I wrote this Nominations Eve piece last year, and it was a lot of fun, so I figured I would try again. I really only asked for two things in 2021: more recognition for films not in the English language, and fewer acting nominations for mediocre biopics. How did that end up playing out?
We got Drive My Car in Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. The Worst Person in the World showed up in Original Screenplay, and Penélope Cruz was nominated for Best Actress for Parallel Mothers. That’s pretty good. I expect the trend to continue this year with top-tier contenders like All Quiet on the Western Front, Decision to Leave, and RRR all vying for major nominations, which is great.
As for the biopics, well, that didn’t go as well. Jessica Chastain, who is a fantastic actress and seems like a lovely woman, won Best Actress for the kinda ghoulish, tonally incoherent Tammy Faye Bakker biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Will Smith, of course, won Best Actor for King Richard, a pretty good biopic about the patriarch of the Williams tennis dynasty. And, the Academy found a way to nominate three performers from the truly dire Being the Riccardos, with the expected nominations for Javeir Bardem and Nicole Kidman in Actor and Actress, respectively, and a surprise Supporting Actor nomination for the beloved JK Simmons.
It seems we may fare better this year as the precursor awards have heavily favored original characters, and three of the four acting categories have a frontrunner portraying a fictional character. In Best Actor, Austin Butler’s portrayal of Elvis has him in a tight three-way race with two actors playing fictional characters. Only once this century (2016) have all four acting awards gone to performers portraying fictional characters, so we could be looking at a pretty rare occurrence this year.
Speaking of this year, what am I hoping for when the nominations are announced bright and early tomorrow morning? (By the way, check back here tomorrow morning for first-blush reactions to the nominees.)
Don’t Forget the Films Directed by Women
Best Director has gone to a woman each of the past two years – Chloé Zhao for Nomadland in 2020 and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog in 2021. Nomadland and CODA, also directed by a woman, have won the past two Best Picture prizes. At a glance, this could seem like progress. After all, Zhao and Campion are the second and third women, respectively, to win Best Director, but that is in 94 years of Academy history. Three times in 94 years. There have been nearly 500 slots for Best Director over the years, and only eight have gone to women. That’s 1.6 percent. I guarantee more than 1.6 percent of movies are directed by women.
The early signal has not been good this year, though Gina Prince-Bythewood did receive a well deserved directing nomination at the BAFTAs for The Woman King. But, here is what we have for consideration: Sarah Polley’s Women Talking – for my money the best film of the year – Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King, Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Charlotte Welles’ Aftersun, and Maria Schrader’s She Said. All of these are better than at least a couple of the movies that will be nominated tomorrow in Picture and Director.
If the Academy cannot find a place in the top two categories for at least a couple of these films, then that 1.6 percent again starts to look like what it is: a poor excuse for representation.
Genre Performances Are Performances
It feels like an annual tradition at this point for an actress to give a killer performance in a horror movie then be left out of the awards conversation, despite critics and fans championing her. A few recent examples that spring to mind immediately: Toni Collette in Hereditary, Florence Pugh in Midsommar, Lupita Nyong’o in Us, and Elisabeth Moss in The Invisible Man. This year’s likely victim of genre bias: Mia Goth, who gives one of the best performances of the year (look for the column later this week!) in Pearl.
But, it’s not just the women, and it’s not just horror. Action movies, sci-fi pictures, and comedies – all of these tend to be forgotten when it comes to nominations and awards. At least this year, we are likely to get Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis nominated from the sci-fi mashup Everything Everywhere All At Once – a movie I did not like and about which I will certainly be forced to write many words this year – and Angela Bassett from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But, these performances are the exception to the rule, which says genre acting is less impressive somehow.
Even with all of that, we are unlikely to get nominations for Goth, Jessie Buckley or Rory Kinnear in Men, Ralph Fiennes or Nicholas Hoult in The Menu, Pedro Pascal or Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, or anyone from the Glass Onion cast. So often, Academy voters nominate the performances that make us cry, but I guarantee it is just as hard to make us laugh, to make us afraid, or to make us believe in worlds we never imagined.
Spread the Wealth
Did you know there are generally 300-400 films or more eligible for the Academy Awards every year? Probably not, given that only around 40 feature-length films have been nominated in each of the past three years. The specific numbers are 41 last year, 38 in 2020, and 37 in 2019. Thirty-seven films. Does that sound like a broad survey of the best in cinema from a given year?
I understand that sometimes, the best movies are those with the best crafts and best performances and everything comes together to make a Best Picture. But, that is not always the case. Too often the crafts categories are filled out by the same films that lead the top races. This leaves out tremendous achievements like the cinematography of Romain Gavras’ Athena, which deserves recognition as an Oscar nominee, even if the film is unlikely to compete in Picture or Director.
This tendency toward narrowing the field to a select set of films – combined with the genre bias mentioned above – has an equally distressing effect on the acting categories. For instance, this year, there is every chance in the world that seven or eight of the 20 acting slots will be taken up by just two movies. Plainly, that’s not enough.
The issue goes beyond the failure to recognize deserving nominees, though that is a major problem. The Academy Awards are “Hollywood’s biggest night,” or so the advertisements tell us. The industry is trying to sell its product, which in this case means its best films. If the Academy is only recognizing less than 10 percent of films in any given year, then the organization is doing a terrible job of promoting its product. The Oscars are desperate to remain relevant. To do so, this is one of the most consequential trends for them to reverse.
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