I’m not a big fan of the Oscars. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pageantry and I love the few weeks of the year where it almost seems like everyone cares about movies almost as much as I do. But ultimately, whatever wins or loses rarely does so based on the actual quality of the film, but instead is more of a metric on how persuasive that film’s Oscar campaign was and how much bandwidth it squeezed out of its marketing budget. Every once in a while, the Academy gets it right (Parasite), but most of the time it’s woefully out of touch and downright wrong (Green Book).
I haven’t seen every nominated movie yet, but I have a pretty good head start and will definitely have them all watched by the time the Oscars air on March 2, so hopefully when we get closer I can do an in-depth dive into each category and pick the winners and losers. But, for now, let’s take a look at some of the interesting choices and ridiculous snubs for the 97th Annual Academy Awards.
There are a few pretty shocking snubs this year that I’m still wrapping my head around. Leaving Sing Sing, Challengers, A Real Pain, and His Three Daughters out of the race for Best Picture seems like a huge mistake. If you had told me six months ago that Challengers wouldn’t get nominated for a single award (especially the propulsive and hypnotizing score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), I would have put money on you being mistaken. To be sure, the nominated scores for The Brutalist and Conclave are pretty fantastic, but Reznor and Ross taught a masterclass on how you can literally build a movie around the score. It’s groundbreaking.
And speaking of music... we need to talk about Emilia Pérez. First, let me say that as a cis het white guy, I feel wildly unqualified to talk about this movie, but since cis het white guys basically have a cottage industry in talking about shit they have no business speaking on, I’ll just be brief. This film (which now shares the same number of Oscar nominations as Mary Poppins, Fellowship of the Ring, and Gone with The Wind with a whopping 13) has some catchy songs and some fun choreography and director Jacques Audiard knows what he’s doing behind a camera. But the story… the actual story… is ridiculously bad.
I’d like to write an entire piece on Emilia Pérez at some point, but for now all I’ll say is the film takes the insanely stupid premise so seriously that it’s impossible to treat the film like camp, which is what it deserves. Imagine John Waters directing the film and using his transgressive and fearless lens to create truly bold satire with the story and then we would have something more than what feels like a poorly conceived attempt at cultural and gender tourism.
I think the race for Best Picture boils down to Emilia Pérez vs. the actually breathtaking The Brutalist, which for me is one of the finest American films of this quarter century. Adrien Brody should also handily take Best Actor (although I wouldn’t be upset if Colman Domingo got it for Sing Sing or Ralph Fiennes won for Conclave).
A lot of how people win Oscars is also based on the momentum they have from other awards shows. This gives Kieran Culkin a big lead in the race for Best Supporting Actor for his electrifying work in A Real Pain, and Demi Moore is the front runner for Best Actress with her transformative work in The Substance. I think the only chance Moore loses is if Emilia Pérez keeps gaining momentum; then Karla Sofía Gascón will win for her genuinely remarkable titular performance. Felicity Jones is astonishing in The Brutalist, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Zoe Saldaña took Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Pérez, which could very well sweep the Academy Awards simply for the optics.
See the trend here? Oscar voters sometimes lean really hard into the appearance of progressive filmmaking, but some can’t usually spot that from the cloud of age and privilege. They mistakenly think that Emilia Pérez is the historic and inclusive choice this year, completely missing the fact that the true groundbreaking work about gender (from an actual trans filmmaker) is the deeply empathetic I Saw the TV Glow with its whopping total of zero nominations.
The other big snub that I can’t quite wrap my head around is not nominating director Denis Villeneuve for his work on Dune: Part Two. It’s truly jaw-dropping work on a scale I’m not sure I’ve seen before and while I don’t think he would have won (Brady Corbet has it for The Brutalist), it would have made more sense to nominate Villeneuve over James Mangold’s workmanlike direction of A Complete Unknown.
The week before the Oscars my plan is to break down every category of nominees into what should win vs. what will win and give some context into each of the films. I’m pretty terrible at predicting these things, but the Academy is sometimes pretty terrible at picking the winners, so I guess I don’t feel that bad about it. We’ll all just have to do our best.
