Takeaways From This Year’s Academy Award Nominees

Image courtesy of NBC News

Noelia Veras

Oscar nominations were released on Tuesday, February 8, and there has already been rampant discourse on the internet regarding which films have been snubbed and which films have been overly praised. 

As expected the most contested category this year is the Best Picture category. The films nominated for Best Picture this year are Belfast, CODA, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, 

Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, West Side Story.

Don’t Look Up is a particularly controversial film as it has been considered a bad film, though its message is good.

“Don’t Look Up as a whole doesn’t seem to know what it is as a movie — if it’s a farcical comedy, black comedy, or pessimistic drama,” according to a Screen Rant review. 

Interestingly, almost all of the nominees this year premiered on streaming service platforms rather than in theaters. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, nominating films from streaming platforms has become normalized. 

The nominees for Best Director this year are Paul Thomas Anderson for Licorice Pizza, Kenneth Branagh for Belfast, Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi for Drive My Car, and  Steven Spielberg for West Side Story.

Wes Anderson is always snubbed at the Oscars, but this year disregarding his work on The French Dispatch was a shock for many. The film received no nominations.

“It’s no secret The Oscars really don’t like Wes Anderson,” according to film reviewer Sean Eifert. “This project was one of his most fun and cinematically appealing projects to date. Yet, The French Dispatch did not get a nomination at this year’s Oscars. It’s impeccable that someone as talented as Wes Anderson gets snubbed so often. The movie is completely original and has a star-studded cast to back it.”

One category that has received a lot of criticism is the Best International Feature category. Film connoisseurs have been especially surprised that the French film,  Titane, was not nominated for an Oscar. 

“[Titane,] the Palme d’Or winner got the honor of becoming France’s official selection (probably because of the fact that Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux sits on the nominating committee),” said Staff Writer at Vulture Nate Jones. “But it ran out of gas early. While Titane was tailor-made for festival audiences, who left the Croisette raving about its in-your-face body horror, the leisurely Drive My Car was the Cannes contender that proved to have staying power over the marathon of awards season.”

Critics have also pointed out how the film The Green Knight has been overlooked for multiple categories, including Best Visual Effects, Best Cinematography, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. The film featured impressive visuals in both a cinematographical sense and artistic sense. The titular character was impressively well made with makeup and styling to look both realistic and supernatural, a feat which many have said is deserving of an academy award. 

The film with the most nominations is the Netflix film The Power of the Dog. Many predict that this film will be the winner of the Best Picture category, while others say that Belfast will win in this category.

An addition to the Oscars this year is the “Fan Favorite” category. This is an attempt from the Academy to garner more views and help remedy the declining views that the Awards have experienced in the past few years. 

“We’re thrilled to partner with Twitter to help build an engaged and excited digital audience leading up to this year’s ceremony,” said the Academy’s Digital Marketing Vice President Meryl Johnson, according to Entertainment Weekly. “The Oscars are an opportunity to bring people around the world together through their shared movie love, and through these activations social media users around the world now have more opportunities to engage with the show in real-time, find a community and be a part of the experience in ways they’ve never been able to before.”

The Academy Awards will take place on March 27 on ABC. The show’s first emcees in four years will be Wanda Sykes, Regina Hall, and Amy Schumer.
To see all of the nominations for the upcoming Academy Awards click here.