Reactions to this morning's Oscar nominations

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!