AMPAS Announces 2021 Oscar Nominees
With the COVID pandemic putting the world in a tailspin and delaying just about everything, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has finally released their nominees for the Oscars. Due to the many theater closures and collapsed distribution deals that occurred early last year, the Academy extended its window for awards eligibility through February 2021, giving distributors an extra two months to get their films on a screen in LA in order to qualify. As a result, early 2021 releases like “Judas and the Black Messiah” were able to score a few nominations.
2020 was a strange year, and with many big films seeing delayed releases, many of the award nominations are concentrated in a handful of key names. David Fincher’s Netflix release “Mank” leads the way with 10 nominations, showing that the Academy is as predictable as ever. In our podcast episode on the movie, we discussed the many ways in which the film is good but not particularly special. However it checks all the boxes that the Academy loves to hand out statues to, not least among them: histrionic performances, black and white cinematography, a story based on fact, overt political commentary, and most importantly, a story about Hollywood itself. Following behind are “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” “The Father,” “Nomadland,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” “Minari,” and “Sound of Metal,” with 6 nominations each. While the quality of these is mixed, they are all generally good movies with “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “Nomadland” standing out as particularly excellent.
A lot of fuss will likely be made in the coming month about the diversity of this years’ nominees. While the Academy has received a lot of flack for the lack of women and minority nominees over the years, 2020 presented a very strong crop of performances from non-white actors as well as directorial efforts from non-white and non-male directors. There will inevitably be complaints of tokenism and political correctness, however this years’ diverse nominees, like indie-darling Chloe Zhao, are deserving of their recognition. It’s still a shame Shaka King was left off the Best Director list.
One thing that has not changed is the Academy’s pathological hatred of genre films. While some of this year’s nominees are indeed great movies, the Academy is all too ready to ignore masterpieces like “Possessor” and “The Invisible Man” simply because they are horror or science fiction films as opposed to conventional dramas. This is part of the Academy’s long tradition of thumbing their nose at greatness, with excellent movies like “The Lighthouse” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” failing to receive the recognition they deserved in recent years. Taking this further, “The Invisible Man’s” Elizabeth Moss is now part of a grand tradition of neglected actresses like Toni Collette (“Hereditary”) and Lupita Nyongo (“Us”) who delivered powerhouse performances in horror films only to be forgotten come awards time. How she didn’t get a nomination while Glenn Close did for the universally panned “Hillbilly Elegy” is beyond me, or anyone else for that matter.
Another baffling oversight is the omission of “Tenet” from the Best Original Score category. Ludwig Goransson’s work on the film is some of the best in recent memory, and if anything, this is evidence that however bad the Academy may be at judging cinema, it is even worse at judging music.
While hardly anyone takes the Oscars seriously anymore, they do make for good water-cooler talk, and around here at Under the Wheels, bitching about them is something of an annual tradition. Hopefully the resulting ceremony isn’t a complete embarrassment to the art form of filmmaking, but if it is, there’s no better place to read about it than here.
