Some Oscar Thoughts

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the nominations for this year’s Oscars yesterday morning. Go here for the full list of nominees.

Reaction to this year’s nominee announcement was terse. Many felt the Academy was at best tone deaf to fail to nominate any non-white actors in the four performance categories. While this isn’t a particularly rare occurence, the absence of both actor David Oyelowo and director Ava DuVernay, whose film “Selma” is a strong contender for Best Picture, has an awkward and inexplicable feeling. The good news for Selma is that the Oscars are frequently on the wrong side of history; I fully expect the film’s crew to be remembered long after many of its fellow nominees are cinema trivia.

Other random reactions:

-Reading through the nominees, this awards year feels even more predictable than usual. None of the other Best Picture nominees are remotely in competition with Boyhood and Selma. I still feel like Boyhood has good momentum. It released on DVD a couple weeks ago, good timing that will help freshen it to voters. On the other hand, Selma will likely enjoy a much broader national awareness than Boyhood did, particularly with Martin Luther King Jr. Day coming up next week.

-Both DuVernay and Clint Eastwood’s absence from the Directing category means Richard Linklater should go ahead and write that speech. For the record, I think he would win (justly) in either case, but with no stronger candidate on the list than Wes Anderson and The Grand Budapest Hotel, it looks like a cakewalk for the director of Boyhood.

-For actresses, I think anyone not named Rosamund Pike would be a surprise win in the Leading Role category, and I feel that even more strongly about Patricia Arquette for the Supporting Role.

-The actors are a big tougher. Between the Lead and Supporting categories, only Steve Carrell and Robert Duvall are genuinely surprising nominations. Around Christmas, I think Benedict Cumberbatch was the favorite, but The Imitation Game has since faced some severe criticism over purported inaccuracies. I’ll go with Michael Keaton as Birdman in the Leading Role. Supporting Actor might be the toughest single prediction of the whole show. Whiplash divided critics, but most were united in praise of J.K. Simmons’s performance.

-Lots of head-scratching snubs here, but maybe none are harder to fathom than that of The Lego Movie, the surprise hit of 2014 which won’t even get a chance to compete for Best Animated Feature. Doubly difficult to understand given the weak year for animation.

-I thought Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar was a dazzling moviegoing experience, but I’m not particularly surprised or upset to see his film missing in the major nominations. What does surprise me is that it is nominated for Best Sound Editing; I called Interstellar’s mix a “disaster” after seeing it, though I did note that the problems may have been IMAX-specific.

-It was probably always a long shot, but I was still disappointed that Brendan Gleeson’s performance in Calvary wasn’t recognized.

-Not too sad to see Life Itself missing from the Documentary category. It’s a good doc but not a great one, as I said.

This should be an intriguing awards year. I’ll have more to say as we get closer to the show.