My overall reaction to this morning’s Academy Award
nominations: disappointment.
Disappointment #1: No Best Picture nomination for Carol or
Best Director for Todd Haynes. Carol
was my favorite movie of the year, and critics and audiences loved it. What happened?
My best guess is that straight men, who are still ridiculously overrepresented
among Academy voters, couldn’t get excited about this stylish lesbian romantic
drama.
Disappointment #2: Rooney Mara nominated for Best Supporting
Actress instead of Best Actress. By any
reasonable measure, Therese (Mara’s character) is the leading role in Carol. Mara has more screen time than Cate Blanchett;
the story is told primarily from Therese’s perspective; and her character
experiences the greatest transformation over the course of the film. Mara is deserving of recognition for her fantastic
performance, but it is unfair to the other Supporting Actress nominees for her
to be in this category.
Disappointment #3: Twenty acting nominations with zero people of
color. As usual, there were plenty of
deserving actors who would have brought diversity to the nominations: Will
Smith in Concussion, Michael C. Jordan and Tessa Thompson in Creed, Abraham
Attah and Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation, Jason Mitchell and others in Straight
Outta Compton, the ladies of Tangerine, and a whole bunch of actors in the
brilliant Chi-Raq.
Disappointment #4: No recognition at all for the thrilling independent films 99 Homes and Tangerine.
Certainly the voters could have made room for Michael Shannon, perhaps
our most talented living actor, in the Best Supporting Actor category that
instead includes good-but-not-great work by Christian Bale, Mark Ruffalo, and even
Tom Hardy, who couldn’t maintain a consistent accent throughout The Revenant. As for Tangerine, I’m not sure which
categories would have been the best fit for its unique achievements; perhaps
Best Supporting Actress for Mya Taylor, where space could have been made by
moving Rooney Mara up to Lead.
Disappointment #5: No nomination for Jacob Tremblay of Room. He deserves to be among the Best Actor nominees. I expected that the voters might put him in
the Best Supporting Actor category due to his age. But they skipped over him entirely.
There were a few bright spots among the nominations:
- Phyllis Nagy, Best Adapted Screenplay for Carol
- Sandy Powell, Best Costume Design for Carol
- Rachel McAdams, Best Supporting Actress for Spotlight (career-best performance!)
- Best Picture, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay for the wonderful Brooklyn
- No nomination for Best Original Screenplay for The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s worst script in years
Excited
for the awards ceremony on February 28!
