Like it or not, screen time matters to Oscar voters

Like all who’ve come up short at the Oscars, Lily Gladstone lost the 2023 Best Actress award to Emma Stone for countless reasons, many of which were unrelated to the quality of her work. It’s no secret that some voters were dissuaded by the relative brevity of her performance, which was proportionally shorter than any her category had seen in nearly two decades. I predicted Stone partly because she outpaced Gladstone by 41 points and I had seen plenty of proof that 2020s voters prefer lengthy lead turns. Among others, that’s also one reason I’m now avoiding jumping on the Michael B. Jordan bandwagon.

It pains me that my savvy Stone prediction was immediately followed by a foolish one for Demi Moore, wherein I failed to account for Mikey Madison’s near-relentless screen dominance in Anora. Other factors obviously contributed to her win, but that clearly is something that influences many current voters. We mustn’t ignore that the last four Best Actress-winning turns are among the nine longest ever, nor that Madison and Adrien Brody have the all-time highest combined time for concurrent lead victors, nor that the 2020s lead champs boast a much larger average than their counterparts from previous decades.

Lead winner averages per decade (in minutes)

Although Jessie Buckley’s 69 minutes of screen time in Hamnet put her slightly above her lineup’s average, she will severely buck said Best Actress trend when she lands in 45th place among the category’s winners. Given that, I find it hard to believe that the upcoming lead honorees will be the first in 10 years to both clock in under 60% and have the lowest percentage average for such a pair in over two decades. The last 11 lead duos’ percentage means are among the 20 highest ever, and I believe it would make more sense for this year’s to align with them rather than land on the opposite end of the spectrum.

There are several plausible 2025 Best Actor outcomes, but Timothée Chalamet is the only nominee who delivers the type of epic-scale performance this decade’s voters evidently favor. With the exception of Ethan Hawke, any one of his competitors would be the category’s first winner in five years to fall under his lineup’s physical mean, and they’re all at least twice as far off as Anthony Hopkins was then. What’s more, Hopkins’s strongest challenger trailed him by 21 minutes and 20%, and the below-average winners who most recently preceded him (Gary Oldman, Matthew McConaughey, Daniel Day-Lewis) were on Buckley’s level of inevitability, unlike Jordan.

I know people perceive Buckley and Jordan’s performances to be longer than they are (in his case because he is one of two current Best Actor nominees playing a dual role), but the numbers don’t lie, and it’s easy to feel the difference in scale compared to Chalamet and Rose Byrne. Just because Byrne is going to be passed over doesn’t mean voters are suddenly no longer swayed by that feeling.

The screen time factor is just one reason why the possibility of Jordan winning doesn’t make sense to me. Even with different elements in play, it does remind me a lot of the Gladstone situation, and I have to go in believing that sticking with Chalamet (whose performance is simply better) will work as well as sticking with Stone did. We’ll see.