This is a strange year. The films that carry the day, Birdman, Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel are all pretty weird for Academy Award style fair. And yet, the list as a whole is supremely underwhelming.
Here’s how the Academy Award Nominations, and Omissions, shake out for The Stake. Not your best year, Academy.
By the numbers:
9: The Grand Budapest Hotel and Birdman took home the most nominations, with 9 a piece. Those are both wonderful and strange films. That’s pretty cool.
6: The perceived favorite for Best Picture, Boyhood, received 7 6.
2. On the other side of the spectrum, Selma received only 2 nominations, for Best Picture and Best Song (Common and John Legend).
2 Many: It’s time for the Academy to get over its adoration of the British biopic. The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything received 8 and 5 nominations, respectively. Both of these films are just fine thanks. They contain highly nuanced performances by gifted actors in roles that are pre-determined to be Powerful and written with every intention of getting attention come award season. And I can get behind that. But all these other nods? Best Picture? It just leaves me cold.
0: The number of women nominated for Best Director, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, and Cinematography.
20 (out of 20): The number of white actors nominated in the four acting categories. No non-white actors received a nomination. That is stunning.
You are still missing the mark in a big way, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
6?: All this love for American Sniper is a bit strange. Clint Eastwood still carries enormous power to woo Academy voters, it would seem, enough to overcome claims of historical inaccuracy and its strident pro-War politics.
3: There are 3 superhero films on the list, in the categories you would expect. Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: Winter Soldier and X-Men: Days of Future Past all received nods for Best Visual Effects. It’s not a surprise-each of these is well deserved-but it’s still good to see genre films making it into the Oscars anywhere at all. Guardians also got a Best Hair and Makeup nomination.
84 (years old): The age of Robert Duvall, who was nominated for The Judge, a movie very few people saw. Duvall is now the oldest man nominated for an acting award.
19: The number of acting nominations that Meryl Streep now has to her name, with this year’s nod for Into The Woods. There is only one actor in the universe capable of breaking that record. Meryl Streep. What’s she doing in 2015?
Omissions:
Ava DuVernay did not get a nomination for Directing Selma and that is plainly absurd. In executing the large-scale scenes of violence and in rendering the power of King’s speeches, her work on that film was remarkable. It’s a terrible oversight and I hate to pick on The Imitation Game but that is such a blandly made film that seeing Morten Tyldum nominated here instead of Selma is really unfortunate.
David Oyelowo did not get a nomination for Acting for Selma and that is plainly absurd. His quiet, forthright portrayal of Martin Luther King, Jr. leaves audiences moved, perhaps because DuVernay’s film is not a biopic but a story of the people of Selma and the men and women-King among them-who came to a place and changed history. With respect to the nominees, there is room for Oyelowo in this list.
Bradford Young did not get a nomination for his cinematography in Selma and that is plainly absurd. Selma was photographed with such creativity and style; it was one of my favorite looking movies of the year. His work is more than deserving. Young also photographed A Most Violent Year, making 2014 a most brilliant year for Bradford Young.
These omissions for Selma are glaring and make it worth our while to wonder just what the overwhelmingly white, male, and aged voting membership of the Academy was thinking.
It was thought that Jennifer Aniston would receive her first nomination for her work in Cake, a film I have not seen but I was rooting for Aniston to make her way into the Academy ranks. It appears that her spot went to Marion Cotillard, for Two Days, One Night.
Christopher Nolan failed to get his first Best Director nomination for Interstellar. I am hot and cold on Christopher Nolan’s work, but pulling together something as big and broad and strange as Interstellar is a real accomplishment. Nolan doesn’t deserve this nod more than Ava DuVernay, but it would be fun to see movies like Interstellar get nods outside of the technical awards.
Gone Girl only pulled in 1 nomination, for Rosamund Pike. Not even the brilliant score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch was recognized, and those two have become recent favorites of Academy voters. Fincher’s adaptation is expert film-making, but perhaps its too genre for the Academy to find favor in more categories? I’m very surprised by Gillian Flynn’s omission in the writing category. Her screenplay was taut and crisp and funny and terrifying and should be up there.
No love for The LEGO Movie? It’s a runaway hit and a critical darling. It would have been something new in the Best Animated category. This is a tough category this year, with a lot of deserving movies. But it’s a surprise to see LEGO left off.
Nothing for A Most Violent Year, Big Eyes, and a handful of other films that were right on the cusp. In the end, this is an unsurprising bunch.
What The Academy Got Right:
One place where the restraint of voters was right: Wild received two nominations, one for Reese Witherspoon and one for Laura Dern. I think Wild is a great film, really. And what it makes it great is first: Reese Witherspoon’s performance. After that: Laura Dern. No other love needed, really.
Boyhood. But that’s no surprise.
My Personal Favorite:
The Academy has long loved Hayao Miyazaki’s work at Studio Ghibli. This year, though, Miyazaki’s partner Isao Takahata got a nomination for The Tale of Princess Kaguya, a true masterpiece of animation. It’s Takahata’s first Oscar nod and a deserved one, both for this film, and for a remarkable career in animated film-making.
