Well, everyone, the day has come at last. This morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences trotted out Danielle Brooks and Lewis Pullman to announce its nominees for the 98th Oscars. A new category made its official debut, and a longstanding record was broken, perhaps permanently. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s not waste any time. The Blitz has begun!
Best Actor
Timothée Chalamet – Marty Supreme
Leonardo DiCaprio – One Battle After Another
Ethan Hawke – Blue Moon
Michael B. Jordan – Sinners
Wagner Moura – The Secret Agent
Best Supporting Actor
Benicio del Toro – One Battle After Another
Jacob Elordi – Frankenstein
Delroy Lindo – Sinners
Sean Penn – One Battle After Another
Stellan Skarsgård – Sentimental Value
Best Actress
Jessie Buckley – Hamnet
Rose Byrne – If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Kate Hudson – Song Sung Blue
Renate Reinsve – Sentimental Value
Emma Stone – Bugonia
Best Supporting Actress
Elle Fanning – Sentimental Value
Inga Ibsdottir Lilleaas – Sentimental Value
Amy Madigan – Weapons
Wunmi Mosaku – Sinners
Teyana Taylor – One Batter After Another
Animated Feature
Arco
Elio
KPOP Demon Hunters
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
Zootopia 2
Animated Short
Butterfly
Forevergreen
The Girl Who Cried Pearls
Retirement Plan
The Three Sisters
Casting
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
The Secret Agent
Sinners
Cinematography
Frankenstein
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Train Dreams
Costume Design
Avatar: Fire and Ash
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
Sinners
Best Director
Chloé Zhao – Hamnet
Josh Safdie – Marty Supreme
Paul Thomas Anderson – One Battle After Another
Joachim Trier – Sentimental Value
Ryan Coogler – Sinners
Documentary Feature
The Alabama Solution
Come See Me in the Good Light
Cutting Through Rocks
Mr. Nobody Against Putin
The Perfect Neighbor
Documentary Short
All the Empty Rooms
Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud
Children No More: “Were and Are Gone”
The Devil Is Busy
Perfectly a Strangeness
Film Editing
F1
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
Sentimental Value
Sinners
International Feature
Brazil – The Secret Agent
France – It Was Just an Accident
Norway – Sentimental Value
Spain – Sirāt
Tunisia – The Voice of Hind Rajab
Live Action Short
Butcher’s Stain
A Friend of Dorothy
Jane Austen’s Period Drama
The Singers
Two People Exchanging Saliva
Makeup & Hairstyling
Frankenstein
Kokuho
Sinners
The Smashing Machine
The Ugly Stepsister
Original Score
Bugonia
Frankenstein
Hamnet
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Original Song
“Dear Me” from Diane Warren: Relentless
“Golden” from KPOP Demon Hunters
“I Lied to You” from Sinners
“Sweet Dreams of Joy” from Viva Verdi!
“Train Dreams” from Train Dreams
Production Design
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Sound
F1
Frankenstein
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Sirāt
Visual Effects
Avatar: Fire and Ash
F1
Jurassic World Rebirth
The Lost Bus
Sinners
Adapted Screenplay
Bugonia
Frankenstein
Hamnet
One Battle After Another
Train Dreams
Original Screenplay
Blue Moon
It Was Just an Accident
Marty Supreme
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Best Picture
Bugonia
F1
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
The Secret Agent
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Train Dreams
***
Okay, a lot to unpack here. First and foremost, I might be jolly well fucked on completion. As it stands, I have nine films still to see. That’s not all that daunting of a task, especially considering it’s all to finish five categories, as four of them have two nominees each.
The problem is with the documentaries. Cutting Through Rocks played for a week locally back in December and Viva Verdi! for a week in October. Neither movie is available to stream. There’s a chance that Cutting Through Rocks could come back, as the Laemmle Theatre chain often does recirculate docs if there’s popular demand. As for Verdi, though, I’m at something of a loss. It will come back to a Laemmle for one show only… on Saturday March 14, literally the day before the Oscars. If that ends up being my only outlet, I’ll have one of two choices. Either I’ll have to delay Original Song until the very last minute, or I’ll have to skip viewership and just judge the songs in a vacuum. That’s technically allowed for Academy voters (what else other than bribery or extortion could explain Diane Warren getting nominated every year), but they’re not supposed to do that. They’re meant to consider each song within the context of its associated film. Many have clearly ignored this rule, as our annual charity case almost exclusively writes songs to play over the credits, but I’ve held myself to a higher standard. No matter what, it looks like I’ll have to break precedent. Either I skip the actual flicks, or I cover Original Song on the eve of the ceremony, AFTER I do Best Picture and my predictions. It really is a bummer, too, because the category is, at best, a two-horse race between “I Lied to You” and “Golden,” with the latter already picking up two wins.
Moving on, what are the biggest surprises/snubs? Well, first and most noticeable, Wicked: For Good was completely shut out. There was a massive campaign for Ariana Grande to get Supporting Actress, the momentum for which died down after she lost at the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globes, but I would have bet anything that she still would have been nominated, especially since she’s also up for a SAG Award. It would appear that the Acting Branch writ large has finally realized she was just doing a bad Kristin Chenoweth impression. I’m happy she’s out, but I’m legit shocked. Similarly, you’d figure that given how readily the Academy fell over the first half of Wicked last year that they’d at least give the back half a pity nomination or two for Costume Design, Production Design, or hell, one of the TWO shortlisted songs. But no, completely left out, and as far as I’m concerned (prepare your water buckets now), rightfully so.
On the flipside of that is F1. I watched it just the other day, figuring it would get a couple of technical nods, but FOUR? Including Best Picture?!?!?!?! Are you high, voters? Spoiler alert for my eventual review, but F1 barely even qualifies as a movie. It’s a feature-length commercial for one of the dullest sports in the world (Marty Supreme and ping pong are more exciting), in the guise of a dick-measuring contest, in the guise of an actual movie. I mean, how? In what universe is this one of the 10 best films of the year?
As for the rest of the shockers, Kate Hudson’s nomination feels like an apology for Song Sung Blue not getting enough attention during Awards Season, but to me that’s the film’s own fault for releasing in the final week of the year. They gambled and lost. The fact that she got nominated over Chase Infiniti feels particularly dubious. Along similar lines, we don’t really know what the criteria were for Casting, but it does strike me as odd that Marty Supreme, The Secret Agent, and Hamnet are all on the list despite having only one member of their ensembles nominated in the individual acting categories. In the case of Hamnet, I get it, because of the casting of both Jacobi and Noah Jupe, real-life brothers as unofficial brothers for thematic purposes. In my mind it’s honestly a genius touch. But the other two are something of a mystery, as Marty Supreme is full of non-actor stunt casts, and if they wanted to nominate a foreign film, Sentimental Value has its entire principal cast nominated, yet The Secret Agent only has Wagner Moura. I mean, four to one sounds like a no-brainer, right? I know these are different branches voting, and they don’t share notes (at least they’re not supposed to), but it feels kind of odd.
There are other categories where it clearly looks like we just padded things out to get to five, knowing who’s really going to win. Makeup is down to Sinners and Frankenstein, and the other three are filler. I absolutely loved Kokuho and it certainly deserves consideration here, but the writing’s on the wall, seeing as how it didn’t make the final cut for International Feature. The other two are placeholders, nothing more. Same goes for Visual Effects, where the pointless CGI of yet another terrible Jurassic movie gets a seat by default so we can watch Avatar win again.
Speaking of Avatar… Costume Design? Are you serious? A movie that’s almost 100% CGI, and what few human characters there are only wear military uniforms and lab coats? That’s one of your best bits of costuming? Really? This is just as confusing as when The Way of Water got nominated for Production Design, including a set decorator, in a film where there were no sets. It’s hilarious, and also quite stupid.
Netflix can take something of a victory lap, which is disheartening. The way they’re aggressively trying to buy Warner Bros. and bring about the ultimate destruction of the studio and theatrical models is an existential crisis for the industry. And yet, they have enough ownership of IPs and enough money to throw around to make a huge impact on this year’s ceremony. Guillermo del Toro’s version of Frankenstein has nine nominations, and Train Dreams has four, both of them including Best Picture. Apart from that, KPOP Demon Hunters has two, and it’s likely to win both, and the Big Red N has a nod in each of the Documentary categories. That automatically makes All the Empty Rooms the favorite for Documentary Short, because for those voters who don’t watch screeners or go to the block presentations by ShortsTV next month, that will be the only one they see. The only “losses” Netflix took are that Jay Kelly, Wake Up Dead Man, and A House of Dynamite all came up empty.
Finally, there’s the big news of the day, the fact that Sinners broke the all-time record for nominations with an astounding 16 nods, breaking the three-way tie between Titanic, All About Eve, and La La Land. It’s amazing, because to me Sinners was by a wide margin the best film of the year, but what does that portend for the ceremony? Normally it would be a slam dunk for Best Picture and a slew of others, but I’m not so sure here. One Battle After Another won Best Picture at the Critics’ Choice Awards and the Comedy prize with the Golden Globes, while Sinners lost the Drama category to Hamnet. Given that One Battle has a near-record 13 nominations, three other films (Sentimental Value, Frankenstein, and Marty Supreme) have nine, and Hamnet has eight, this is clearly a highly-concentrated affair. There is no clear front-runner like there normally would be. This means Sinners could sweep, or it could just as easily come up almost empty on Oscar Night. Last year A Complete Unknown left with nothing from eight nods, the year before Killers of the Flower Moon blanked from 10 (sadly a common theme with Martin Scorsese films, as The Irishman, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Taxi Driver all got goose eggs from ceremonies where it was up for several awards, sometimes double-digits), and the year before that The Banshees of Inisherin failed to convert any of its nine. We’ve also seen situations where the most-nominated film only got a token prize, like The Power of the Dog only getting Best Director from its 11 nods and The Favourite losing all but Best Actress from its 10.
Will Sinners crap out? I don’t think so, at least not entirely. I see a couple of fields where I think it has no chance (Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress) and others where it’s a genuine toss-up (Cinematography, Film Editing). That said, I think it’s a lock for Original Score, and if it turns out that the Academy goes for One Battle overall, it’ll probably get Original Screenplay as a consolation prize for Ryan Coogler. If I had to put down money, I’d say it’s getting at least two, and as many as seven or eight.
This brings us back to why it broke this record when it may not be the actual favorite. Well, I can think of two reasons, both of which deal with the various branches looking to subvert trends where the Academy has been vocally criticized over the last few years. For one, there’s been a longstanding bias against horror, most recently evidenced by The Substance only winning for Makeup last year (I love Mikey Madison, but Demi Moore should have been a unanimous winner for Best Actress) and Jordan Peele getting the token Original Screenplay Oscar for the otherwise ignored Get Out. Hell, even this year, the amazing Weapons is only up for Amy Madigan’s supporting turn. The second is the “#OscarsSoWhite” controversy, where films centering on the black experience, or those produced by minority filmmakers, get little more than cursory mention, only winning big if there’s a way to whitewash the race relations at the center of the film (Green Book, Driving Miss Daisy). By giving Sinners the most nominations and One Battle After Another the second-most, they can be seen as doing “something” to buck the trope while at the same time largely only awarding the white people who made those pictures (see my previous dissatisfaction that Chase Infinit was left off for Best Actress in favor of Kate fucking Hudson). Coogler might get Screenplay and Ruth Carter might get Costume Design, but the closest thing to a guarantee is for Ludwig Göransson when it comes to Sinners. One Battle might win the other top prizes, which would all go to Paul Thomas Anderson, with only Teyana Taylor in with a chance at Supporting Actress. Even then, part of me wonders if the voters’ hands were forced by the fact that these two films are in a complete league of their own, even relative to the other Best Picture nominees. These are far and away the two best movies of the year in most people’s eyes. Would we even be having this conversation if they were just “great”?
So yeah, all in all, the best I can say as this year’s Blitz begins is that I’m cautiously optimistic. I have a lot of coverage to plan out, and I have far more films still to see than this very top heavy slate would indicate. I’ll have my Category Draw video out in fairly short order, as well as the annual Hub Post. Pray for Mojo, here we go!
Join the conversation in the comments below! Which film do you think will take home the most gold? Which omission is the biggest shock to you? No, seriously, what costumes, the entire film is digital? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
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