When it comes to me, Oscar nomination day is the equivalent to my
Christmas morning. For the past seven
years, I have made every attempt to watch the announcement live. On the west coast, they announce the
nominations at 5:30 in the morning. Luckily
for me, I live in the Midwest—so the announcement is at a more reasonable 7:30
in the morning. I just realized that I
used “luckily” and “I live in the Midwest” in the same sentence. Don’t worry, it’ll never happen again.
After sitting on the nominations for two days, what is my
reaction? In short: I’m on board with the vast majority of these
nominations. I only have a couple
negatives compared to the positives.
Positive: an African
American cast leads three of the nine Best Picture nominees. This is significant, since the past two years
have been #Oscarsowhite, and the representation for POC has been lacking. Speaking of representation…
Positive: seven of the 20 acting nominees are POC,
which is a record: Denzel Washington,
Ruth Negga, Mahershala Ali, Dev Patel, Viola Davis, Naomie Harris, and Octavia
Spencer. Additionally, there is
representation in all four acting categories, and in Best Supporting Actress
there are three African American nominees!
This doesn’t mean we should rest on the representation this year and not
continue to fight for future years, but it’s a good start.
Negative: Hacksaw
Ridge was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best
Director for Mel Gibson. I’ve never been
that big of a Mel Gibson fan, but Hacksaw
Ridge’s awards success baffles me.
When I saw the film in October, it felt like a middling at best action
movie with a rare bad performance from Andrew Garfield (who was also
nominated). I get that the film would
play better for conservative audiences, but even still, I would think there are
better movies. Whatever. I just don’t get it.
Positive/Negative: This year was sinfully easy to prognosticate. Michael Shannon in Nocturnal Animals and Ruth Negga in Loving were the only surprises amongst the acting nominees, and the
other nominees had hit the typical precursors:
Golden Globe, SAG, BAFTA. The
only snubs to speak of were Amy Adams in Arrival
(which hurts, because it’s one of her best performances) and Hugh Grant in Florence Foster Jenkins (which I don’t mind,
because Meryl Streep was the only standout in that film). It’s nice that so many worthy nominees were
able to maintain their precursors and get nominated for an Oscar, but one of
the more exciting things about the Oscar nominations is predicting all of the
surprises…which this year sorely lacked.
Positive: Like me, plenty of people will see a movie if
it is nominated for an Academy Award.
This year it felt like the Academy went out of their way to nominate a
large amount of films, even if they only received one nomination. Captain
Fantastic, Loving, 20th Century Women, Elle, Nocturnal Animals, and The
Lobster all received a single nomination in one of the “big” categories, an
acting or screenplay award. Below the
line, Hail, Caesar!, The Jungle Book, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of
Benghazi, and Jim: The James Foley Story all received single
technical nominations. It’s always nice
when the Academy decides to share the wealth, even though we all know how this
is going to end. Speaking of…
Negative: I love La
La Land as much as the next guy, but 14 nominations (tying the record for
the most nominations, along with 1997’s Titanic
and 1950’s All About Eve) feels
excessive. I was talking to a couple
friends on a movie forum I frequent, and it’s looking like the popular musical
is snowballing to sweeper status, and it’s possible the film could win up to 11
of its categories. I’m okay with it
winning Best Picture (Moonlight is
much better, but I made peace with it being an also-ran), Director, Actress,
Original Score, Original Song (sorry, Lin-Manuel Miranda), and some other
technical awards, but when we start lumping in Best Original Screenplay,
Cinematography, and possibly Best Actor, I get into a “bitch, please”
mode.
Positive: Not to end this on a negative note, Moonlight is one of the best films of
the decade so far—so that it was nominated for Best Picture and seven other
Oscars is easily my highlight of the awards season.
No comments:
Post a Comment