Wicked just won a huge award it could spell bad news for Oscars

“Wicked” has claimed victory at one of the first major stops on the road to the 2025 Oscars. As the opening lyric of Stephen Schwartz’s musical goes, “Good news!”Or is it?On Wednesday, the National Board of Review named the big-budget adaptation of the Broadway show its top film of the year.Adding to the haul, “Wicked”’s Jon M.Chu won Best Director.His stars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, meanwhile, did not take home Best Actress and Supporting Actress (those respectively went to Nicole Kidman for “Babygirl” and Elle Fanning for “A Complete Unknown”). Instead, the green-and-pink duo got a combined special award for “Creative Collaboration.”Before you hop on a Swifter and start belting “Defying Gravity,” there’s just one problem with these honors — statistically, they’re curses. The group’s record is spotty, to say the least.NBR’s Best Picture winner has only gone on to win the top Academy Award three times in the past 24 years: “No Country For Old Men” (2007), “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008) and “Green Book” (2018). That’s an 8% success rate since Y2K.The exact same number applies to their rocky Best Director Oscars overlap: Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic,” 2000), Ang Lee (“Brokeback Mountain,” 2005) and Martin Scorsese (“The Departed,” 2006). If I was Universal, I would be “loathing” those odds.The taste of the National Board of Review — a New York-based organization made up of, according to its website, “enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals, academics and students,” rarely aligns with that of the Oscars, a group of 9,375 Hollywood pros.The Academy’s directors branch, for instance, which chooses their Best Director category, tends to favor craft over popularity. Last year they nominated Justine Triet and Jonathan Glazer, whose “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest” had zero dance numbers or flying monkeys.The kick-off week for award season has been crowded.

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