The Oscar nominations are finally out, delayed a couple of weeks because of some minor annoyances like a few unprecedented fires that may or may not have disrupted the process of Academy voters actually doing the necessary work to watch the works of those that have attracted acclaim, buzz and earlier awards. It sure seems like those that were disrupted may have been disproportionately those who better understood the goals of the movie business and the Oscar telecast that acts as a clarion for it.
Look, this was a challenged year from the get go. The multiple 2023 strikes disrupted the major studios’ 2024 slates enough so that the majority of box office successes were animation and family-friendly projects. Of that batch, only WICKED seemed to have had enough creative chops to register with voters, and it’s more than represented in the list that the theatrical superstars Rachel Sennott and Bowen Yang announced to the world before dawn yesterday, just as the night skies were being lit up with a couple of new fires alarmingly close to still more zip codes where they tend to reside. The movie version of the stage hit garnered 10 of the 13 nominations that Universal received, which was more than twice as many as any other major.
But beyond that–this was a nominees list that was starkly driven both by smaller independents–just ahead of Universal was A24 (largely due to THE BRUTALIST) and in between them and Warner Brothers were arthouse labels including Focus Features, Neon and Mubiand. More crucially, a list dominated by actors whose popularity isn’t quite A-list and, in some cases, downright triggering.
EMILIA PEREZ was seemingly a most deserving work–as CBS NEWS’ Eric Henderson reported yesterday:
(W)ith 13 total…overall nominations…(t)hat achievement is just one nomination shy of tying the record for overall nominations from a single film; “Titanic,” “All About Eve” and “La La Land” all received 14.
And a large part of the reason for that is the spirited performance of Karla Sofia Gascón in the eponymous lead role, who does so with authencity. We’re reminded of that with the lead of virtually every report of yesterday’s nominations, exemplified by NBC NEWS’ Daniel Arkin:
Gascón, who stars…as a Mexican cartel chief who undergoes gender-transition surgery, made history this morning as the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an acting Oscar.
And with that emphasis it has immediately turned the contest for Best Actress into yet another culture war. Gascon will actually be facing some stiff competition from the likes of WICKED’s Cynthia Erivo, who brilliantly channeled the Wicked Witch role made famous on Broadway by such standouts as Idina Menzel and herself broke some barriers by being the first woman of color to portray the role in a significant production, as well Demi Moore, who has already been honored with the Golden Globe for her performance in SUBSTANCE that produced a stirring and emotional confession that after more than four decades as what she described as the perception of being little more than a “popcorn actress”. They happen to be two of the few nominees in major categories with some level of familiarity. But now a vote for either of them will be a vote against a trailblazer, and it appears that Gascon is determined to force-feed that issue throughout the balance of this campaign. As THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR’s Stephen Humphries chronicled:
Reacting to the nominations, Ms. Gascón told The Hollywood Reporter it’s an honor. “What love,” said the actress, who has a child with her wife. “I feel fulfilled.” Ms. Gascón says that her campaign for the movie will focus on overcoming bigotry. Earlier this week, she responded to President Trump’s executive order by declaring, “He is shameless.”
He may very well be, and I certainly don’t walk in her shoes. I get her personal passion and emphathize with her struggles. But the Oscars should never be seen as an opportunity to advance any other cause except attracting audiences into theatres in enough volume to support the companies that are capable of producing these works and employing people of any race, color, creed or age. And given what other obstacles seem to be already in the path of the Academy achieving such a goal, to emphasize this particular aspect at this time is at best counterintuitive and potentially damaging.
As PEOPLE’s troika of Eric Andersson, Nigel Smith, and Jen Juneau observed:
(T)here were many glaring omissions (Selena Gomez! Nicole Kidman!). Read on for the biggest snubs of the day.
Were those performances truly inferior to those of, say, Mikey Madison or Colmin Domingo? At a time where the Academy arbitrarily expanded the list of best picture nominees to 10 to create at least the illusion of opportunity, maybe a pivot back to seven nominees for at least the top two awards for humans might have been a way to bring in different constituencies–certainly one more statistically significant that the transgender community?
And as Humphries noted, there’s not necessarily lockstep support even within that sliver:
In his less than favorable film review of “Emilia Pérez” in November, trans writer Caden Mark Gardner commented on the confluence of the movie and Mr. Trump’s electoral win.
“It’s not that I thought significant progress had been made or that ‘the world was ready for us,’ but witnessing a certain strain of transphobic malice that had been fomented by online far-right internet trolls being transferred to the highest office in the world, is a surreal development,” wrote Mr. Gardner, author of “Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema.” “With its storytelling stumbles and lackluster music, Emilia Perez was never going to be a film that I could embrace, but its arrival in this moment in history feels like [the] botched punchline of a cosmic joke.”
And as Arkin reminded, the Academy had already taken another step toward doing away with access points to potential viewers of the awards:
Oscar telecasts typically feature live performances from the artists nominated for best original song. At last year’s ceremony, for example, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell performed “What Was Made I Made For?” from “Barbie,” then won the award.
But this year, the producers behind the Oscars are going in a different direction. “The Best Original Song category presentation will move away from live performances and will be focused on the songwriters,” the academy said in a memo to members Wednesday.
“We will celebrate their artistry through personal reflections from the teams who bring these songs to life,” the academy added, referring to the songwriters. “All of this, and more, will uncover the stories and inspiration behind this year’s nominees.”
This was done with the theory that the show tends to run far too long and that non-awards elements were clearly the most expendable. But in making more time for people to be acknowledged, that also allows more potential time for them to hijack the broadcast and offer their own views on topics of the moment. And given the Academy’s emphasis on framing Gascon’s performance with the qualifier of her gender, that’s a powderkeg just waiting to explode.
After an all-time low viewership of 10.4 million to the delayed and socially distanced 2021 ceremonies held at a Los Angeles train depot, the Oscars have rebounded with three consecutive years of improved viewership per STATISTA, topped by 2024’s 19.5 million that were an +88% improvement from 2021. That’s still well below 2020’s 23.6 million and light years from the levels in the 30 and 40 million ranges seen from the beginning of this century through 2018. No one, certainly not I, believes those levels in a structurally fractured viewing environment will ever be reached again. But to add political fracturing to the equation is almost certainly a recipe for decline.
The Oscars already celebrate far too many tentpoles of TV. EMILIA PEREZ is, of course, a production for Netflix. Host Conan O’Brien hosted TV talk shows for decades. Bowen Yang is best known for his work on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. And the industry frankly needs more reasons to get people to get off their comfy couches and find enough reasons to save a few shekels for parking, overpriced carb-laden entrees and cocktails and, in some cases, drop $40 on a particle-filtering mask with goggles and better support an industry increasingly being overseen by cost-conscious executives who often lack the passion and appreciation for big-screen executions.
I can’t help but conclude that a significant number of voters seem to ignore these realities in their quest for honoring performances and causes they believe should be elevated without enough consideration of what and who is capable of keeping them working. Shouldn’t THAT be a cause that we should ALL be embracing?
Until next time…