Good morning! The Oscars nominations are officially here, and as always, the Academy’s selections were bittersweet. There’s a lot to celebrate; to name but a few, Colman Domingo became the first openly gay Best Actor nominee since Ian McKellen in 1998’s “Gods and Monster,” three Best Picture nominees were directed by women (the most ever), seven people of color were honored in the acting races, the legendary Wim Wenders finally received a long overdue nomination for his narrative work, the great Robbie Robertson received a posthumous nomination for his lovely “Killers of the Flower Moon” score, and this Best Picture lineup is in serious contention for the best set of nominees ever.
But we have the next six weeks to celebrate all of those wonderful achievements, so today they can take a backseat to a different set of emotions: confusion, incredulity, despondence, and outrage at a handful of surprising selections that range from head-scratching to tone-deaf to outright spiteful. As always with these things, it’s worth remembering that no film you love is any different today than it was yesterday. They’ll all still be there, ready for your next rewatch, same as they ever were. Unfortunately though, Oscar snubs do mean these films will get fewer eyes on them than they otherwise might have, and there’s real sadness in that. But as smarter people than me have said, the Oscars are merely a first draft of history, and we can hold out hope that our favorites will still get discovered by eager viewers in due time (as I’m hoping with my beloved “The Promised Land,” cruelly left out of the Best International Film race).
With that in mind, let’s break down this morning’s most notable omissions, and try to make sense of what they mean.
1. “Barbie”
We have to start here. Though it was a decent morning for “Barbie” overall, and eight total nominations is certainly nothing to shake a stick at, perhaps the two most jaw-dropping omissions of the nominee slate were the two women behind the highest-grossing film of the year. Greta Gerwig’s snub for Best Director, coming from a branch that doesn’t tend to honor a lot of women (though “Anatomy of a Fall” director Justine Triet at least got in the field this year), unfortunately started to feel like the worst kind of quasi-inevitable in recent weeks. But Margot Robbie missing out on Best Actress was truly shocking. The silver lining, if there is one here, is that at least Gerwig and Robbie were nominated in other categories (Gerwig for her delightfully subversive “Barbie” script and Robbie for producing the film).
2. The Cast of “May December”
Few actors that ultimately failed to get an Oscar nomination have dominated the critics awards quite like Charles Melton did over the last few months (the last time was probably Ethan Hawke for “First Reformed,” five years ago) and his pileup of honors from regional critics groups and film societies became so overwhelming that it started to feel like an Oscar nomination was really in the cards. But it was not, and nor was it for Melton’s “May December” cast mates, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. Perhaps the writing was on the wall when all three missed out with the Screen Actors Guild a few weeks ago—the movie might’ve been just a bit too scathing of actors (and their fabled “process”) to resonate with voting bodies made up entirely of actors.
3. The “Killers of the Flower Moon” Screenplay
Though it received 10 nominations overall, “Killers of the Flower Moon” was very conspicuously absent in the Best Adapted Screenplay field. Adapted from the David Grann book of the same name, the screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese took a lot of flak on social media for changing the book’s dominant point of view from the FBI investigators and Osage victims to the white men who were murdering the Osage. That POV change may have fit in nicely with Martin Scorsese’s filmography, but in our present era of heightened representational awareness—particularly when it comes to who gets to tell stories and who those stories are focused on—the shift rubbed many viewers the wrong way. Academy voters apparently agreed, and refocusing the story on the Ernest Burkhart character didn’t seem to help the actor who played Burkhart, either, as Leonardo DiCaprio also failed to get a nomination.
4. “The Color Purple” and December Releases
Ever since “Million Dollar Baby” came out of nowhere in December of 2004 (after playing no festivals) and eventually won Best Picture, we have the same conversation every year: Could there be a big December Surprise? And for the 19th year in a row, the answer has once again been No. As “The Color Purple” and “The Iron Claw” became the latest in a long line of very good movies to find out, it’s incredibly difficult to become a serious Oscar contender if you skip the fall festivals and then open at the end of the year. Danielle Brooks ended up being the lone nomination for “The Color Purple,” which also endured some surprising misses in the craft and music categories.
And even films that played the fall fests but still had late releases fared poorly overall, with “All of Us Strangers” and “Ferrari” also getting completely shut out (shed a tear for Penélope Cruz’s towering “Ferrari” performance). “American Fiction” still did well, but it had the advantage of winning the biggest prize of the fall fests (the TIFF People’s Choice Award), which helped sustain its momentum even as audiences couldn’t see it yet. As for all the others, the song remains the same: You can’t just pile all the contenders into December and expect it to work. (Also worth noting in regard to the not-great morning for “The Color Purple”: as we saw last year with the total Oscar shutouts of “Till” and “The Woman King,” the Academy continues to have a problematic aversion to honoring films about Black women.)
5. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” and Spring Releases
For as much as December releases had a bad morning, it was even worse for Spring releases. Our beloved “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” ultimately failed to get nominations for its screenplay or its wonderful Rachel McAdams performance, despite both being widely speculated on as potential dark horse possibilities. And Ben Affleck’s highly lauded “Air” was also completely shut out, after Viola Davis’s supporting performance as Michael Jordan’s mother was considered a serious Oscar contender upon the film’s release last April. Just a year after “Everything Everywhere All at Once” dominated the Oscars despite a March release date, this year the earliest release date for a film nominated in any major category was June (“Past Lives”).
6. The Animated Feature Ghetto
When the Golden Globes nominated Joe Hisaishi’s lovely original score for “The Boy and the Heron,” and when the American Film Institute named “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” as one of the ten best films of the year, it almost looked like this could be the year that the best animated features could potentially receive nominations in other categories. But it still wasn’t to be, and despite this maybe being the final chance to nominate Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki for his sublime screenwriting, voters still seem to think that animated films only belong in their own categories. (And please pour one out for the incredible editing of “Spider-Verse,” which I wrote about in our rundown of the year’s best craft accomplishments.)
7. Documentaries About Celebrities
Two of the year’s most moving documentaries were intimate and creative portraits of noted celebrities coping with disease. “American Symphony” chronicled the dual struggles of musician Jon Batiste composing a symphony while helping his wife undergo cancer treatment, while “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” saw the famed actor recounting his legendary career and his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s Disease.” Both films made the Academy’s Documentary Feature shortlist last month, and both were considered to be major contenders to win the Oscar. But ultimately the incredibly gate-keep-y Documentary Branch didn’t select either to even receive a nomination.
8. France
While we may be upset by them, nothing discussed above truly qualifies as a “snub.” They’re all just examples of voters thinking differently than we might wish they did. But when it comes to what happened in the Best International Film category, “snub” really is the most apt term. There was sufficient outrage last fall when the French film commission selected “The Taste of Things” to submit for the Best International Film Oscar over the Palme d’Or–winning “Anatomy of a Fall,” but we mostly told ourselves that France just made a difficult decision between two great films (each country can only submit one film for the Best International Film category), and that “The Taste of Things” could win the Oscar just as easily as “Anatomy of a Fall” could have.
But as “Anatomy of a Fall” kept winning major precursors and turned into a likely Best Picture nominee, the questions about France’s selection turned to outright vitriol, and that vitriol apparently led to many Academy voters snubbing “The Taste of Things” to spite France’s selection process (as had recently been reported by some industry insiders). It’s a sad result for “The Taste of Things,” a wonderful film that did nothing wrong and didn’t deserve to be the target of anyone’s ire. But just as outrage about “The Dark Knight” missing out on a Best Picture nomination in 2009 led to the expanded Best Picture lineup, the outrage we just saw manifest in the Best International Film category could lead to real changes in the submission process.
9. Unpredictability
As surprising as many of the above omissions are, these were, on the whole, among the least surprising Oscar nominations ever. Only 14 total films are represented in the top eight categories (the ten Best Picture nominees, plus “The Color Purple,” “May December,” “Nyad,” and “Rustin”), which is among the lowest spreading-of-the-wealth that we’ve ever seen in the major categories. The Best Picture nominees are also a perfect 10-for-10 match of the Producers Guild nominations, nine of the ten screenplay nominees are also in the Best Picture race, and only three of the 20 acting nominees differed from the Screen Actors Guild nominations (with Best Actor also a perfect 5-for-5 match). That’s an astonishing amount of chalk, and it illustrates an overall lack of thinking outside the box from Academy voters, who seem to be watching and seriously considering fewer options than ever. The dream of any major nominations really coming from left field (some fun choices this year could have included Glenn Howerton, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Holt McCallany, and Leonie Benesch) seems to be officially dead.
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