They are finally here, the 2019 Oscar Nominations. So Oscarathon 2019 continues with my reactions and biggest thoughts after the nominees were announced.
What a good day for Roma and The Favourite
- The big winners of the day are clearly Roma and The Favourite, who lead the way with ten Oscar nominations each. For Roma, this is validation that it really is a true threat to be the first foreign language film to win Best Picture, especially now that it has picked up not one, but two acting nominations. The only negative for this film today is that it failed to pick up an Editing nom, which prevented Alfonso Cuarón from picking up five nominations in his own name in one year (he did still get four). Overall, Roma firmly established itself as a true contender to be the first foreign language film to ever win Best Picture.
- Meanwhile, what a day for The Favourite! After losing much momentum, the film not only scored the ten nominations but managed to secure all of the important nominations that Best Pictures tend to need: Directing, Writing, Acting, and the all so important Editing. This is exactly what the film needed to give its waning Best Picture chances a real shot in the arm.
This Race is Truly Wide Open
- These nominations proved that, despite the best efforts of the PGAs and Golden Globes, there is no real frontrunner, and hopefully, there will continue to not be one. It really never makes sense how much consensus ends up being formed every awards season just because no one wants to stand out too much. This also makes the Oscars at times almost pointless, as they are just agreeing with everyone else. This year, though, there is a real chance that there will be virtually no agreement across the awards shows this year (depending on how much we want to say the Golden Globes matter). If nothing else, SAG, the DGAs, and BAFTA are unlikely to agree going forward, so the Oscars for once can actually feel like the definitive stance on the awards season it is supposed to feel like, and not simply just another show that agrees with everything that came before it.
Green Book had a weird day
- The film with the most momentum going into the nominations had a weird day. It looked like once it obtained an Editing nomination it might be really set up for a win, but then Peter Farrelly failed to get a Directing nomination, and now things are in chaos again. This film is going to continue to be divisive, to say the least, but overall Green Book managed to have a productive day that still could put it in line to be the fifth film to win without a Best Directing nomination–which would be pretty appropriate since one of those films was Driving Miss Daisy, a film often mistaken for Green Book (a misguided comparison, as Green Book is not actually a horror film).
Best Director continues to be a brutal category
- Let’s get this out of the way: there were no women nominated, which is unfortunate, and hopefully, this will start becoming less and less the norm as more women are given opportunities to direct the types of movies that the Oscars tend to actually nominate. That doesn’t change the fact that this year’s nominees are one of the most diverse and interesting group in some time… oh, and Adam McKay, so I guess you can’t win them all. As always, this category is absurdly deep, and you could pick five snubs in the form of Barry Jenkins, Bradley Cooper, Chloé Zhao, Peter Farrelly, and Ryan Coogler to instead be the nominees, and no one would even blink. Add in Damien Chazelle and Debra Granik, and you can see how there will always be snubs, even if they ever decide to increase the number of nominees in this category. Still, we instead got the aforementioned McKay, frontrunner Alfonso Cuarón, Greek-born Yorgos Lanthimos, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, and the first nomination ever for Spike Lee. That is an impressive group, and there are a lot of positives from it. That is not to say we should act like everything is fine now, but at the very least we can say this is real progress that should only get better going forward as long as people commit to making it happen.
We need to talk about If Beale Street Could Talk and BlacKkKlansman
- A true disappointment is the treatment of these two movies. Now, both still did quite well, but the lack of a Best Picture nomination for If Beale Street Could Talk is simply ridiculous, and even if Barry Jenkins and Regina King go on to win on Oscar night that will not be enough to make up for this surprising snub. Meanwhile, while BlacKkKlansman still did quite well for itself (and actually is about as well positioned as any film to win Best Picture going forward), it just feels wrong that Adam Driver was the actor that got nominated for an Oscar for this movie and not star John David Washington. It is not a good look for the Academy, and almost feels like in a year that was full of truly magnificent films about race and more specifically the African-American experience, there was a cap in terms of how much the Academy was willing to honor these films. That may be an unfair statement in a lot of ways, but that is just how it looks, especially when you consider the next thing I am going to talk about.
Bohemian Rhapsody… sigh
- For all the hand wringing about Green Book, at least that film is, like, actually a good movie. Probably even a very good movie–it just shouldn’t be winning Best Picture. None of those compliments is true for Bohemian Rhapsody, which is a phenomenal Rami Malek performance surrounded by garbage. The editing is really bad, which makes its Oscar nomination a travesty, and the writing is just not good. The film is a complete mess before we even get into how it handles Freddie Mercury’s bisexuality and its association with Bryan Singer. Seeing this film get accolades that should have gone to other, far more deserving films (mainly Beale Street) is just truly a disappointment. Though just to be clear, Rami Malek once again is truly amazing in that movie, and deserves every accolade he is getting.
Way too not mess-up the Animated Feature category!
- Look, there is not much to say here, other than congrats, Academy. You finally were able to nominate a Japanese film not made Studio Ghibli with the selection of Mirai; you didn’t rubber stamp an Aardman film simply because you have in the past; and you didn’t vote for The Grinch just because all of your children saw it. After last year’s fiasco, this year has a really solid group of nominees that doesn’t have a bad film in the bunch. While not as strong a slate as the one from two years ago, this year proves hopefully that last year was just a blip. Now just don’t take your eyes off the prize and fail to pick Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse to win.
A Surprising Amount of Pleasant… Surprises
- Willem Dafoe getting a Best Acting nomination, both Yalitza Aparicio and Marina De Tavira of Roma getting acting nominations, three foreign directors getting nominations including surprise nominee Pawel Pawlikowski, Mirai holding on to a nomination, and more. This year’s nominations were full of surprises, which made it far more entertaining than normal. When you then include the fact that the Academy avoided mistakes like nominating Peter Farrelly for Best Director, giving Black Panther Screenplay or Visual Effects nominations it wouldn’t have deserved, or going too crazy with the Bohemian Rhapsody nominations, and this nomination cycle did a lot right. There is still a lot that can be improved on, but there was also a lot to like, which is a pleasant surprise considering it is also the year that gave us so many nominations for Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book.
So there are my brief thoughts. Look for the megathreads to start coming up so you can see my in-depth thoughts about each category now that the real Oscar prognosticating can begin.