established,” adds the anonymous awards strategist, who notes that the Cinderella story of a young matinee idol proving they’ve got chops is an easier sell in other acting categories. “Best Actress often goes to beautiful young ingénues, but Actor skews older, less ‘beautiful.’” A quick glance at this year’s Best Actor category bears that out: At 36, Efron is more than a decade younger than the youngest nominee, Cillian Murphy. His youth — and glistening, bared abs — may have benefited the film’s marketing campaign, parlaying thirst into box office. But it didn’t create the impression of a prestige acting showcase.
Almost nobody involved with The Iron Claw is part of the Oscar club yet. Not Durkin, whose films (including the gripping Martha Marcy May Marlene and the haunted The Nest) have made a splash with cinephiles, not tony voting bodies. And not the cast, a gaggle of fellow Oscar virgins and actors on the cusp of greater recognition, like Lily James, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson. The Iron Claw is the very definition of a strong ensemble piece. In fact, the few awards it did pick up over the season, from the National Board of Review and the Utah Film Critics Association, were for its whole cast. But the lack of one clear standout performance likely kept it out of acting races.
And as Neglia argues, pedigree makes a difference in the tail-wag-dog world of Oscar season, where movies are “pre-anointed” as contenders before they even come out based on the marquee talent. “All [the films] have to do is live up to those expectations even a little bit,” he says. It’s how a movie like Maestro, hardly universally beloved, muscles its way into the race — by marketing itself as an “important movie” with big Oscar energy, regardless of what people actually think once they get around to seeing it. That’s the self-fulfilling prophecy: Say for months that these are the movies that will compete, and a prediction becomes a guarantee. Is it any wonder that most Oscar pundits guessed what the ten movies up for Best Picture this year were going to be weeks in advance?
Of course, Netflix also spent tens of millions to position Maestro as a major contender. Could A24 have bought a nomination, altering the course of this particular awards season through ads alone? “I don’t think it has anything to do with money,” Neglia says of the campaign spending issue. “Even with all the might and power A24 could have put behind [The Iron Claw], I don’t think it would have been enough to push out one of the other films.” He does wonder if they should have just held the movie for March’s upcoming South by Southwest Film Festival. After all, that’s where Everything Everywhere’s long journey to Oscar glory began two years ago. And given the halt in film production that happened during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, 2024 might be lighter on movies, and hence a much less competitive awards field.
Then again, maybe A24 got what it was hoping to get out of The Iron Claw: an acclaimed box-office hit that helps the brand by demonstrating that the company can make populist movies (a shift in priorities announced in October) without abandoning its commitment to quality. Likewise, the film’s rising tide with audiences and critics will likely lift all boats, creating a new perception of respectability for its actors and crew alike, which could land them Oscar recognition next time. In other words, The Iron Claw will elevate careers, even without the Academy’s stamp of approval. People are discovering the movie without that, too. Who needs a nomination?
