The nominations for the 91st Academy Awards were announced last Tuesday. Some well deserved nominees were announced that morning by Kumail Nanjiani and Tracee Ellis Ross. As with every year, there were some surprises and snubs. The following is my take on some of the chosen nominees in the major categories.
In the category of Best Documentary Feature, the expected winner is Free Solo. Now until 2018, I had never seen a documentary in the theater. That all changed this past year as I was able to see four different documentaries. They were, in chronological order, RBG, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Whitney, and Fahrenheit 11/9. I can honestly say I was impressed with all of them and Fahrenheit 11/9 was the first documentary I went to see twice in the theater. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is actually the one that has been winning many awards but to the shock of many was left out as a nominee. The only one of the nominees that I had seen this year was RBG, an incredible documentary about Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
For Best Original Song, it’s not even a contest. “Shallow” from A Star is Born is literally guaranteed to win this award. This category is already so far decided that the telecast is only scheduled to have two songs performed during the show, “Shallow” and “All the Stars” from Black Panther. Lin-Manuel Miranda has been very open lately that “The Place Where Lost Things Go”, from Mary Poppins Returns which he had co-starred in, won’t even have the opportunity to be sung during the show. The Academy has a limit of two songs that can be nominated from any one movie and A Star is Born had three songs submitted for contention, with the other two being “Always Remember Us This Way” and “I’ll Never Love Again”. All three of these songs from A Star is Born had the potential to be nominated but “Shallow” just outshined everything else. Personally, I felt that “I’ll Never Love Again” was the best one of the year but I don’t have a vote…yet. I also felt that “We Won’t Move” from The Hate U Give should’ve garnered a nomination.
Supporting Actress is an interesting category. Amy Adams is up for her 6th Academy Award, the same number nomination that Kate Winslet finally won on. The ironic stat is that half of Amy Adams’ nominations are from movies that Christian Bale also ended up being nominated for (The Fighter, American Hustle, and now Vice). Rachel Weisz and previous Best Actress winner Emma Stone are both up for The Favourite, a movie that I wasn’t a fan of at all. Marina De Tavira is up for Roma, a movie that was barely in the theater as it was almost exclusively made for Netflix. The standout to me from the nominees though is Regina King for If Beale Street Could Talk. There were some other worthy performances that could’ve been nominated here. Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place, Debra Messing in Searching, Cynthia Erivo in Widows, and Margot Robbie in Mary, Queen of Scots are a few of those performances that didn’t make the cut.
Supporting Actor will be a category that I won’t agree with. Mahershala Ali won this category two years ago for his amazing performance in Moonlight, and is the expected winner this year as well for Green Book. I don’t agree with this nomination. I’m not saying that he wasn’t great in Green Book. He was fantastic in it, but his role was more of a co-lead actor with Viggo Mortensen than a supporting role. Richard E. Grant is up for Can You Ever Forgive Me? for playing Jack Hock, friend of author Lee Israel. This role was very different than what I’ll always remember him for, Darwin Mayflower in Hudson Hawk, one of those universally panned movies that I can watch whenever it happens to be on. Adam Driver, mostly recognized for playing the villainous Kylo Ren in the new Star Wars trilogy, is up for BlacKkKlansman, one of the best and surprisingly great movies of the year to me. Sam Elliott received his first ever nomination for A Star is Born. Somehow this screen legend has never been nominated before. Bradley Cooper wrote the role of Bobby Maine specifically for him to play, even before Elliott was secured to co-star in the film. Last year’s winner Sam Rockwell is the fifth nominee in this category that surprised most people. His performance as George W. Bush in Vice was both comical and short in length. The expected fifth nominee was actually last year’s Best Actor nominee Timothée Chalamet. Chalamet generally has taken on difficult characters in his young career, last year for Elio in Call Me By Your Name and this year for Nic Sheff in Beautiful Boy. Other potential nominees for Best Supporting Actor were Daniel Kaluuya in Widows and Russell Hornsby in The Hate U Give.
This was a stellar year for actresses in cinema and the Best Actress category shows that. Olivia Colman is up for The Favourite, even though she has less screen time than Best Supporting Actress nominee Emma Stone from the same movie. Yalitza Aparicio from Roma grabbed her first Oscar nomination for her first ever movie role. Melissa McCarthy earned her second career nomination for Can You Ever Forgive Me? playing author Lee Israel, a real life American author known mostly for her literary forgery. Lady Gaga, yes the pop star, took on the role of Ally in the 4th version of A Star is Born and has been winning some awards for her incredible performance. Glenn Close earned her 7th career nomination, without any wins yet, for The Wife. Close has been winning the majority of the awards, basically any award that hasn’t gone to Lady Gaga, for playing Joan Castleman. Close is the favorite to win this award, especially with never having won before, but I’d personally prefer to see this one go to Gaga. Like I said before, this was a stellar year for actresses in cinema and unfortunately only five could be chosen as nominees. Other actresses I could’ve seen being nominated that didn’t make the cut were Charlize Theron in Tully, Toni Collette in Hereditary, Elsie Fisher in Eighth Grade, and Amandla Stenberg in The Hate U Give.
Best Actor is a category that could go a few different ways. The Academy has a history of rewarding actors that transform themselves into a real life historical figure, especially when the use of a lot of makeup is involved to make them look the part. Since the turn of the decade, we’ve seen Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln), Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club), Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant), and Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour) all win following this script. This year’s nominees follow this trend as four of the five actors are nominated for playing actual people. The only written character amongst this year’s nominees is Bradley Cooper as singer/alcoholic/drug addict Jackson Maine in A Star is Born. Willem Dafoe took on Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate while Viggo Mortensen played Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga in Green Book. This year’s award is pretty much between the last two options. Christian Bale takes on the reclusive former Vice President Dick Cheney in the biographical comedy-drama Vice. Rami Malek plays the legendary Freddie Mercury in the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Bale and Malek have been splitting awards throughout the year for their performances, with Malek winning more than Bale. A few missed nominees from this year include Ethan Hawke in First Reformed, Daveed Diggs in Blindspotting, John Cho in Searching, and the most surprising of all the snubs in this category, John David Washington in BlacKkKlansman.
Best Director missed the ball on a particular nominee. Bradley Cooper is not a nominee for his directorial debut with A Star is Born. Cooper spent two years devoted to this project, with him getting credit for acting, writing, directing, and producing the film. If you want to make a name for yourself as a director after being an acclaimed actor, this is exactly how your debut should go. Two of this year’s directing nominees are for foreign language films. Previous winner Alfonso Cuarón (winner for Gravity) is nominated for Roma while Pawel Pawlikowski is a first time nominee for Poland’s nominee in the Best Foreign Language Film category Cold War. Polarizing director Yorgos Lanthimos is up for The Favourite. I’ve been vocal in the past about not liking his directing style and the way his movies run, especially his previous projects The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but some people do enjoy his films. Adam McKay, a previous nominee for The Big Short, is up again for Vice. Both of his nominated films take a satirical look at real-life events. Finally, the iconic Spike Lee is nominated for BlacKkKlansman. How this is Lee’s first ever nomination is mind boggling. 2019 is the 30 year anniversary of Do the Right Thing, a movie that caused some controversy by Spike Lee NOT being nominated for Best Director and it’s believed by some that Lee was held back by the Academy for this until he had done a movie that without a doubt he had to be up for. BlacKkKlansman is easily that incredible movie. Others that could’ve been up for this award include Aneesh Chaganty for Searching, Carlos López Estrada for Blindspotting, John Krasinski for A Quiet Place, Steve McQueen for Widows, and George Tillman Jr. for The Hate U Give.
Now on to the award everybody waits for, Best Picture. Ever since the public outcry of The Dark Knight not being nominated for the award for 2008, the Academy has changed from 5 Best Picture nominees to “up to 10”. With this being the 10th Academy Awards since then, there have been 10 nominees just twice (the first two years with this amendment), 9 nominees five times, and 8 nominees three times including this year. This year’s “best of the best” are Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Green Book, Roma, A Star is Born, and Vice. Black Panther, the first superhero movie to ever be nominated in this category, is the 3rd highest grossing domestic release of all time with over $700M in ticket sales. BlacKkKlansman is Spike Lee’s telling of Ron Stallworth, an African-American detective in Colorado Springs who manages to infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Bohemian Rhapsody shows how Queen was formed, how they became the legendary band that everyone loved, and the lead up to their unforgettable performance at Live Aid. The Favourite tells the story of two cousins competing to be “The Favourite” of Queen Anne’s court in 18th century England. Green Book follows the real-life relationship between Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga and musician “Doc” Don Shirley as Frank is hired by Don to be his driver during a concert tour through the Midwest and Deep South. Roma follows a live-in housekeeper to a middle-class family. Roma is the only one of the 8 nominees that I have not seen, so my following rankings will not have it included, even though it is the early favorite to win this award. A Star is Born takes a look at how a current music star can meet an unknown, bring her into the industry while falling for her, and have his “star” start to fall while hers rises. Finally, Vice takes a satirical look at the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney, arguably the most powerful person to ever hold that title in our nation’s history, while also using some poetic license for details that were unknown about Cheney.
My rankings for the chosen nominees (again, minus Roma) are as follows:
- A Star is Born
- BlacKkKlansman
- Vice
- Green Book
- Bohemian Rhapsody
- Black Panther
- The Favourite
Now if I were to choose the 8 Best Picture nominees for 2018 myself, I would actually have to sub out 6 of those choices and add in Blindspotting, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Hate U Give, A Quiet Place, Searching, and Widows.
This is how MY top 8 for 2018 would be ranked:
- A Star is Born
- The Hate U Give
- BlacKkKlansman
- Searching
- Blindspotting
- A Quiet Place
- Widows
- Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Zackman at the Movies 