Reacting to any award show’s nominations, specifically the Academy Awards, in any way, is an activity that can be best described by those that do not participate as a waste of time. Seeing that I am not one of those people, I cannot help the cause which is a problem. However, like most any problem, we should ask Google for the answer. When typing the phrase “the Oscars are…” into the mighty search engine, these are the top suggestions; a joke, so white, google feud answers, a sham, and irrelevant. So why is it that year after year, pop culture aficionados and cinephiles from all over the world continue to look towards the Academy for any sort of sanity? While I cannot speak for every person that gets wrapped up in the Academy’s shenanigans on an annual basis, I think I know at least part of the answer. I would hypothesize that the answer is twofold, one part hope and one part consistency.
The hope is for the naïve like myself. My hope is that one year the show that claims to reward the best of the best in cinema will actually do that, reward the best. I have this hope while understanding that movies are an art form. As such, it is an incredibly subjective medium by its very nature. The consistency is for those that like to get upset about something, like me. With so many entries in every category, there are going to be a number of deserving individuals “snubbed.” The snub is a classic word that is usually meant to say that an individual deserved to be awarded for their work in an area, but was not.
I find the idea of a snub to be weird for lack of a better term. On the one hand, it is possible to objectify film. If it was not, there would not be “good” movies or “bad” movies. On the other hand, if a film is in the conversation for awards season, then it is hopefully good. If all the films or performances are good, then it becomes a challenge to pick the best five or so in any category. So, to appease the over-analytical nature of my consciousness, I have decided to think about the snubs in three different ways.
The first type of snub is the mass snub. This type of snub is one that the monoculture has decided for me. Some great examples of this come from the 2016 show, with the infamous best picture snubbing of Straight Outta Compton as well as Will Smith for Best Actor in a Leading Role for Concussion. The thing about the mass snub is that I do not necessarily have to agree with the outrage. The outrage last year was centered on Wonder Women not receiving a Best Picture nomination.
The second type of snub is what I call the “Really?” snub. These snubs are of films that have been receiving awards hype for the majority of awards season and just are not on the list for the Academy Awards. This year, the South Korean film Burning was a constant on many critics’ top 10 lists and was considered a film on the bubble. With the consistent hype train rolling, I thought that this film would be a shoo-in for a nomination, which unfortunately did not happen. A historical example of this is Stanley Kubrick, who never won an Oscar for directing. Really?
The third type of snub is the personal snub. I would guess that this type of snub is what creates numbers one and two, but I do not really want to assume. (hahahahaha) This is the snub of a film or performance that I felt had no business not being a nominee. The historical example that sticks out the most is David Oyelowo not being nominated for his performance as Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. I have a couple of things on this one. First, the Oscars freaking love people doing their best copy-cat routine. Look at all the Academy Award nominations and wins that have occurred for actors acting like other real people. Oyelowo did not only look strikingly similar to the American legend, but his voice was almost identical to boot! Snubs like this become personal because of the fact that the performance or film could have easily won the award. It is difficult to take a category with any seriousness if it does not even have the best performance as an option.
So, with that, I would like to walk through some of the nominations and snubs. This is a common practice and I understand that I am a bit late to the party. I just knew that I needed to sit and think a little bit. A reaction piece could not sufficiently encompass everything that was running through my brain when I watched the nominations come out last Tuesday morning. I am going to run through five specific snubs or surprises, ranked in order of my perceived severity. Here we go.
- Where is Sorry to Bother You?
Boots Riley’s satire did not receive much attention when awards season rumors started to spread. However, I did feel that a movie of this political message and timing would receive at least a nomination in one of the screenplay categories. I perceive the screenplay categories the runner-up award to Best Picture. It just seems like these categories are never completely filled by best picture nominees. This year, the original screenplay race was tough, and this snub probably slots right in between the “Really?” and personal categories.
Who would come out?
The easy answer is Green Book. The Peter Farrelly road-trip race comedy has been receiving heavy criticism for some time now. One interesting part of the controversy is centered on one of the film’s screenwriters, Nick Vallelonga, whose anti-Muslim tweet has been a talking point for some time. I have not yet seen the movie so I cannot judge whether or not any of the criticism is valid. I just know that this is the type of nomination that feels forced.
- Bradley Cooper for Best Director
This snub defiantly falls into the mass category. A Star is Born was the presumptive favorite for much of the period leading up to the first of the big awards shows. It has not been able to hold on to much of that momentum and has fallen to second or third in the race. This surprises me because I thought that he would receive the nomination as sort of a “welcome to the club” moment. Best Director, just like Original Screenplay, is a stacked category this year and assuming anything outside of Alfonso Cuaron turned out to be crazy.
Who would come out?
That is a difficult question. I have yet to see every one of the films in this category, but if I had to choose, I would pick one of Pawel Pawlikowski or Adam McKay. I would probably choose Pawlikowski in the end, because Cold War did not receive a Best Picture nomination. It is an unfair choice, but in such a strong category I am not sure how else to do it until I have seen all the potential films.
- Hereditary shut out, First Man only given the mandatory “technical” nominations, but The Ballad of Buster Scruggs got some attention
All of these films are personal. I love each film and I know that they all are currently on my best of the year list. I will start with Hereditary. I knew that this film was a long shot for any major awards, but that does not make the fact that it is a complete afterthought hurt any less. Toni Collette was magnificent in her role and I thoroughly think that if this film was not a genre film, she would have been getting much more hype than she actually did. First Man was just too quiet, I guess. That is the only way that it makes sense nominating Bohemian Rhapsody in any category over First Man. It even got snubbed in some “technical” categories. The lack of an editing or cinematography nomination is suspicious, not to mention that its score and the performance by Claire Foy were more than worthy of recognition.
I am replacing the who would it replace section here with some positive news. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was nominated for three Academy Awards. These nominations (Best Original Song, Costume Design, and Adapted Screenplay) are all very deserving surprises.
- If Beale Street Could Talk…
These last two are very personal and they are going to be combined together. If Beale Street Could Talk was the best film of the year out of the films in the conversation. What that group of filmmakers achieved cannot be understated by anyone. I understand that receiving any nominations for a film is incredibly hard to do, but the fact that Barry Jenkins’s thesis on love only received three is a true travesty in every sense of the word. What is it about this movie that makes it so easy to ignore? It delivers gut punch after gut punch and proceeds to make you catch all the possible feelings for its entire runtime. It is one of the best shot films of the year; where is the best cinematography nomination? Its editing is fantastic, why no nomination? The production design was impeccable, so where is the nomination? I could go on at the risk of sounding like Craig Bolerjack during every single Utah Jazz broadcast, but I need to save some of that for my final point.
Who would come out?
- Bohemian Rhapsody
I do not want to pretend that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences always makes the best decisions, because I do not know of anyone that actually thinks that. The Kings Speech winning Best Picture over films like The Social Network, Black Swan, Inception, True Grit, and The Fighter is funny to think about. Bohemian Rhapsody is a fine movie. It is beloved by many and that is fine. What is not fine is thinking that it is anything more than a box office success or a star creating vehicle for Rami Malak. Bohemian Rhapsody is about as average as a movie can get. It is the story of a charismatic musician that struggles with life off the stage. This story has been told plenty of times, and most of them were told better than this was. I thought that the nomination for best drama at the Golden Globes was a disgrace, but who cares? It is the freaking Golden Globes. When it won best drama at the Golden Globes, I was without words. I could not believe what I saw! I knew there was still a chance for sanity. The Academy Awards do not always nominate the winners of the Golden Globe best picture categories. (Look at last year and The Disaster Artist) Then I saw that it was nominated for a PGA award, and I tried my hardest to ignore the writing on the wall. The writing was in permanent ink. “Why get so mad? The Oscars have done this before, and they will do it again.” You are right. I know that this is a flawed show, but I think that if you are going to be figuring out what the best movie of the entire year is, you should probably pick films that are actually considered the best of the year. It does not look great if some average films disgrace the field. Bohemian Rhapsody was not even the most entertaining biopic of the year! If it was the best biopic of the year, the discussion would be different.
There can be a difference between fun and good. We have done a pretty good job as a society with this distinction. However, we have failed this time. When the Academy floated out the idea of introducing a best popular film award, I thought they were crazy. I thought that it would have been much easier to just pick the best movies rather than creating a whole new category. I was wrong again. While it might be easy to point to Black Panther or A Star is Born as the films that have benefited the most from this new mindset of voters, the truth is that severely flawed or average films like Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody are the ones that have benefited the most.
Once again, you might be wondering why someone can get so angry over such a thing. It is a fair point. However, chew on this for a bit. The Academy Awards are considered to be the gold standard of show business awards shows. With the Grammy’s as the only one in the same area code of viewers over the last 10 years, the Academy Awards hit a new low in viewership in 2018, with 26.5 million viewers. Compare that to the Golden Globes, Emmy’s, and Grammy’s of the same year. None of the listed shows were even within 6 million viewers of the Oscars. People care about the Academy Awards whether they admit it or not. Over 26 million people decided to spend over 4 hours of a Sunday night watching this show. It has meaning, even if that meaning is declining. So, if it does have meaning, then why is a nomination in the most important category being wasted on an average film when there are far better films that are not included? This question is probably best saved for other people because I have no idea how this film became a part of this conversation in the first place.
Thanks for reading! Curtis
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