2021 Oscar Nominations Reactions
Another Film Blorpcass?? In a probably unsurprising development, I have too many thoughts on this year’s nominations for a Twitter thread, so I decided to add a Blog section to the AFP website. We’ll see how often we use it, but it’s going to be at least this one time!
After spending the last couple months lasering my film-watching focus (including a sprint of 13 movies watched last weekend), the day I had been waiting for finally arrived! In what has become a personal favorite tradition, I got up early to watch the nomination announcement last Monday morning. This is definitely one of the dumber things I do, but it’s also one of the dumber things the Academy does, so at least I’m in good company? (It was, of course, more pleasant when I lived in central time and could get up at 7am instead of 6am. Also, one unexpected downside to the delayed Oscars season this year: hella early morning announcements the day after losing an hour of sleep to daylight saving time.)
As I’ve been doing the last few years, I tried to see as many potential nominees as possible before the announcement, both so that I can have informed takes on nomination morning (or nomination “a week later,” as the case may be) and so that I have less to watch before Oscar night. (Quick shoutout here to THR’s Feinberg Forecast, a truly invaluable resource in this endeavor.) Due to a weird combination of circumstances, almost all related to the pandemic, I really crushed it this year. Not including the short films, there are only two nominated movies I haven’t yet seen, which is by far my best showing ever. (I doubt I’ll ever get anywhere close to this again, but that’s okay. I would much rather have more movies to watch between nomination day and Oscars night if it means I can leave my apartment without the fear of death.) In any case, all of the thoughts provided below are with the caveat that I have not yet seen The Father or The Man Who Sold His Skin. Then again, basically no one has because those studios apparently don’t want our money and haven’t made these films available to the public in any meaningful way. (Okay, sure, to be fair to Sony Pictures Classics, I could go see The Father in a theater, but, as much as I love movies, I’m not trying to contract a deadly disease just to watch one.)
With all that having been said, let’s get into it, shall we?
Overall, this is a shockingly solid list of nominees this year! I’m not sure if it’s because of the changing Academy membership or the pandemic (or, more likely, both), but it’s the least annoyed/angry I’ve been on nomination day since I started actively paying attention to this stuff. Sure, there are (and always will be) little quibbles, if not actual disappointments, here or there, but at least there’s no Green Book or Bohemian Rhapsody inexplicably garnering way too many nominations and harshing my buzz. My beloved Mank (Ed. note: this opinion is not endorsed by other Rommies) led the pack with 10 nominations (*praise hands emoji*) but feels like it’s not going to win any (*crying face emoji*). While that’s a bummer for me personally, many other really good-to-great movies got recognized quite a bit and likely will on Oscar night too. The worst movie that got three or more nominations was a 3.5/5 in my Letterboxd rankings. *Extremely Borat voice* VERY NICE! (Yes, I know Borat 2 only got two nominations, but it should have gotten three, and not just because it would have been awesome to hear Priyanka Chopra Jonas say “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan'' one more time.)
As for the aforementioned quibbles, I’ve got thoughts on all of the major and technical categories, because if there’s one thing I know about you, potential reader, it’s that you want WAAAY too many thoughts about movies you haven’t seen and/or Oscar categories you don’t care about!
Best Picture
When most normal and reasonable people think of the Oscars, this is almost certainly the category that they care most about (possibly even the only category they care about!). Therefore, I’m glad that this year’s crop is representative of my overall thoughts above: pretty good! These are all movies that I enjoyed, and all of them are really interesting and/or noteworthy in some way. I wouldn’t take any of them out, which is a very rare occurrence. A lot of people seem to be upset about the lack of One Night in Miami…/Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom/Da 5 Bloods, but I don’t know if any of those films are that much stronger than the ones that got nominated. (Also, Da 5 Bloods should not be in this conversation, so I’m not sure what those people are talking about anyway.) Of the three, I would like to see One Night in Miami… added to the mix, as I think it’s the best of the bunch, but I’m not devastated that it’s not there. Besides, next year the Academy is going back to a straight 10-nominee pool, so the stuff on the fringes will make it in.
Best Director
Thomas Vinterberg! This was a very welcome surprise, especially since Aaron Sorkin had been projected to get this spot. Nothing in Chicago 7 comes close to the final sequence of Another Round, and that alone probably nabbed him this nomination. It also continues an interesting trend. As the Academy has made an effort to diversify their membership, the Directors Branch has become much more international, and we’ve already started to see that play out recently. It’s now the third year in a row where an international director of a foreign language film has been nominated. Of course, Another Round is no Roma or Parasite, but Paweł Pawlikowski was nominated two years ago for Cold War, which seems like a pretty fair comparison. Hopefully this type of nomination becomes less surprising and more standard in the years to come. (Along those lines, two women were nominated here! (Sidebar to the sidebar, CHLOÉ ZHAO!) The Academy still has a long way to go on this front, but it’s a very exciting development nonetheless.)
Best Actor
Man, what a stacked category. Every single one of these performances is fantastic (based on what I’ve heard about The Father anyway). I’m most excited for Steven Yeun, both because he’s outstanding in Minari and because he’s the first ever (FIRST. EVER. IN 93 YEARS. WTF, ACADEMY?!) Asian-American actor to be nominated in this category. Again, make this the norm, please! Unfortunately, Steven Yeun’s nod may have caused Delroy Lindo to get shut out, which is a huge bummer. He was by far the best part of Da 5 Bloods, and he did give one of the best performances of the year, but I think he was just a bit unlucky. Part of this is also likely due to how acting campaigns are run these days. Oldman was essentially a lock from the minute the first set photos of him as Herman Mankiewicz came out, and that’s a really tough hurdle for a performance like Lindo’s to jump. If I were to rearrange things to fit Lindo in, I’d swap out Gary Oldman, but that’s less because of his performance in Mank and more because he just won in this category a few years ago.
Best Actress
This is a really impressive group of nominees. Pieces of a Woman and The United States vs Billie Holiday aren’t terribly strong movies (and Billie Holiday is actively pretty bad), but those performances were both great, so I’m glad to see them break through. I would have loved to see Sidney Flanigan recognized for her stellar performance in Never Rarely Sometimes Always (including one of the single best scenes I saw in any movie last year), but unfortunately she wasn’t ever really in the race.
Best Supporting Actor
What a bizarre category. I’ve been a big fan of both Lakeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya for several years now, and they were both incredible in Judas and the Black Messiah, but it’s very weird that they’re both nominated in supporting roles. Arguably, they are co-lead roles, but the Academy is gonna Academy, so here we are. The only real downside to both of them getting nominated here is that great work from David Strathairn, Chadwick Boseman, Alan Kim, Bo Burnham, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Bill Murray is left unrecognized. (My god. There could be two full Supporting Actor line-ups and someone still would have been left out. Insane.) Back to the actual nominees though, if Steven Yeun for Best Actor was the nomination I was most excited about, Paul Raci here was a very close second.
Best Supporting Actress
Can they just give Glenn Close a goddamn Oscar already so they can stop nominating her for middling work? Hillbilly Elegy is a bad movie, and Glenn Close is okay (at best) in it, so this really feels like the Academy trying to make up for The Wife (which itself felt like a make up nomination!). Dominique Fishback absolutely should have been in this category, and that’s probably my 2nd biggest disappointment out of the whole bunch.
Best Original Screenplay
It feels weird to complain about Mank missing out on an 11th nomination, but I really wish it would have gotten in here. These nominees are all great, but I thought the Mank script was really fun, and the whole Daddy Fincher of it all would have been pretty cool. Oh well. There’s always next year. (Except for Jack Fincher, who is dead.) This category is also a bit of a bummer because it’s sometimes a place where the Academy recognizes stuff that’s a little bit too weird for the major awards. With that in mind, a nomination for Palm Springs would have been truly incredible, but, again, while it was sort of in the conversation, it never really had a chance, which is a goddamn shame.
Best Adapted Screenplay
What is Borat 2 doing here? Don’t get me wrong: that movie is hilarious and is definitely one of the best I saw last year, but isn’t it mostly improvised? It seems weird to give a writing nomination to a film that presumably didn’t have much written down when they filmed it, but I guess that’s why there are nine(!) nominees. Also, The White Tiger is a perfectly fine movie, but the script was one of my least favorite parts about it, so seeing it get nominated here isn’t ideal. This would have been a perfect place to show some love to First Cow, but I guess it was pretty fun to see Priyanka Chopra Jonas react in real time to a nomination for a movie she was in? (Justice for First Cow. Always.)
Best Animated Feature
This was the chalkiest of chalk announcements on Monday morning. I’m not necessarily mad about it. Soul, Onward, and Wolfwalkers are very good! (Over the Moon and Farmageddon are … significantly less good!) Given the pandemic, this was a pretty bad year for animation, so I don’t really know what else I would have done with this category, but it didn’t make for a very exciting couple of minutes at 6:20am.
Best International Feature
This category is always the hardest for me to complete before nomination day because the films that get shortlisted often don’t get released until after the nominations are announced. This year, however, 11 of the 15 films were available on various streaming platforms ahead of time, so of course the Academy nominated one of the four that wasn’t. *Rolls eyes.* Most of the shortlisted movies were somewhere between “okay” and “pretty good,” so I don’t really have many thoughts on this category. (Maybe The Man Who Sold His Skin will be great?) I would have gone a slightly different direction, but Another Round is (deservedly) going to win regardless, so it’s a moot point.
Best Documentary Feature
Similar to the International Feature shortlist, I usually have a hard time watching these ahead of time, but I was actually able to watch all 15 shortlisted films before Monday morning. The nominee list is … fine? I actually liked all of the nominated films, but for some reason, it just doesn’t seem like a very exciting bunch. (The reason is that Boys State and Dick Johnson Is Dead were two of the best movies (not just documentaries, movies full stop) I saw in 2020, and neither got recognized here.) At least it wasn’t The Truffle Hunters or Gunda. That would have been my nightmare.
Best Original Score/Best Original Song
I’m lumping these together both for obvious reasons and because I don’t have much to say about either. (Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I have a lot to say about the Best Original Song category, but that’s a different conversation for a different blog post.) Based on the shortlist, we were so. close. to having a perfect Original Score category. Mank, Minari, News of the World, and Soul are all definitively the correct choices. Da 5 Bloods? Absolutely not. It’s a fine score, but it’s utterly unremarkable. (I literally listened to it when I started writing this post, and I’ve already forgotten it!) TENƎꓕ should be here, and I will never not be angry about it. As for the Original Songs … this category is very stupid and very broken, but at least this year’s crop isn’t totally out of left field like it is most years? “Wuhan Flu” from Borat 2 is definitely better and more relevant than at least four of the nominees, but I never actually expected the Academy to nominate it. (Also, Diane Warren has been nominated in this category six(!) years in a row for wildly mediocre songs from mostly unseen movies. I hate this category.)
Technical Categories
This post is already ungodly long, so I’m going to burn through these last few categories bullet point style. Plus, nobody really cares about these categories, so if anyone is somehow still reading this, I can’t imagine they’re interested in what I have to say here. Alas, I’ve made my bed, so now I’m going to lie in it. (Also, remember the year Mad Max: Fury Road basically swept the technical categories and all of the winners looked insane? That was dope. God bless that movie.)
Best Cinematography
I know a lot of people don’t like The Trial of the Chicago 7, but I enjoyed it, in spite of all of the (extremely valid) complaints. For cinematography though? Nah. Take your pick of Minari, First Cow, or Da 5 Bloods and slot them here instead.
Best Film Editing
From everything I’ve heard, the editing for The Father is one of the things that really makes the movie work, so I feel a little unqualified to discuss this category at the moment. I’m mostly good with the rest of these, though. (And at least it wasn’t Da 5 Bloods. That movie was approximately 45 minutes too long.)
Best Visual Effects
TENET. That’s it. That’s the tweet. (Okay, I also want to mention Love and Monsters getting nominated. A dumb/fun movie to be sure, but now we can say “Academy Award-nominated Love and Monsters.” I love when the Academy gets weird.)
Best Sound
For the first time in almost 50 years, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing have been lumped into one category, which makes sense since no one could ever remember what the difference was anyway. It’s nice to see that Greyhound snuck in under the wire to snag that token “war film” slot. I was a little worried we might not have one this year! Also, Sound of Metal is going to win this, as it should. If your office has a deep Oscars pool, bank on that one for sure.
Best Production Design
The turnstiles and fancy locales in TENET and 1940s Hollywood of Mank were noteworthy, but everything else was just kind of “meh.” The Midnight Sky had the opportunity to do something cool but instead had one of the most boring “futuristic” spaceships I’ve ever seen. A real swing and miss that possibly cost them an Oscar nomination.
Best Costume Design
Literally every single one of these nominees is a period piece. How boring. I wish Promising Young Woman could have gotten in here. Contemporary films aren’t typically represented in this category, so it’s not terribly surprising, but a lot of Carey Mulligan’s outfits were really fun, and it would have made this race at least a little more exciting.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Has anyone wanted an Oscar as badly as whoever was in charge of makeup and hairstyling for Hillbilly Elegy? (Yes, of course. There’s one of these nominees every year. Ugh.) Pinocchio is a deeply strange movie, mostly because of the makeup, so that’s fun. (Again, get weird, Academy.) It’s a little bit of a bummer that Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) won’t get to defend its title (never forget: Academy Award-winning Suicide Squad), but also that movie wasn’t very good, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Well, I did it! If anyone is still reading this, you have my deepest appreciation. Either way, I had a lot of fun writing it, so if it took writing an obscenely long blog post for me to get these thoughts out, it would have been worth it. As I mentioned at the top, I don’t really have any plans for this blog after this post, so I guess we’ll see what happens. Perhaps Matt or Tierney will chime in if they ever have something they feel they need to get off their chest, or perhaps it will stay dormant until next year’s Academy Award nominations. Who can say? Much uncertainty, SUCH suspense!