This Week: 🏆 Oscar Snubs, Surprises, & More!

This year’s Oscar nominations were announced last week, so we wanted to take this opportunity to discuss all the surprises and disappointments, as well as revise our winner predictions ahead of the ceremony on March 10th.

And make sure you read all the way to the bottom for a special announcement about the 8th Annual Bestie Awards!

NOMINATIONS THAT SHOCKED 😲

This year’s crop of Oscar nominees is (in our opinion) one of the best in recent memory, so before we dig into some of the disappointments, let’s take stock of some of the most exciting surprises from nomination morning:

With two nominations (in Best Sound and Best Visual Effects), Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning breaks its franchise’s Oscars curse by earning its first two Oscar nominations. Now if only we could get the Oscars to finally add a Best Stunts category…

Some nice surprises at the expense of other worthy nominees—The Zone of Interest shows up in Best Adapted Screenplay, effectively “knocking out” the brilliant Killers of the Flower Moon, while the inclusion of NEON’s independent animated feature Robot Dreams became an awards nightmare for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

In Best Cinematography, the impressionistic Chilean vampire film, El Conde, pulled out an exciting nomination that few were expecting. We personally thought The Zone of Interest was a “lock” here for its unique filming techniques, but are happy to see Ed Lachman get it instead.

JUSTINE TRIET’S BEST DIRECTOR NOMINATION FEELS DEFIANT

We may have predicted that Jonathan Glazer would crack the Top 5 for Best Director, but it was a true shock to hear Justine Triet’s name also among that group. Apart from the fact that Triet directed one of the best films of the year, this nomination (and the overall strong showing for Anatomy of a Fall) is a delicious miracle of awards season karma. Let us explain…

When Triet won the Palme d’Or at Cannes back in May, she used her acceptance speech to criticize French President Emmanuel Macron’s response to the pension reform strikes, in which protesters who stood against the government’s proposal to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 were met with excessive force—to quote Triet herself, the protesters were “repressed, in a shocking way.”

Subsequently, in a reportedly close 4–3 vote, France’s Oscar committee chose the critically acclaimed The Taste of Things starring Juliette Binoche as the country’s official submission for the Academy Awards, eliminating any possibility that the supposed frontrunner, Anatomy of a Fall, would be nominated for Best International Film. Still, the film’s distributer (NEON) mounted a solid campaign to accompany the growing support for the film, which eventually garnered five Oscar nominations. The Taste of Things received zero, missing out even in the International Film category, where Anatomy would have been a shoe-in.

Perhaps France’s Oscar committee felt burned by the lack of recognition for their previous Palme d’Or pick, the strange and groundbreaking Titane, or perhaps the older members of the committee were simply fed up with Triet’s outspoken takes on politics and feminism, both of which have made her somewhat of a cult figure among young French film fans. Either way, it’s Triet who will have a shot at Oscar glory come March.

OUR FAVORITE 🤩 NOMS!

Lily Gladstone makes history as the first Native American to be nominated for Best Actress, as well as only the second non-binary person to be nominated in any acting category (the first being Elliot Page, nominated back in 2008 for his performance in Juno).

Also for Killers of the Flower Moon, former guitarist/songwriter for The Band, Robbie Robertson, received a posthumous nomination for his original score after passing away shortly before the film’s release in August.

In the realm of international cinema, Film Twitter-darling Godzilla Minus One impressed the visual effects branch enough to snag a nomination (fun fact—visual effects supervisor Takashi Yamazaki also served as the film’s writer AND director). J. A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow was able to grab a much-deserved nomination for its makeup and hairstyling, in addition to its inclusion in Best International Feature. 

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENTS 😥

The biggest disappointment of last week’s nominations was the fact that animated films were shut out of all general categories, and most egregious was the absence of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Boy and the Heron in Best Original Score.

It was also a disappointing morning for a number of our favorite performances of the year, but especially Greta Lee for Past Lives and Charles Melton for May December, whose films only earned a combined three nominations overall (two for Past Lives, one for May December).

In the Documentary category, Beyond Utopia (which emerged as a hot Sundance title early in the year for its unsparing portrayal of North Korean escapees), went from being a frontrunner to being inexplicably excluded from this unpredictable line-up of docs.

AND CAN WE TALK ABOUT THOSE BARBIE SNUBS???

You may have noticed that none of Barbie’s supposed “snubs” made our list of nominations we were hoping to see but didn’t. Though their exclusion from our list mostly came down to personal preference, we still wanted to take a moment to unpack those surprises in the Best Director and Best Actress races:

If you asked us a month ago, we may have predicted that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie had strong chances at a nomination—both had a massive amount of online buzz (✅) and received a fair amount of precursor support (✅) in their respective categories, leading most awards pundits to place them in their top five to be nominated (✅).

However, as the nominations announcement inched closer, we watched as many pundits shifted Robbie down on their Best Actress predictions, to either the number five or six slot, indicating some awards experts saw her “on the bubble” to either just make it in or potentially be snubbed. Annette Bening was on the outside looking in for many awards predictors (ranking outside the top five, but still in the top ten), making her nomination over Robbie feel like somewhat of a surprise.

A similar fate befell Gerwig, whose “secure” place in the Best Director line-up became increasingly less secure as pundits began to consider films from international directors like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest or Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Though not many pundits predicted that Glazer and Triet would make it into the final line-up, I saw plenty swapping out Gerwig for one of the two, or even Alexander Payne, who was also presumably “snubbed” for his work directing The Holdovers. In this sense, Gerwig’s absence on nomination morning feels less surprising (and upsetting) than Robbie’s. The fact that “her spot” was presumably usurped by another accomplished female director in Justine Triet softened the blow, at least for the Listies.

Our final take on the matter? While it’s fair to say Robbie and Gerwig were snubbed in their respective categories, it felt more like an “expected snub” considering their tenuous standing in the race over the past few weeks. Plus, in terms of personal taste, we prefer Triet’s direction to Gerwig’s and Annette Bening’s performance in NYAD to Robbie’s in Barbie.

TOP 5 TAKEAWAYS FROM THE NOMINATIONS

1. Oppenheimer remains the season’s frontrunner

2. Mixed-to-positive results for Barbie

3. Strong showings for Anatomy of a Fall and Zone of Interest

4. American Fiction surprises with Supporting Actor/Original Score

5. Animated films absent in other categories

And with that, see below for an update to our Oscar winner predictions that we made back in October—before we really knew anything! We are hanging onto eleven of our twenty original predictions (plus adding three new ones for the short film categories).

🚨 BONUS LIST ALERT 🚨

…and that’s all folks!