Last year was rich with great work by female filmmakers, which is perhaps reflected in the record 70 women nominated for Oscars—including, in a first for the Academy, two in the Best Director category, Nomadland’s Chloé Zhao and Promising Young Woman’s Emerald Fennell. Zhao is the first woman of color ever nominated there; her Nomadland, an A.V. Club favorite that’s currently streaming on Hulu, is competing for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. That it’s the best-reviewed movie of last year might seem to position it as the one to beat on Oscar night, but never count on the Academy’s taste completely aligning with critics’. Also, Nomadland is competing against Mank, which is about Hollywood itself and picked up a whopping 10 nominations, more than any other film this year.
The Academy also made history by nominating three Black actors in one category, with Leslie Odom Jr.’s take on Sam Cooke in One Night In Miami… competing against Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield, the two headliners of Judas And The Black Messiah, for Best Supporting Actor. (All three are arguably leads in their movies, though that gets tricky when you’re talking about dramas with ensemble casts.) Black artists didn’t fare as well on the other side of the camera or in the Best Picture lineup, which doesn’t include Spike Lee’s well-reviewed summer Netflix joint Da 5 Bloods, nor two stage adaptations—Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and One Night In Miami…—widely believed to be in the running for the top prize. Speaking of Bloods, among the most disappointing of this year’s omissions was Delroy Lindo’s absence from the Best Actor category: The movie has its problems, but his fiery, anguished performance as a Vietnam vet swallowed by resentment and the cult of MAGA isn’t one of them.
As for most pleasant surprises, there was the unexpected Best Director nod for Danish filmmaker (and one-time Dogme 95 signee) Thomas Vinterberg, whose drinking drama Another Round is now almost certainly the favorite for Best International Feature. I was also happy to see Stanfield nominated; though a lot of the precursor attention for Judas has centered on Kaluuya’s commanding work as slain Black Panther Fred Hampton, it’s Stanfield’s desperate, guilty rat in a maze William O’Neal who gives the film its urgency. (Also, the guy’s been roundly, consistently great in supporting roles for years now.) In general, Best Supporting Actor boasts some of the worthiest nominees this year, with Sound Of Metal’s terrific Paul Raci—a character actor who didn’t even have a Wikipedia page until fairly recently—also making the cut.
So how did the expanded eligibility window end up affecting the race? Allowing early 2021 films to compete paid off for Judas, certainly—with six nominations, it’s among the most well-represented (and, for this critic’s money, one of the more deserving) films competing. The longer calendar also seems to have worked out well for Andra Day, up for Best Actress for her work in the title role of Lee Daniels’ The United States Vs. Billie Holiday. That the film was available to stream on Hulu during the voting period couldn’t have hurt her chances; possibly instrumental, too, was the fact that she won the Golden Globe before Academy voters even had their ballots, making this the rare year where the results of that ceremony may actually have reshaped the Oscars race.
On the other hand, Jodie Foster isn’t among this year’s Best Supporting Actress nominees, despite her Globes win: The Mauritanian joins The Little Things and Cherry on the list of last-minute awards hopefuls completely ignored by AMPAS. At least they’re in good company, among the First Cows and Assistants of the world—films that would probably be too small to ever grab the attention of this voting bloc, even if they hadn’t opened too early (instead of too late) to make a dent in the solidifying narratives of Oscar season. Good and bad alike, this year’s nominees paint a picture of a system perpetuating itself: awards to fuel Hollywood’s engines, at a time when fear of a full-blown breakdown on the side of the road is probably on every member’s mind.
