This was never going to be a typical batch of Oscar nominations. Nothing about 2020 was typical and that has had a ripple effect throughout the season leading up to the 93rd Academy Awards. Films scheduled for a 2020 release that almost certainly would have been contenders dropped off the calendar. (Without the pandemic, we might have been considering In the Heights’ chances against West Side Story and talking about America’s newfound love of movie musicals, but that conversation will have to wait a year.) And, because of the expanded window of eligibility, films that premiered in the first months of 2021 have entered the awards picture well past the usual deadline for consideration. Judas and the Black Messiah (nominated for six awards) and The United States vs. Billie Holiday (which picked up a Best Actress nomination for singer Andra Day’s acting debut) made no critics’ year-end lists because no critics had a chance to see them before year’s end. The Golden Globes, a silly but venerable Oscars precursor, handed out awards via a borderline disastrous ceremony that few watched and fewer enjoyed. So far, this awards season has been business as usual only in the sense we now have a bunch of nominees.
It’s a curious bunch, though. While it’s not unusual to see the same films nominated across several categories, it is unusual to see the same titles repeated over and over again to the degree they are this year. With 10 nominations, Mank is up for more awards than any other film. But Mank‘s fellow Best Picture nominees Nomadland, Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, The Father, Sound of Metal, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 picked up six nominations each while Promising Young Woman picked up five. Expect to see the same few faces many times during the awards ceremony, whether taking the stage or graciously smiling in appreciation as someone else wins.
So what does the list of nominees tell us about this weird awards season? There are some striking takeaways.
Delroy Lindo was robbed. Each year produces at least one galling exclusion and this year that unfortunate honor fell to Delroy Lindo, the veteran actor who delivered an intense performance as a haunted, angry Vietnam veteran in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. Lindo’s been reliably great for a long time and the past few years have seen something of a resurgence thanks to his work in The Good Fight. Da 5 Bloods belongs on any list of his best performances: It’s disturbingly raw work, maybe too disturbing for some Academy members. But Lindo, and Da 5 Bloods in general, also seemed to lose momentum — that intangible but undeniable element so important to awards season — in the months after its June release on Netflix. Was that too long ago? Did Netflix opt to push the much-nominated Mank and The Trial of the Chicago 7 instead? Whatever the reason Lindo fell short, it’s a shame he’s not in the mix, though he can at least take comfort in a lot of people being annoyed.
Judas and the Black Messiah apparently has no lead actor. Both Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield — who play, respectively, Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton and FBI informant William “Bill” O’Neal in Shaka King’s drama about Hampton’s death — are nominated for Best Supporting Actor. On the face of it, that’s good news. Both performances are remarkable. They’re also effectively co-leads in a film that frequently shifts its focus between their characters. But instead of Best Actor, both have landed in the Supporting Actor field, thanks to Academy voters selecting Stanfield for that category despite WB’s official push for Stanfield as lead. There’s a good chance they’ll cancel each other out: For a recent example, look no further than The Favorite, another film in which the line between lead and supporting performances looked a bit blurry. Olivia Colman, nominated for Best Actress, won the award. Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz kept their seats while Regina King won for If Beale Street Could Talk. King likely would have won anyway for her great performance, but even so, Weisz and Stone most likely divided the votes for their film.
The 2020 acting nominees, at least, are notably diverse. . Six years ago, April Reign created the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite after all 20 acting nominations went to white actors for two years running. This year finds many more actors of color in the mix, with Riz Ahmed, Steven Yeun, Chadwick Boseman, Viola Davis, Andra Day, Leslie Odom Jr., and Yuh-Jung Young joining Kaluuya and Stanfield. That’s a big difference. So what happened? In the years since #OscarsSoWhite, the Academy has pushed to diversify its ranks, which likely helped. Films have shifted as well as audiences have come to expect, sometimes demand, more diversity in casting and subject matter. This year’s acting nominees follow that trend as the last few years have featured markedly more non-white nominees — not that anyone should start considering the problem of diversity in Hollywood fixed. There’s still a lot of work to be done both in front of and behind the camera, but the development provides some glimmers of optimism.
Two of the five Best Director nominations went to women. Last year, when announcing the nominees, Issa Rae offered a less-than-heartfelt “congratulations to those men” after reading a list that excluded Greta Gerwig, Lulu Wang, Lorene Scafaria, Marielle Heller and, well, every other woman who directed a film in 2019. This year’s nominees include Chloe Zhao for Nomadland and Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman. Considered the frontrunner, Zhao is now one of a handful of women directors to be nominated and would be only the second woman to win the Best Director prize, following Kathryn Bigelow, who won in 2010 for directing The Hurt Locker. Again, that’s not the sign of a problem that’s been fixed. But it’s not nothing, either.
A-listers were shut out… Few things are as reliable as Tom Hanks picking up Oscar nominations — or at least that’s how it used to be. Hanks could have been nominated for either Greyhound or News of the World, both of which fit the mold of movies that the Academy likes to nominate. But he’s nowhere to be found this year. Neither film found much traction despite being, respectively, a perfectly OK war movie and an often terrific western. In fact, the Oscars nominations proved kind of rough for the A-listers who didn’t sit out the pandemic year. George Clooney took a big swing as a director and actor with The Midnight Sky, but it picked up only a single nomination for Best Visual Effects. Should we read this as a portent of stars on the wane? Is it over for Hanks and Clooney? Nah. They’ll be fine. You just can’t be lucky all the time.
… which left room for a bunch of nominees who were hardly household names last year. Maria Bakalova burst out of nowhere to steal Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (it was fun to hear that title read in full during the nominations announcement, wasn’t it?). Youn Yuh-jung had enjoyed a long, respected career in Korean movies prior to Minari, but looked like a 73-year-old newcomer to much of the world. Most of Minari director Lee Isaac Chung’s previous work had flown under the radar and the now-42-year-old director was on the verge of giving up filmmaking before drawing on his own life for one last try. Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci has worked steadily for years but has never had a role as high-profile as his turn as a deaf mentor in Darius Marder’s film. And it’s not like many had heard of Marder, either—he didn’t get a Best Director nomination, but his film is well represented elsewhere, including a nod for the screenplay he co-wrote. Emerald Fennell has worked extensively as an actor and ran the second season of Killing Eve, but Promising Young Woman pushed her to a new level. However well-deserved these nominations are, they might not have happened in an ordinary year more crowded by the usual suspects. It’s cool to see them happen this year, however.
What the hell is The Father? The Father was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, and Best Editing, which raises an interesting question: What the hell is The Father? Though recently released in theaters (remember those?) it’s the least-seen of the major nominees, but those who have seen it since it premiered at Sundance in 2020 have loved it. Directed by Florian Zeller, who also wrote the play on which it’s based, the film stars Hopkins as a man struggling with dementia and unfolds largely from the perspective of his character. Oscars completists who don’t want to go to movie theaters yet can relax, however. It will be on VOD services starting on March 26th.
The Best Documentary Feature category remains weird, unpredictable and kind of annoying. It’s not that the Oscars don’t nominate compelling films in the Best Documentary Feature category, it’s that they frequently leave out some of the year’s best docs (and best films, period). The absence of Dick Johnson is Dead counts as an oversight akin to Delroy Lindo’s. And why no Boys State? The answers, as always, remain hard to pin down.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga was nominated for the song “Hosavik.” And that’s awesome! In whatever form this year’s Oscars ceremony takes, it has to feature a musical performance by Rachel McAdams and Will Ferrell, right? That’s reason enough to tune in. (But where is the Best Costume nomination?)
Chadwick Boseman is a lock. Making predictions is a fool’s game! Nonetheless, one sure thing seems obvious: it would be bizarre if Chadwick Boseman didn’t win for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. His death remains shocking and his performance in that film is searing in a way that suggests the years of great work that should have been ahead of him. His win would be a fine choice on its own terms and a way to honor Boseman’s legacy, and it’s hard not to imagine the majority of Oscars voters feeling the same way. That said, who knows? We’re only a few years out from La La Land… no wait… Moonlight winning Best Picture. The Oscars remain, in many respects, predictable. Except sometimes they’re not, and that’s what makes following them so irresistible, in strange or ordinary times.