In my Oscar predictions piece on Wednesday, I warned about the possibility that this year’s list could be even more international than in recent years, partly because of the L.A. wildfires, which moved the Academy to extend the voting period twice and by nearly a week overall. It was indicative that voters in Los Angeles, where a lot of them live, might have been preoccupied. This said to me that the ever-growing international base of Oscar voters, not affected by the fires, might have more influence than ever on the nominations.
There is no question that happened.
Let’s start with Best Picture. Since Z in 1969, there have been 11 films simultaneously nominated for Best International Feature (formerly known as Best Foreign Language Film) and Best Picture. This year, for the first time, there are two: France’s Spanish-language Emilia Pérez and Brazil’s highly political I’m Still Here, the latter becoming the biggest Best Picture surprise of the morning. South Korea’s Parasite remains the only film to win Best Picture and International Feature, in 2020, but all of the previous examples did go on to win the International prize.
And then there is Cannes. The iconic film festival taking place way back in May had an exceptional showing this year with a whopping 31 nominations for eight films that debuted in the South of France. That sometimes is thought of as an unwise Oscar strategy since playing that far in advance can lead to other films getting more attention at the fall festivals, but with many Cannes titles getting their North American premieres at Telluride or Toronto, that is becoming a moot point. Cannes has three of this year’s Best Picture nominees in Palme d’Or winner Anora , Emilia Pérez and The Substance.
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And while we are on the subject of Emilia Pérez, landing Netflix a personal-record 13 nominations, the musical is in rarefied air at the Oscars and represents the streamer’s first real best chance to finally take Best Picture after Apple became the first with CODA in 2022. It also is the first time since winner Oliver and Funny Girl in 1968 and winner My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins in 1964 saw two musicals face off against each other in the Best Picture race. Throw in the Bob Dylan musical biopic A Complete Unknown, and you have three.
Looking over the nominations, the only really surprising thing is how surprising they aren’t. Sure, there are the usual snubs, particularly in the overcrowded Best Actress field, and foreign directors, as usual, taking spots away from those whose movies otherwise racked up numerous nominations and Best Picture noms. Among the overlooked is Conclave’s Edward Berger, who I thought was a lock for his otherwise eight-times-nominated papal drama — what does this exceptional filmmaker have to do to impress the AMPAS Directors branch, who are the ones voting for nominations, after two years ago similarly being overlooked for his multi-nominated Best Picture contender All Quiet on the Western Front? Shameful, and as he is not a producer or writer this time, he’s locked out.
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The same goes for the sensational 10-times-nominated Best Picture contender Wicked, which saw its director Jon M. Chu ignored. At least he has a shot next year for Part 2, Wicked: For Good. I think it is high time the Academy looked at the annual snub fest in this category. As people always say, “Do you think five of these 10 Best Picture nominees directed themselves?”
Overall, today’s list mostly is as I thought it might be. I mean, did you really expect Diane Warren would have no chance for her 16th (!) Best Song nomination and eighth (!) consecutive — another of Netflix’s leading total of 16 — for “The Journey” from The Six Triple Eight?
The exceptional showing for The Brutalist, with 10 nominations including Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay, perhaps could set up a weird kind of rerun of 2002, when another Holocaust-oriented movie, The Pianist, for which Adrien Brody won an Oscar, took also Directing and Adapted Screenplay before losing in the end to Chicago, the last musical to win Best Picture. Could that unique scenario repeat itself for Brady Corbet’s 3½-hour epic against either Emilia Pérez or Wicked? If it is to be the latter without Directing or Screenplay nominations, you would have to go back to 1930’s Grand Hotel, which won Best Picture on its only nomination.
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As for Emilia Pérez‘s 13 nominations today, yes it is a record for a foreign-language film, as headlines are blasting, but it joins a list of other movies that have received 13 nominations including last year’s Oppenheimer, The Shape of Water, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Chicago, Shakespeare in Love, Forrest Gump, Mary Poppins, From Here to Eternity, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Gone with the Wind. Of that list every one of them won Best Picture eventually except Benjamin Button, Mary Poppins, Virginia Woolf. La La Land, with 14 nominations, is the only film to ever lose Best Picture with that many.
Despite the overwhelming showing for Emilia Pérez, with its 13 nominations and its newly minted front-runner status, with the Academy’s preferential balloting process in which voters rank their favorites starting with 1 and going to 10, surprises are possible such as when Moonlight triumphed over La La Land. And Conclave, which led the BAFTA nominations with 12, can take heart in the fact of two recent Best Picture winners, Green Book and CODA, that did that feat without a Directing nomination (each won Best Picture with also Screenplay and Supporting Actor awards).
Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the morning came with the Supporting Actor nomination for Jeremy Strong as Donald Trump‘s evil mentor Roy Cohn in The Apprentice (setting up a showdown in the category with his Succession co-star Kieran Culkin of A Real Pain), and then again for Sebastian Stan’s Best Actor nomination as the younger Donald Trump in The Apprentice.
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Coming just three days after watching him sworn in for a second term, this is a sweet moment that no doubt Trump himself — who claims not to have seen this smart origin story of the 45th and now 47th president (an occurrence director Ali Abbasi could not have predicted when he set out to make this film, which is exceptionally fair and accurate, even sometimes empathetic to Trump). Considering no one in Hollywood wanted to release The Apprentice in the U.S. after its Cannes premiere, until finally Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff took a chance and now has two Oscar nominations for their efforts, the Academy actor’s branch should take a bow — especially since Stan was competing against himself for his Golden Globe-winning A Different Man, making it doubly difficult to amass the votes needed for his Apprentice performance.
When I interviewed Stan not too long ago he mentioned Variety was unable to even find an actor to talk to him for its Actors on Actors series due to the Trump factor. Maybe an Oscar nomination for the actor playing him finally will get Trump to see the film. How can he resist? And as last year, when he crashed the Oscars with a “review” at the end of the show read by host Jimmy Kimmel, will he be tempted even more so to do that again?
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Stay tuned.
The 97th Academy Awards are Sunday, March 2. ABC will air the ceremony live at 4 p.m. PT/7 ET, and Hulu will stream it.
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