The theme of this year’s Academy Awards nominations was: They like her, they really like her. The “her” in this case refers to the fictional character Emilia Pérez and more broadly the film about the cartel leader turned missing persons advocate, Emilia Pérez. Jacques Audiard’s musical melodrama was nominated Thursday morning for 13 Academy Awards, tied for second-most all time with 11 other films, including last year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer.
Of the 14 previous movies to earn at least 13 nominations, nine of those went on to win the top prize, so we have our front runner. In addition to Best Picture, Audiard was nominated for Director, Karla Sofía Gascón for Actress, Zoe Saldaña for Supporting Actress, and the film for Adapted Screenplay, Makeup and Hairstyling, Cinematography, Editing, and Sound.
Taking nothing away from the feat, it is worth noting that two of the Emilia Pérez nominations are for Best Original Song and one for Best International Feature, two categories in which The Brutalist and Wicked were not eligible. Both of those movies received 10 nominations, tying Emilia Pérez among categories in which all three films were competing.
Joining those three features in the Best Picture lineup are Anora, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, and The Substance. The biggest miss is Jesse Eisenberg’s Holocaust dramedy A Real Pain, which was cited in the top category at almost every precursor but couldn’t quite make it over the finish line here. Eisenberg was nominated for his Original Screenplay, and Kieran Culkin was cited in Supporting Actor, where he remains the front runner but perhaps a little more vulnerable now that support for the film appears to be flagging.
Another unfortunate miss in Best Picture was Greg Kwedar’s prison drama Sing Sing, which earned three nominations, including Colman Domingo’s second straight Best Actor nomination. The film also earned a Best Original Song nomination and an Adapted Screenplay nomination. The screenplay citation is particularly enjoyable as it makes nominees of John “Divine G” Whitfield and Clarence Maclin, the real-life figures the movie is based on. They share the nomination with Kwedar and Clint Bentley.
In addition to Domingo, the nominees for Best Actor are Adrien Brody for The Brutalist, Timothée Chalamet for A Complete Unknown, Ralph Fiennes for Conclave, and somewhat surprise nominee Sebastian Stan for The Apprentice. Stan has been out on the town, stumping hard for a movie some felt got short shrift because of its subject matter. He’s excellent in the film, so good for him for making this happen, even if I might have preferred he get in for his work in A Different Man (itself nominated for Makeup and Hairstyling).
In Supporting Actor, Jeremy Strong joins Stan in representing The Apprentice. He’ll compete alongside Culkin, Yura Borisov for Anora, Edward Norton for A Complete Unknown, and Guy Pearce for The Brutalist.
Both The Brutalist and A Complete Unknown showed up in Supporting Actress, as well, giving each film three acting nominations across the same three categories. Monica Barbaro represents A Complete Unknown, while Felicity Jones is the nominee for The Brutalist. Also cited are Saldaña, Ariana Grande for Wicked, and Isabella Rossellini for Conclave.
In Best Actress, along with Gascón, we have Cynthia Erivo for Wicked, Mikey Madison for Anora, Demi Moore for The Substance, and Fernanda Torres for I’m Still Here. Torres had been an outside contender, but the Academy clearly loved this film, which in addition to Picture, is also nominated for International Feature.
One of the big surprises of the morning was Conclave, which garnered eight nominations across just about every major category, including two acting nominations, Editing, and Adapted Screenplay, which it very well could win. However, director Edward Berger missed out in the directing category, taking some of the wind out of this film’s sails.
Much of that wind, as it were, was transferred to A Complete Unknown, which also picked up eight nominations, including one for director James Mangold. Mangold will compete alongside Audiard, Sean Baker for Anora, Coralie Fargeat for The Substance, and Brady Corbet for The Brutalist. I would call Corbet the front runner after his Golden Globe win, but if voters really love Emilia Pérez this much, the direction is probably that film’s saving grace, so I don’t see how Audiard doesn’t win. But, we’ll get to predictions in a few weeks’ time.
Interestingly, all five Director nominees are nominated for their screenplays, as well – Baker, Corbet, and Fargeat in Original and Mangold and Audiard in Adapted. Mangold and Baker are actually triple nominees as nominated producers on their films. For all we know, Corbet, Fargeat, and Audiard could join them since, as of this morning, the nominated producers for five of the Best Picture nominees shockingly have not yet been determined. This has happened before, but never to this level.
Fargeat is now the ninth woman to be nominated for Best Director and, interestingly, the second consecutive French woman to be nominated, following on the heels of Justine Triet’s nomination last year for Anatomy of a Fall. A woman has been nominated for Director in four of the past five years with two wins in that span, but the numbers still heavily favor men, so we’ll continue to cite this disparity until it ceases to be a disparity. It also is worth noting that all five nominees this year are white.
So, that’s what happened. The question, then, as Bob Dylan himself might say, is: How does it feel? Personally, I’m delighted at the inclusion of Nickel Boys in Best Picture, though baffled by its exclusion from Cinematography. RaMell Ross’ film features some of the most breathtaking and inventive photography of any film this year, so that’s a bummer.
I wish A Real Pain and Sing Sing could have made it to the finish line in the Best Picture race. The Eisenberg film may have peaked too early – it had a long race to run from Sundance – and A24 completely botched the Sing Sing release strategy. It’s an odd mistake from a studio that is generally pretty savvy. It was a miscalculation to release the film in June, then not make it available for home viewing, either via streaming or DVD, and instead wait for nominations time to re-release it in theaters.
In the era of streaming, I’m all for innovative approaches to film releasing, but for a film that clearly was positioned for major awards contention, I don’t see how making it practically unavailable for nearly six months builds buzz. The film re-released to theaters last Friday, the original date for the nominations announcement. So it seems obvious the strategy was to put it back in theaters at the exact moment it could capitalize on the Oscar nominations they assumed it would get. Except, they did none of the work to garner those nominations. (To clarify, I’m referring to the studio and its awards consultants; the cast and crew made a beautiful movie and were all over town selling the hell out of it.)
My greatest joy of the morning comes in the double nomination in International Feature and Animated Feature of the Latvian animated film Flow, from director Gints Zilbalodis. I wrote about this film for my Top 10 Moments of the year column, and spoilers, I’ll be writing about it again for my Top 10 Films. It’s such a gorgeous, special film, and I hope more people check it out as a result of these nominations.
There are a few other coulda, shoulda, wouldas that we could talk about – the complete shutout of The Piano Lesson and specifically Danielle Deadwyler is unfortunate, as is the snub of Marianne Jean Baptiste for Hard Truths – but that’s enough for this morning.
We’ll be finishing up the 2024 Year in Review this weekend with the aforementioned Top 10 Films column (all but two of which were nominated in at least one category today), then in February, I will have my category-by-category breakdown of all the nominees.
As it stands, Emilia Pérez is your front runner, with The Brutalist and A Complete Unknown seemingly in the Nos. 2 and 3 positions. It seems like Netflix is making Emilia Pérez happen by sheer force of will, as I have not spoken to one person nor read or listened to one critic who likes this film, let alone loves it with the passion these nominations suggest. But, stranger things have happened.
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