Hey, you wanted intrigue at the Oscars? How about not one but two screenplay races where the winner remains legitimately uncertain? Let’s get to it.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
NOMINEES
Belfast—Kenneth Branagh
Don’t Look Up—Adam McKay
King Richard—Zach Baylin
Licorice Pizza—Paul Thomas Anderson
The Worst Person in the World—Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt Read More
There are quite a few competitive races at this year’s Oscars, including several in categories we’ve previously analyzed. They do not include the races for the supporting actors, which are virtually written in stone at this point. But who cares? After all, the whole point of this annual exercise isn’t to predict the winners but to officially log my own choices so that years from now, I can issue boastful statements like, “Sure, you all like Anya Taylor-Joy now that she’s earned her third Oscar nomination of the 2020s, but how many of you put her on your ballot in 2018 for Thoroughbreds??”
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
NOMINEES
Jessie Buckley—The Lost Daughter
Ariana DeBose—West Side Story
Judi Dench—Belfast
Kirsten Dunst—The Power of the Dog
Aunjanue Ellis—King Richard Read More
Quick trivia question: Which movie received the second-most nominations at this year’s Oscars (following The Power of the Dog’s twelve)? It wasn’t the emerging Best Picture threat CODA, or the technical marvel West Side Story, or the big-hearted crowd-pleaser Belfast. It was Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s mammoth sci-fi adventure about spice, dreams, and colonialism. In addition to raking in cash (its $108 million domestic haul far surpassed any other Best Picture contender), Dune racked up 10 total Oscar nods, with the Academy clearly admiring its bold visual style and maximalist craft. It’s an impressive showing that recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, which also scored 10 nominations in 2013 and won a whopping seven trophies (the third-most of any movie this century, behind The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Slumdog Millionaire), though it failed to win the big prize, falling to 12 Years a Slave.
Dune isn’t winning Best Picture either, but could it match Gravity’s overall tally? In yesterday’s piece, I analyzed eight miscellaneous categories, and while Dune is nominated in three of those, I’m predicting it to fare poorly (winning Sound, but losing both Costume Design and Makeup/Hairstyling). Thus, to keep pace with Cuarón’s smash hit, Dune virtually needs to sweep the following five fields, each of which encompasses a high-profile area of technical filmmaking (and which I’ve historically dubbed The Big Techies). What are its chances? Let’s find out. Read More
Welcome to Oscars week! Over the next five days, we’ll be running through all 20 feature categories in contention at this year’s ceremony—not to be confused with all of the awards that will actually be presented during the ceremony. Sharper and more knowledgeable critics than I have already and justifiably skewered the Academy for its laughable decision to announce the winners of eight different categories before the show proper and then somehow “edit” them into the telecast. Now, it’s possible to acknowledge that not all 23 categories (20 features, plus three shorts) possess an equivalent degree of luster; hell, I imply as much every year by titling this opening piece “odds and ends” before moving on to “the big techies” (which include film editing, original score, and production design… all of which won’t be presented live this year). But it’s foolish to pretend that this bizarre, fanboy-chasing maneuver—which is presumably designed to save time, though there are rumblings that the Academy will replace the missing minutes with, I dunno, more montages about the magic of movies, all while still limiting the telecast to three hours, we promise—will somehow attract potential viewers who were otherwise on the fence.
This makes no sense. If you don’t care about the Oscars, the prospect of not seeing the award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling presented live will not suddenly make you want to watch the Oscars. If you do care about the Oscars—if you annually follow cinema’s most prestigious, pretentious gala, and if you recognize the Academy’s value as a recordkeeping institution while still lamenting its general unwillingness to be truly adventurous—then the marginalization of a handful of categories (and of the hard-working artisans deprived of their chance to hear their name read aloud by a gorgeous celebrity) represents a pointless, self-flagellating smack. To quote a certain crime lord who made his share of disastrous decisions: It accomplishes nothing. Read More
When it comes to this year’s Oscars, we can agree to disagree. Or maybe we can disagree about what we agree on. From my particular vantage on Film Twitter, it was hard to tell whether this year’s slate of nominations constituted a triumph or a travesty. Did the Academy make some brave and unexpected choices? Or were its curveballs simply, to quote a certain aesthete, a sly declaration of new classic status slipped into a list of old safe ones?
As is ever the case, it’s hard to get too excited about this year’s Oscar nominees, but it’s also silly to be too disappointed by them. By and large, the Academy highlighted some pretty good movies and artisans, even if their picks rarely aligned with my own. The day our respective selections do match perfectly will be cause for trepidation rather than celebration. After all, what am I without my own weird, idiosyncratic, inimitable taste? Read More