Do you remember last year, when the Oscar Nominations were about “Barbenheimer’s?” Wasn’t it fun?
Well, are you ready to settle for “Dunked”, the much less soft mashup of this year’s two biggest hits among the nominees for best movies, “Dune: Part Two” and “Wicked?”
Or are you ready for a year where a French -made, Spanish -speaking musical if a Transgender Mexican drug bar is by far the dominant film? Let’s realize it, “Emilia Pérez” may be Donald Trump’s nightmare, but it’s Oscar’s favorite – and its 13 nominations can make Oscar evening uncomfortable in the White House even without Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong also getting nominations for playing Trump and his sloppy mentor Roy Cohn, respectively in “The Apprentice”.
“Emilia Pérez” is not only the most nominated film of the year, it is the most nominated non-English-language film in the history of Oscar, and practically tops the previous record of 10 of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Roma”.
The film, directed by Jacques Audiard and bought from Netflix from the Cannes Film Festival, has been a lightning leader for controversy since the debut in Cannes, and has made complaints about its French screenwriter and director’s use of offensive Mexican stereotypes and its treatment of the main character’s head. Gender transition. But it has also received supporters, including Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, and its nomination amount is another sign that Oscar voters either do not pay attention to the many controversies that are raging on what used to be called Film Twitter, or do not care about them.
While “Emilia” picked up the nominations in all expected categories and a little more, most of the other major challengers had some small (or not so small) moments of weakness: “Conclave” was not nominated for director or film, “wicked” goes Misten on the script, “A Complete Unknown” and “Dune” is bypassed for film editing …
The 10 nominations for Brady Corbet’s three and a half hours of “The Brutalist” were meanwhile another sign of strength for that movie, while “Anora” and “The Substance” did about what was expected of them.
Like last year, the nominated best film includes two huge successes and a lot of other films that are not very successes. But let’s realize it, “Dune: Part Two” and “Wicked” don’t really have the pizzazz (or the cool nickname) that “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” did last year. And it may be a problem for the academy, who would like to take advantage of the grading increase it received from the show in 2024, but which already complains about delays and canceled events caused by the forest fires in Los Angeles.
But Oscar voters should not think about grades or disasters off the screen when they vote for the films they think are the best of the year. Thursday’s nominations were not designed to do anything but show us the favorites for how many of the almost 9,905 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose this month.
As usual, there are the favorites 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 film, Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain” and Greg Kwedar’s “Sing Sing.” These films were apparently pushed out by Ramell Ross lyrical and challenging “Nickel Boys” and the biggest single surprise of the nominations, Walter Salle’s Brazilian drama “I’m still here”.
The success of “I’m still here”, which received an expected nod for best international feature film and longshots for best female actress (Fernanda Torres) and best film, may be a sign of the increasingly international composition of academy members – but it can also be completely Easy to mean that when voters saw the movie, which Sony Pictures Classics worked hard at home, they realized how good it was.
The nomination for Torres, in particular, made it easier to accept the sad fact that Marianne Jean-Baptiste was not nominated for “hard truths” and Angelina Jolie bypicion for “Mary”; The best actress category simply had much more worthy challengers than it had nomination sites, so you can’t really use the word neglect To describe what happened to these extremely worthy actresses.
The nominations leave us with a race that has a predecessor but which is still wide open. It may change over the next few weeks, especially in early February when Friday the 7 will give Critics Choice Awards (which has predicted Oscar for Best Movie nine times in the last 15 years) and Saturday the 8 will give both Directors Guild Awards (also 9-for-15) and the most important producers Guild Awards (12-for-15, and the best of all the Oscar Teleblades).
Until then, the academy will find out how to attract viewers to a show that lacks “Barbie”/”Oppenheimer” magic. It’s not that there are no hit films in progress this year: “Dune” and “Wicked” have both topped $ 700 million, while “The Substance”, “Conclave” and “Anora” have earned back four or five times Much as their budgets in global gross.
But “wicked” is really the only one nominated for best film that has affected pop culture to the extent that people may be at the Oscars gala to see how it goes. And if the academy and producers want to take advantage of success in the ticket funds to the Oscar rating, it 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 is excluded to believe that one of the reasons why the Academy decided to “move away” from the performance of the nominated songs. Is it crazy to think that it will make room for some important “wicked” actors to go on stage and perform something other than nominated songs, which their musical has no one? (Cynthia and Ariana do “Over the Rainbow”, someone?) Maybe it’s crazy, but this is a year for conspiracy theories.
Or maybe the academy should only lean into the list they have received from their voters, and play how rare a series of films this is. Even when it broke through big in Cannes, there was no reason to expect a crime drama/musical/love story/transgerts study such as “Emilia Pérez” could end as the year’s most nominated film, let alone beat the record. For international nominations set by “Crouching Tiger” and “Roma”.
At the same time, its second Cannes title “The Substance” is a strange, graphic, slopy horror movie that cost less than $ 20 million and has earned almost $ 80 million around the world and won Demi Moore his career’s first actor award at the Golden Globes. . It’s a kind of miracle.
Then there is “The Brutalist”, a three and a half -hour epic, expansive and indulgence and beautifully mounted and made for less than $ 10 million when it looks several times as expensive; There is another remarkable achievement.
And even “wicked”, the gigantic musical riff on “The Wizard of Oz”, managed to slip in a rather sharp criticism of intolerance and demonization of others between all these beautiful colors and cheerful songs.
Of these strange little miracles, Oscar voters created an interesting, odd list of nominations. And if it’s not a “barbenheimer”, it could be a provocative night in Donald Trump’s America.