Emilia Pérez dominates a 2024 Academy Awards nominations announcement short on surprises

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.

2024 Year in Review: Top 10 Moments

The best moments of the year are those that simply brought the most of whatever it is they had to offer. The tensest. The grossest. The most thrilling. The most shocking. The most heartbreaking. The most transcendent. Great filmmakers know how to build up a sequence, a scene, and a moment so that it conveys the deepest impact. None of these moments can be taken out of the context of the films that surround them. Rather, they exemplify the best of what comes before and after them.

When I reflect back on the films of 2024, these are the scenes I keep returning to in my head, asking what it all means or how they accomplished this. Some are moments of grand spectacle that only the movies can offer, while others invite deeper questions about life and existence. Neither is more valuable than the other, and both are required to make the cinema the grand experience that it is. So, I share with you the 10 moments this year that mattered the most to me.

First, a couple runners-up: when Kelly-Anne and Clementine watch a video together in Red Rooms; when Kneecap perform “H.O.O.D.” in Kneecap; the final dance in Fancy Dance; the underpass sequence in Twisters; and the interrogation scene in The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Now, the top 10:

10. Thelma takes a fall. (Thelma, directed by Josh Margolin)

Ninety-three years old at the time of filming, June Squibb brings such life and energy to the title role of Thelma Post that I believe wholeheartedly she could star alongside Tom Cruise in one of the Mission: Impossible films her character watches in this. She is sharp, funny, and spry – but she is also 93. Margolin never lets us forget the vicissitudes of aging, usually in lines given to Richard Roundtree’s Ben. Thelma refuses to acknowledge that there are some things she can’t, or at least shouldn’t, do, and we’re there with her every step of the way.

Until one fateful step. After a fight with Ben, Thelma storms off into the night, determined as ever, then she makes one wrong move – and that’s all it takes. She tumbles to the ground. The first time I saw this scene in the theater, I gasped. It was legitimately shocking. We in the audience intuitively know the dangers of an elderly person falling, and the movie reminds us, in mostly subtle ways, of this fact. But, you can’t believe it could happen to Thelma.

Squibb plays the moment perfectly with equal parts anger, frustration, and fear. A long, quiet moment passes, then Ben returns. He helps her up using a method he learned in a safety class at the senior center. The quest continues. This moment, however, lingers in the mind as the perfect distillation of the film’s primary theme: Just because you’ve aged doesn’t mean you can’t be a badass, but just because you’re a badass doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.

9. Ani gets tied up. (Anora, directed by Sean Baker)

The first 45 minutes to an hour of Anora play out like a fairy tale, as sex worker Ani (Mikey Madison) meets, falls in love with, and impulsively weds Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). The next half-hour plays like a home-invasion thriller, except that nobody wants anything except to have a conversation. We meet Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Igor (Yura Borisov), the hired goons of Ivan’s father. From the first moment they arrive, the train goes off the tracks – for Ani and the audience.

What this actually represents is the end of the fairy tale, the joy and opulence of the first act colliding with the harsh reality of the world. The spoiled Ivan makes a break for it, leaving Ani to wonder what the hell is going on with these two men she has never met, standing in the living room of the home she believes is hers. Things escalate quickly from shouting match to wrestling match to Ani being tied up with a phone cord.

The sequence goes on forever and you keep wondering how Baker and cast will top each wild moment, but somehow they do. By the time Madison is screaming, “Rape!” at the top of her lungs, the audience is stunned into silence, unsure if we can be seeing what we’re actually seeing. It’s the movie’s finest set piece, the dial being turned up to 11 on a story that starts at 10. It’s also the beginning of the end for Ani’s dream, and as fun as it is to watch, the truth hits like a ton of bricks.

8. Margaret goes into labor. (The First Omen, directed by Arkasha Stevenson)

The First Omen has no right being as good as it is. A prequel to a nearly 50-year-old horror masterpiece that already has three sequels and a remake, we’ve seen this formula go wrong much more than it’s gone right. Hell (pun intended), we’re less than 18 months removed from the truly dire The Exorcist: Believer. Going to the well one too many times can be deadly.

Against the odds, Stevenson makes it work. A lot of that is due to the work of leading actress Nell Tiger Free as Margaret, but spoiler alert, we’ll talk about her more in the top performances column. For now, let’s focus on Stevenson’s skill with putting together a horror sequence. 

There are a number of tremendous thrills and chills in this film – not to sound like an Entertainment Weekly blurb – from the riot scene to the first car crash. However, the director truly ups the ante in the third-act sequence in which Margaret makes her escape from the Satan-worshipping cultists with whom she has been living. It’s a harrowing sequence with one shocking twist after another, better seen than described, so I will leave it to you to seek out. Suffice it to say that each moment builds on itself until the sum of the parts is greater than you could have imagined.

7. Monstro Elisasue hosts the New Year’s Eve special. (The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat)

Fargeat’s style is the definition of maximalism, a go-big-or-go-home approach finely tuned to wring the most possible spectacle from her scenarios. In filmmaking terms, “the substance” may as well be steroids, and it’s wonderfully exciting. When subtlety is not the point, anything can happen, and how often do we get to be surprised at the movies anymore?

The tale of Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle and Margaret Qualley’s Sue (just Sue) is not particularly grounded to begin with, but in the last 20 minutes, Fargeat goes full 1950s monster movie. No joke, characters in this movie literally stand up from their seats, point their fingers, and yell, “The monster!” “Shoot the monster!” and “It’s a freak!”

Then, in one of the movie’s many unsubtle metaphors, the ones pointing their fingers are the ones who end up with blood on their hands. And their faces. And their suits. Really, on everything. We’re talking geysers of blood erupting from orifices just invented for this movie. It was serial killer John Doe in Seven who said: “Wanting people to listen … you have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you’ll notice you’ve got their strict attention.” Fargeat, now and forever, has our strict attention.

6. “What kind of American are you?” (Civil War, directed by Alex Garland)

Garland’s superlative war film is being unfairly lost in the Academy Awards fray, presumably because it was released so early in the year. At more than $100 million in worldwide box office, though, this is A24’s second-biggest hit ever, so good for them. One imagines, however, that a later-year release may have ensured the film would be recognized for its considerable crafts. 

Regardless, we have the work, and it is considerable. Garland expertly captures the uncertainty and paranoia inherent in the conflict he is portraying. He builds tension through the slow burn of having to work your way across a devastated landscape in which you have no idea who your friends and enemies are. Perhaps more importantly, they have no idea who you are.

Jesse Plemmons gives one of the year’s great one-scene performances as a militiaman who captures our protagonists and holds them at gunpoint, questioning what kind of Americans they are. It’s another way of asking, simply, ‘Are you like me or are you not like me?’ which is what the whole American mood seems to have boiled down to at this point. With me or against me. My tribe or not. Does your life have value, or doesn’t it? It’s a scary time, getting scarier, and Garland nails it.

5. Bob and Joan perform “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” (A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold)

There are two love triangles at the heart of Mangold’s wonderful Bob Dylan biopic: the first is among Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning); the second is Bob Dylan, the past, and the future. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Bob settles all accounts, whether he means to or not.

The whole movie builds to the infamous “Dylan goes electric” moment, and that is pulled off flawlessly by Mangold, Chalamet, and Co. But, that’s the plot climax. The emotional climax of the film comes the day before when Bob invites his long-estranged ex, Sylvie, to watch him perform. On a whim, though not without some prodding, she agrees. They go and Bob is called onstage to perform his hit “It Ain’t Me, Babe” with ex-lover Joan, who by this point, barely tolerates him.

Their performance is tremendous – four performers at the absolute peak of their powers, Bob and Joan and Chalamet and Barbaro. Mangold’s camera, however, centers Sylvie in the wings, heart shattering as she watches the man she loves share something with another woman – and with the world – that she could never share with him. The moment is equally beautiful and crushing, signifying that Bob is lost to her but also that Bob may be inherently uncatchable.

4. Rain navigates a maze of blood in zero gravity. (Alien: Romulus, directed by Fede Álvarez)

It’s kind of wild that Romulus is the ninth theatrical Alien feature film. “Unsuspecting crew meets a vicious and unrelenting alien” is just a reliably sturdy premise. Of the nine, I’d rank Romulus smack dab in the middle. Álvarez, of course, is a master at building suspense and crafting terror, so it’s always a ride. But, this film is content to play the hits and rarely breaks new ground – with one glorious exception.

Romulus takes the Aliens, more-is-more approach and gives us lots of xenomorphs. And, one of the key things we know about xenomorphs is that their blood is highly acidic. Like, burn through multiple levels of an industrial mining ship acidic. Álvarez makes excellent use of this terrifying fact throughout Romulus, but the pièce de resistance comes toward the end of the second act, when our heroes have their backs against a wall, facing down a horde of aliens.

They can’t shoot the aliens because the blood will burn through the hull of the ship, causing catastrophic failure. However, we learn early on that the gravity on this ship can be turned off for a short period of time. Turn off the gravity and the blood floats. But remember, their backs are against a wall. The only way out is through the blood maze. It’s one of the most gripping sequences I’ve seen in any Alien movie. Credit to Álvarez and everyone involved here that nine movies into a franchise, they still found a way to show us something we had never seen before.

3. Cat and bird climb the mountain. (Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis)

Much of the animated masterpiece Flow is rooted in reality, a heightened sci-fi-esque future reality, but reality nonetheless. Meaning, carnivores eat meat, if you don’t have gills, the rising water level will eventually drown you, and cats are mercurial under the best of circumstances. We accept all of these things and happily go along for the ride.

Then, late into a relatively short movie, Zilbalodis gets transcendental on us and crafts the single most beautiful sequence of the year. Our protagonist is a small black cat who picks up a variety of animal friends throughout the film, including a secretary bird who has been looking out for the cat in ways both seen and unseen. Their connection is one of the key emotional fulcrums of the movie, so when they get separated in a storm, it is devastating.

Eventually, they reunite at the top of a mountain, where time and space and reality itself seem to fold in on each other. The rain reverses direction, returning to the sky above. The heavens part. Cat and bird float into the clouds, but only one is prepared to transcend. The other clings to the earth, to life, the will to survive being innate. Call it god. Call it the universal connection among all things. Call it an acid trip at the end of days. Whatever it is, it is breathtaking.

2. Paul Atreides rides a sandworm. (Dune Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve)

In my At the Movies piece, I took time to write a paean to the beauty of the small, quiet movie and the need for meditative space at the cinema. I believe that with all my soul. But, sometimes, Paul Atreides rides a freakin’ sandworm through the desert, and you just have to get up from your comfy movie theater seat and applaud.

As the most recent crop of Star Wars projects largely dropped the ball (give or take a Last Jedi or Rogue One), a gap in the culture was created for high-minded space opera. With his Dune series, Villeneuve has only been all too happy to fill that gap. I can’t say that I’m 100 percent buying everything this franchise is selling, its champions perhaps placing the films on too high a pedestal. That said, no one is making movies like this these days, and when you want an epic tale on the grandest scale about intergalactic warfare and centuries-long birth conspiracies, accept no substitutes.

Honestly, there’s too much plot going on to fully set up this moment in the movie in these brief paragraphs. The short version is that Paul (Chalamet again, having just a helluva 13 months, going all the way back to Wonka) is embedded with the Fremen people and may or may not be their messiah. For reasons, it’s important that he ride a sandworm, so of course, he rides the biggest one. Conveniently for us, he does so in IMAX, and for about five minutes, we remember why cinemas need such big screens.

1. Cardinal Lawrence casts a vote for himself. (Conclave, directed by Edward Berger)

Conclave is a locked-door thriller all about electoral procedure that turns on who votes for whom and why. Yeah, it achieved a certain amount of relevance in 2024, but that’s not what makes it great. The achievement of this film is the way that Berger, fresh off the accomplishment of All Quiet on the Western Front, infuses every moment with drama and tension, using little more than the weight of moral inquiry. 

It’s a movie about decisions. For the audience to care, those decisions must have meaning, and the audience must understand that meaning both intellectually and emotionally. Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan do an expert job of communicating that meaning, and Ralph Fiennes, portraying Cardinal Lawrence, carries that burden effortlessly.

The titular conclave has one purpose: to elect a new pope. There are a few viable candidates, and over the course of the film, that pool of candidates narrows, and it becomes clear that this is an election about the very soul of the church. Will they move backward or forge new paths (again, relevant)? Lawrence finds himself in the midst of a crisis of faith, not lacking belief in god but rather in the institution of the church. He does not want to be pope, but certain interested parties insist that not only should he be pope but that deep down, he must want it. They all want it.

So, when push comes to shove, Lawrence finally votes for himself – and all hell breaks loose. The how is one of the year’s great cinematic surprises, so I will not reveal it here. But in this moment, everything comes to a head: the weight of history, the burden of expectation, the fecklessness of our institutions. The world may be run by (mostly) men in locked rooms, but while they hide in their bunkers, the world turns. They can neither stop it nor control it. They play their games while the rest of us simply want to live our lives.