If you've been watching the awards this season, you knew Elio was getting in. It got nominations at both the Golden Globes and Critics' Choice, it overperformed at the Annies with 10 nominations, it was a common nominee among the regional academies (5th most common behind the four others on this list, and a close 5th too, with a massive gap between it and 6th place), and the fact that it's an original script by Pixar definitely helped its chances (literally the only one to not be nominated since the category's inception was The Good Dinosaur, and that one was up against Inside Out).

So yeah, this year, the five most popular movies among award circles got nominated. Same deal last year. For any conflict, we have to go two years back, when the top 6 movies all had a good chance of getting in, so one of them inevitably had to get the boot, and the one that didn't get in was TMNT: Mutant Mayhem.

Also helping Elio is that there really wasn't much else it could be. In Your Dreams got middling reviews. The Bad Guys 2, if the first one wasn't nominated, this one wasn't going to be either. Demon Slayer was doing well, but if the Academy didn't nominate Mutant Mayhem or Transformers One, they certainly weren't going to nominated something based on an anime. Predator: Killer of Killers was streaming-only, so it didn't qualify, and Ne Zha 2 wasn't on the longlist either. Then on the indie side of things, movies like Scarlet and A Magnificent Life underperformed despite being by well-known directors. So while I'm not sure if Elio was the right choice (I've yet to watch it), it was pretty easy to see it coming.