The 97th annual Oscar Awards is coming up right around the corner and the excitement is rising.
The Oscar awards have been taking place since 1929 and have been celebrating movies, actors, directors and more ever since. Last Thursday the nominations for this year’s Oscars were released and many are saying the picks are quite interesting.
The award show features 23 categories most of which double as to showcase slightly separate aspects such as actor/actress, original/adapted screenplays, and feature/short styles to name a few.
Like any award show, the Oscars also have the main categories people tune in for.
Let’s be real, a good chunk of people who are turning on the award show for a more casual night unfortunately don’t have a big care for who wins best editing or best sound design so that narrows the main categories down to the big five.
Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay (adapted or original) and it makes sense as these categories have a lot of work behind the art, and they are, without a doubt, major aspects of any movie.
Now diving into these arguably strange nominations:
Starting with a relatively agreeable category, Best Actor also known as Best Actor in a Leading Role. Nominated for this was Adrien Brody in The Brutalist, Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, Colman Domingo in SingSing, Ralph Fiennes in Conclave and Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice.
All of these nominations are very well deserved as these actors put copious amounts of effort into these incredible films. For Stan this is his first Oscar nomination and Chalamet is now the third-youngest two-time nominee for best actor, he is also the youngest since James Dean when he was 24.
Best Actress in a Leading Role also has some impressive competition with Cynthia Erivo in Wicked, Mikey Madison in Anora, Demi Moore in The Substance, Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here and Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Pérez.
Notably Karla Sofía Gascón is the first openly trans woman to be nominated for an Oscar Award. Her movie Emilia Pérez however has been quite the issue when it comes to the other nominations. Emilia Pérez was nominated for a total of 13 awards on Thursday and people aren’t so thrilled.
I personally haven’t seen the film but the comedy-musical has strikingly low reviews, in fact I haven’t heard a single good thing about this film. While of course making a movie is an art form and all art is subjective it is a bit saddening to see such a low star movie take high over other films that got fewer nominations or even zero nominations at all.
There was a slight uproar on the internet after people saw the nominations stating just this.
“I definitely saw a lot of people upset over the nominations last week,” Harmony Williams said.
I feel it is one of the many things that are so frustrating about these prestigious award shows, as a viewer you feel like the films (or other media the award is particularly for) you want to see win never get truly represented or the justice they deserve and they get constantly snubbed.
It’s not at all rare to see movies sweep both in nominations and likely awards but typically the movie is almost unanimously deserving and that just doesn’t seem the case for the Emilia Pérez film.
Moving on from the actor centric awards we have the nominations for Best Picture being Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, I’m Still Here, and Emilia Pérez.
Another set of relatively good movies in this category and I feel like it’s really exciting to see Dune: Part Two in this category as well as I feel like it’s gotten a bit overlooked by the media due to the fact that it came out much earlier on in the year.
Best Director is another exciting category, this year there’s a lot of repetitive awards for a handful of films again like Anora with Sean Baker as the director, The Brutalist with Brady Corbet, A Complete Unknown with James Mangold, Jacques Audiard with Emilia Pérez, and The Substance with Coralie Fargeat.
Lastly in The Big Five is Best Screenplay, this has two categories as one is for adapted screenplays and one is for original screenplays.
In the category for adapted we have the scripts for A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Emilia Pérez, Nickel Boys, and SingSing.
In the category for original we have the scripts for Anora, The Brutalist, A Real Pain, September 5, and The Substance.
Both these categories have tight competition with these impressive scripts. It’s again a lot of repeats but standing out the most in my opinion is Jesse Eisenberg’s script for A Real Pain which he recently won a Golden Globe for a few weeks ago.
As I’ve mentioned there are tons of repeats in regards to nominations for this Oscar ceremony. We’re seeing very few movies with unique nominations but what that also means is a small scope of movies are getting recognized.
With this it’s also important to realize how many movies, actors, directors, etc. aren’t getting any recognition. Sometimes this is due to movies not submitting themselves for Oscar consideration or lack of campaigning but sadly that isn’t the case for all of them.
“I wish more of a variety of movies got nominated because I always feel like I don’t know any of the movies whenever I watch the Oscars,” Williams said.
Moving away from these films I want to showcase some other movies that aren’t getting talked about as much.
People tend to forget about the recognition animated movies receive at these awards and one animated movie in particular has quite a few nominations and some difficult competition.
The Wild Robot has three nominations in the categories of Best Animated Feature Film, Best Music for an original score, and Best sound.
The Wild Robot was an excellent film and certainly deserves these awards and it’s always lovely to see animated films get so much recognition as they often don’t get taken very seriously especially in the film world.
Another very deserving movie with more nominations is Wicked which is up for Visual Effects, Sound, Production Design, Best Picture, Music for an original score, Makeup and Hairstyling, Film Editing, Costume Design, and lastly a nomination for Ariana Grande’s role nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Wicked definitely has plenty of nominations even though they might not take up a lot of space in The Big Five but of course these nominations aren’t really a surprise as the film was insanely successful and broke a large amount of records especially for such a long musical film.
Those are just a few examples out of the handful as most movies not nominated in those major categories did shine a bit in the less notable ones, not to say those categories are any bit unimportant.
I’m really excited to see how these movies get awarded on March 5th and I hope each decision is fair and made well as I think some truly amazing movies came out this year and they deserve that big shiny award and their time in the spotlight.
