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Can ‘The Power of the Dog’ take home Best Picture?

The Jane Campion film has 12 Oscar nominations

Thomas Savage’s 1967 based-on-truth novel The Power of the Dog got a masterful cinematic adaptation in Jane Campion’s 2021 Western drama of the same name. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the domineering rancher Phil. Jesse Plemons plays his brother George who marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst). Phil intimidates Rose and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) but eventually finds himself drawn towards the sensitive Peter forming a tender relationship with him.

The film is an Oscar frontrunner this year, with 12 nominations, including Best Picture. “The fact that all four of us have been nominated… Seriously, I think it’s such harmony, and 12 is my new favourite number, without a doubt. It seems greedy in a way. It’s such an amazing pool of nominations, but then every single one of them is so richly deserved. I guess that’s what I’m driving at. My point is that when I saw what I was part of, I saw a truly great piece of cinema, a really poetic visual and aural statement of art history, on every level,” Cumberbatch said in an interview.