Oscar Seasoning: The Highs and Lows of the 96th Oscar Nominations
The good and the bad (but mostly the meh.)
They nominations for the 2024 Academy Awards are in and things are… eh, mostly decent but still kind of bland, if I’m being honest? Expecting better from the Oscars is a hopeless endeavour. It’s like expecting your incontinent cat not to piss all over your bed. The Academy is making progress in areas like diversifying its membership and keeping Best Picture at ten nominees, but you can always see the blind spots at play. 2023 was a great year for blockbusters, indie cinema, and everything in between. Here are a few things that caught my attention. You can read the nominations list here!
GOOD: Justine Triet’s Achievements
When Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or, it wasn’t immediately seen as an Oscar contender. The Cannes-to-Academy pipeline is inconsistent and often struggles to find a place for more esoteric fare. Yet Justine Triet’s gripping courtroom drama just stuck around all season, even when France pointedly did not submit it as their choice for Best International Feature (their pick, The Taste of Things, was notably not nominated.) As well as a Best Director nod for Triet (making her only the eighth woman to get such a nomination), the film received four more noms, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Sandra Hüller. I highly recommend seeing Anatomy of a Fall if you haven't already: it's a deceptively tangled story of how the spotlight's harsh gaze can mutate even the most mundane qualities of everyday life. Also, it has an amazing dog in it.
BAD: Where’s Greta’s Nom?
Barbie did great business, earning eight nominations including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Gosling, and a surprise Supporting Actress nom for America Ferrera. That celebration did not extend towards director Greta Gerwig. While she and husband Noah Baumbach for an adapted screenplay nomination, she was absent from Director, which featured Triet and four men. Granted, director was always going to be stacked this season. You could fill it out a couple of times over with those who are missing: Cord Jefferson, Celine Song, Alexander Payne, Andrew Haigh, Todd Haynes (and none for Bradley Cooper, bye!) Still, when you made the highest-grossing film of the year, one of the most critically acclaimed at that, the lack of recognition as a director can't help but sting. I'm reminded of Barbra Streisand not getting in for The Prince of Tides, even though it was a Best Picture nominee (and that was in the days of only five films per category.) It didn't direct itself! I don't necessarily see this, as some have, as a distaste for Gerwig herself. If it were, she wouldn't be nominated at all but she is. She's still the first woman director to have made three Oscar-nominated films. Yet it definitely feels like a moment where the Academy went, “That’s enough for now.”
GOOD: The Zone of Interest Overperforms
I must admit that I rolled my eyes a bit when, after its premiere at Cannes, I saw people predicting Oscar gold for The Zone of Interest. Granted, I hadn’t seen the movie but the idea of a Jonathan Glazer movie about Auschwitz and the banality of evil felt like Academy kryptonite. The Oscars is way too middlebrow for the dude who made Birth and Under the Skin. But here we are and The Zone of Interest has five nominations. What a coup for A24, especially since Glazer got in for Director while so many more mainstream films didn’t. The Zone of Interest isn’t going to take home the big awards but it even being nominated is exciting. It’s only the third British film to receive an International Feature nomination, which is pretty cool and a reminder of how weird that category is. I question how many of those cranky Oscar voters who think that Barbie is too woke will deal with this one. Oh, to have that livestream viewing experience available to me. At the very least, I’d like to see it win for Best Sound. You’ll understand why once you see it.
BAD: Did May December Hurt You?
It became clearer in the lead-up to nominations morning that May December wasn’t going to get a ton of nominations, but a Supporting Actor nod for Charles Melton seemed perfectly solid. So, of course he didn’t get it. indeed, Todd Haynes’ drama got nothing aside from a (well-deserved) Original Screenplay nom. It didn’t do brilliantly with precursor awards either, by which I mean the big flashy ones and not critics’ circles where they seemed to more fully appreciate May December. Still, the omission seemed especially questionable. Look, I love Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things. He’s basically playing Victorian cad Zapp Brannigan. It’s hilarious. But over Charles Melton? It felt lazy. I think May December may have just hit differently for the film industry. Maybe they weren’t ready for a scathing indictment about the ways that mediocre talents mine real human tragedy for clout.
GOOD: Lily Gladstone!
I've made no secret of the fact that Lily Gladstone's work in Killers of the Flower Moon was my favourite performance of 2023. It was, in all senses of the word, revelatory. How thrilling to see it rewarded, and for Gladstone to become the first Native American to receive a Best Actress nomination. You could hear the excitement in the room when the nom was announced (Gladstone is also non-binary and uses she/they pronouns, making her nomination a big win for the LGBTQ+ community too!) This was a stacked category and a lot of painful cuts were obviously made, like the lack of Margot Robbie, Fantasia Barrino, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. I think this race is between Gladstone and Emma Stone for Poor Things, and either would be a worthy win.
BAD: Annette Bening?
Look, I love Annette Bening. It is a shame that she doesn’t have an Oscar already. Anyone who saw 20th Century Women still feels the pain of that lack of nomination. Nyad, though? It’s fine. Actually, it’s mostly boring, a very typical biopic that does everything you expect from the genre, nothing more. This wasn’t a movie a lot of people were wildly enthusiastic about. If they were eager for anything from it, it was Jodie Foster’s performance (and she is nominated.) But the Academy loves being lazy, and it loves legacies. It also doesn’t hurt that Bening is universally loved, part of an iconic power couple, and is Vice Chair on the board of trustees for The Actors Fund. She was pivotal in helping actors stay afloat during the SAG-AFTRA strike. I bet that secured her a few votes.
GOOD: 2023 Was Colman Domingo’s Year
As someone who's been rather enamoured with Colman Domingo for years, it was a joy to see him get nominated in that stacked Best Actor category. Rustin is a perfectly fine movie but he is so moving and charismatic in it that you'll want to watch him in absolutely everything. He was also in The Color Purple (snubbed aside from Danielle Brooks), and is still committed to the mess that is Euphoria. Personally, I'd been rooting for Domingo to get Oscar recognition since Zola, wherein he flips from charming to terrifying in the blink of an eye. Look out for him next year in Sing Sing, which was a show stealer at TIFF. Domingo's nom also makes him the second gay Black man to get a Best Actor nod, and he's gotten it for playing a gay man. Stuff like this is rare, particularly since a lot of amazing queer films like Monica and All of Us Strangers were totally ignored by the Academy. Expect Domingo to be the best-dressed nominee of the night.
BAD: We Will Never Be Rid of Diane Warren
There's being Oscar hungry and then there's Diane Warren. The songwriter is one of the industry greats and for a reason. She wrote "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing!" "If I Could Turn Back Time!" "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now!" Her place in music history is secure. But she also really REALLY wants a competitive Oscar for Best Original Song. She’s admitted to being desperate to win it. The Academy gave her an honourary award and that didn't stop her! So this means we're doomed to get a Warren nod every dang year, usually for a song you've never heard in a film you're not entirely sure actually exists. This year, she's in for something called "The Fire Inside" from that film about the guy who didn't create Flamin' Hot Cheetos? Yeah, me neither. At this point, I’m convinced the ballot just comes with her name already filled in.
BAD: All Those Omissions
The thing about covering this business year after year is that, no matter how hardened you are to Academy jackassery, you cannot help but feel like maybe this time things will be different. Hey, they have gotten better over the years. Perhaps that means they’ll be more open to stuff previously considered anti-Oscars? But then they don’t nominate All of Us Strangers or A Thousand and One or Ferrari. They don’t acknowledge Kokomo City or Monica. And even stuff that seemed perfectly with the limiting mould of awards contenders are shoved aside, from The Color Purple to The Iron Claw. For every step forward, such as Lily Gladstone’s nomination, you can’t help but notice the steps back when actors like Greta Lee, Fantasia Barrino, Teo Yoo, Charles Melton, and Teyana Taylor missing from the table. It’s not simply that so many stories (diverse ones, those with more esoteric styles, ones that don’t adhere to Hollywood tropes) aren’t invited to the party; it’s that ones made by more inclusive creative teams that do appeal to the Oscar ideal are still not good enough in their eyes.
A lot of this makes the Oscars this strange mixture of gripping and dull. You don’t watch the awards to gauge the best films of the year; you engage with it to see how the film industry (read: American mainstream) wants to convey itself to the world. What do they want to celebrate? Who do they want to elevate to the upper echelons of worthiness? This is a very safe-minded business that still balks at taking risks, and risk can mean anything from a film not in the English language to an animated drama to something with a majority Black cast. Regardless of how often such works prove themselves to be critically and commercially excellent, they have to repeat this cycle ad infinitum.
So, come March 10, how will the Academy want the world to see it? Will Barbie get Best Picture or Oppenheimer? Will biopic performances win the lion’s share of prizes or something more experimental? Will there be any real surprises? Will I get to watch Bradley Cooper suffer yet again? We’ll wait and see.
Stay tuned over the next several weeks for even more Oscar Seasoning! Next up will be my thoughts on some of the campaigns of the season.