Thoughts on the 2016 Oscar Nominations

I have yet to see most of the big Oscar contenders this year, although I’ll do what I can in the coming weeks to change that.  As usual, we have some old standbys, some pleasant surprises, some underachievers, and, like I mentioned yesterday, some institutional racial bias.  Business as usual?

I’ll start with the best picture nominees I have seen, both of which fall into the “surprising but incredibly well-deserved” category.  Mad Max:  Fury Road and The Martian are both up for the top prize and a handful of other awards, including best direction and a number of design awards for Mad Max (most of which it really ought to win) and best actor/adapted screenplay nods for The Martian.  No love for Charlize Theron, my glorious Furiosa, unfortunately.  Still, I love “non-Oscar-film” Oscar films, and I’m glad to see these two movies get some recognition.

Last year, I pointed the disparity between men and women from best picture nominees in the lead acting categories – i.e., the best pictures were a major boys’ club.  Interesting circumstance this year, with only two nominees in either category up for their work in a best picture contender.  For the men, we have Matt Damon in The Martian and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, and for the women, there’s Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn and Brie Larson in Room.  I imagine this is partly due to a few ensemble-heavy movies in the best picture category, like The Big Short and Spotlight, as well as films with strong acting whose overall regard didn’t live up to their early buzz, like Joy and The Danish Girl.

Speaking of The Danish Girl, both it and Carol predictably got acting love, with acting nods for each film’s central couple.  Carol also has an adapted screenplay nomination and is, I hear, a magnificent film, but I hope that when Oscar time comes, there’s not a bunch of talk about the “great year for LGBTQ movies.”  We’ve seen this before, in 2006 with Brokeback Mountain and 2011 with The Kids are All Right and Black Swan (really?), and it feels a bit self-congratulatory.  1) Two prominently-nominated films don’t make a pattern, and 2) isn’t Hollywood’s penchant for salivating over straight/cis actors playing LGBTQ characters a little othering?

And yes, #OscarsSoWhite.  For the second year in a row, every single one of the twenty performers in the acting categories is white.  That’s weird.  I’d assumed Will Smith would be up for Concussion (though I’m not sure who I would’ve booted to give him a slot – lots of Oscar catnip in the lead actor category,) and Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation seemed like a sure thing.  For that matter, I’m really surprised that Beasts of No Nation didn’t get a best picture nod.  With only eight films up for the award, there was more room in the category (this goes for Carol too, even though it’s not relevant to the PoC topic.)  Besides that, it was extremely well-reviewed, and the heavy subject matter is exactly the sort of thing the Academy normally loves.  In fact, it’s exactly the sort of thing the Academy normally loves about Black movies in particular.  How is it that Beasts of No Nation isn’t this year’s Selma or 12 Years a Slave?  Did the Netflix release kill it?  In total, only two major PoC-made films got any recognition, and ridiculously, both managed to get their single nomination for seemingly the only white people involved (Sylvester Stallone for Creed and the white screenwriters of Straight Outta Compton.)  Over the next six weeks, I’ll be seeing/reviewing what Oscar movies I can, but I’m also hoping to send some love to films like these that didn’t get nominated as they probably should have.