Remember last year, when the Oscar nominations were all about “Barbenheimer?” Wasn’t that fun?
Well, are you ready to settle for “Dunked,” the significantly less mellifluous mashup of this year’s two biggest hits among the Best Picture nominees, “Dune: Part Two” and “Wicked?”
Or are you ready for a year in which a French-made, Spanish-language musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord is by far the dominant film? Let’s face it, “Emilia Pérez” might be Donald Trump’s nightmare, but it’s Oscar’s favorite — and its 13 nominations could make Oscar night uncomfortable in the White House even without Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong also receiving nominations for playing Trump and his sleazy mentor Roy Cohn, respectively, in “The Apprentice.”
“Emilia Pérez”is not just the most-nominated film of the year, it’s the most-nominated non-English language film in Oscar history, handily topping the previous record of 10 by “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Roma.”
The film, directed by Jacques Audiard and acquired by Netflix out of the Cannes Film Festival, has been a lightning rod for controversy since its Cannes debut, drawing complaints about its French writer-director’s use of offensive Mexican stereotypes and its treatment of the lead character’s gender transition. But it’s also acquired supporters including Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, and its haul of nominations is another sign that Oscar voters either don’t pay attention to the many controversies that rage on what used to be called Film Twitter, or don’t care about them.
While “Emilia” racked up the nominations in all the expected categories and then some, most of the other major contenders had some slight (or not-so-slight) moments of weakness: “Conclave” not being nominated for director or cinematography, “Wicked” missing out on screenplay, “A Complete Unknown” and “Dune” being bypassed for film editing …
The 10 nominations for Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half hour drama “The Brutalist,” meanwhile, were another sign of strength for that film, while “Anora” and “The Substance” did about what was expected of them.
Like last year, the Best Picture nominees include two giant hits and a lot of other movies that aren’t giant hits. But let’s face it, “Dune: Part Two” and “Wicked” don’t have quite the pizzazz (or the cool nickname) that “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” did last year. And that could be a problem for the Academy, which would love to capitalize on the ratings boost it got from the 2024 show but is already reeling from voting delays and event cancellations caused by the Los Angeles wildfires.
But Oscar voters aren’t supposed to be thinking about ratings or off-screen disasters when they cast their ballots for the films they think are the year’s best. Thursday’s nominations weren’t designed to do anything other than show us the favorites of however many of the almost 9,905 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cast ballots this month.
As usual, those favorites are all over the map – and as usual, there were a couple of surprises, including the omission of two American indie films that were expected to be nominated for Best Picture, Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain” and Greg Kwedar’s “Sing Sing.” Those films were apparently nudged out by RaMell Ross’ lyrical and challenging “Nickel Boys” and the biggest single surprise of the nominations, Walter Salles’ Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here.”
The success of “I’m Still Here,” which got an expected nod for Best International Feature Film and longshot ones for Best Actress (Fernanda Torres) and Best Picture, could be a sign of the increasingly international makeup of the Academy membership – but it could also simply mean that when voters saw the movie, which Sony Pictures Classics worked vigorously in the homestretch, they recognized how good it was.
The nomination for Torres, in particular, made it easier to accept the sad fact that Marianne Jean-Baptiste wasn’t nominated for “Hard Truths” and Angelina Jolie was bypassed for “Maria”; the Best Actress category simply had far more worthy contenders than it had nomination slots, so you can’t really use the word snub to describe what happened to those eminently worthy actresses.
The nominations leave us with a race that has a frontrunner but is still wide open. That may change over the next few weeks, particularly in early February when Friday the 7th will bring the Critics Choice Awards (which has predicted the Best Picture Oscar nine times in the last 15 years) and Saturday the 8th will bring both the Directors Guild Awards (also 9-for-15) and the all-important Producers Guild Awards (12-for-15, and the best of all the Oscar tea leaves).
Until then, the Academy will get to figure out how to draw viewers to a show that’s missing the “Barbie”/“Oppenheimer” magic. It’s not that there aren’t hit films in the running this year: “Dune” and “Wicked” have both topped $700 million, while “The Substance,” “Conclave” and “Anora” have earned back four or five times as much as their budgets in worldwide grosses.
But “Wicked” is really the only Best Picture nominee that has made an impact on pop culture to the extent that people might tune in to the Oscars to see how it does. And if the Academy and the producers want to leverage box office success into Oscar ratings, that puts a heavy burden on the shoulders of the only real sensation of any kind in this year’s lineup.
Such a heavy burden, in fact, that it’s out of the question to think that one of the reasons the Academy decided to “move away” from the performances of the nominated songs. Is it crazy to think that that’ll make room for some key “Wicked” cast members to get up on that stage and performing something other than nominated songs, of which their musical has none? (Cynthia and Ariana doing “Over the Rainbow,” anyone?) Maybe it is crazy, but this is a year for conspiracy theories.
Or maybe the Academy should just lean into the slate they’ve been given by their voters, and play up just how singular a batch of movies this is. Even when it made a big splash in Cannes, there was no reason to expect that a crime drama/musical/love story/transgender character study like “Emilia Pérez” could end up as the year’s most-nominated film, much less shatter the record for international nominations set by “Crouching Tiger” and “Roma.”
Its fellow Cannes title “The Substance,” meanwhile, is a weird, graphic, gooey body-horror flick that cost less than $20 million and has grossed almost $80 million worldwide and won Demi Moore the first acting award of her career at the Golden Globes. That’s a miracle of sorts.
Then there’s “The Brutalist,” a three-and-a-half-hour epic, expansive and indulgent and gorgeously mounted and made for less than $10 million when it looks several times that expensive; there’s another remarkable feat.
And even “Wicked,” the giant musical riff on “The Wizard of Oz,” managed to slip a pretty p0inted critique of intolerance and the demonization of others in between all those pretty colors and perky tunes.
Out of those weird little miracles, Oscar voters fashioned an interesting, quirky slate of nominations. And if it’s no “Barbenheimer,” it could make for a provocative night in Donald Trump’s America.