Oztix | News | Surprises, Typical Hollywood Picks & Some Aussies: Oscar Nominations Revealed

In finding a narrative in the 91st Academy Award nominations, there’s a few that jump out, but they almost seem to run counter to each other. The glass is half-full, sure, but it’s also half empty. There’s signs of progress, but also a giant, buzzing, neon sign that flashes the unmistakable message: this is Hollywood business-as-usual.

From the top, the two leading nominees — with ten apiece— are a star-free, black-and-white Mexican family-drama made by a streaming service (Roma) and an absurdist queer comedy from the don of the Greek weird-wave (The Favourite). More importantly, both are also incredible films, meaning that anyone who wants to forward the idea that the American movie-biz’s night of self-congratulatory-back-patting nights is about excellence in cinema actually has a leg to stand on.

And, if you want to take an even-more optimistic viewpoint: neither film has a male lead, and, though this is a hard thing to quantify, there’s certainly no Oscars in living memory in which the two leading films came without a leading man. The strong presence of The Favourite (which includes two Australian nominees, screenwriter Tony McNamara and production designer Fiona Crombie) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (which has nods for screenplay and its two lead performances, from Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant) also forwards a happy narrative of two much-acclaimed films filled with queer characters, where their queerness is handled matter-of-factly, without issue-movie grandstanding or tragedy.

For those who want to see even more signs of progress, and champion an idea of how far we've come from the #OscarsSoWhite outcry of 2016, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman are also all over the nominations: with seven for the former, and six for the latter. Lee was also nominated for Best Director, marking — somehow — his first-ever nomination in the category (Paul Schrader’s nomination for Best Original Screenplay for First Reformed marked a similar long-overdue acknowledgement for another rebel of American cinema). Steve McQueen’s Widows may’ve been completely shut out (even for Viola Davis’s sterling turn), and Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk largely marginalised (save for Regina King’s sterling turn), but the 2019 Oscars could hardly be described as white.

Yet, Black Panther’s presence —which didn’t even need help from the once-mooted, much-mocked, subsequently abandoned Best Popular Film category — is less a sign of racial progress than the annual example that the Oscars is the Scene That Celebrates Itself. It’s hardly ‘brave’ or ‘trailblazing’ to crown the biggest film of the year as a contender; even if, somehow, somewhere, someone will trumpet the first super-hero film to receive a Best Picture nomination as its own epoch of progress (Black Panther’s not even the best super-hero film to be nominated: the awesome Spider-man: Into The Spider-verse receiving a Best Animated Feature Film nod).

Combined with plentiful nominations for big, glitzy, money-makin’ studio hits A Star Is Born and the genuinely-bad Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s another year where the message is clear: Hollywood is gonna Hollywood.

This message rings loud and clear with the genuinely-baffling all-over-the-noms presence of Green Book, a terrible issue-movie comedy that is essentially a Driving Miss Daisy redux; with Viggo Mortensen’s awe-inspiringly-awful, stereotypin’ turn as meatball-eating Bronx goombah and the racism-is-bad/now-we-know-better screenplay the two most egregious of its seven(!) nominations. This is a reminder that, as much as the Oscars have attempted to change, this remains the institution that once claimed Paul Haggis’s worst-film-in-living-memory Crash as its 2006 Best Picture.

Those looking for evidence of the recent shake-up in the voting —Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs having added 2000 new members in recent years, specifically with the intended goal of getting younger and more diverse in the voting body— have to squint to see signs of such change.

Where it really comes up is in individual categories, which are voted on by their relevant members. The directors voting on Best Director “snubbed” A Star Is Born bro Bradley Cooper (who still has plenty to hang his hat on) in favour of Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, for his music-filled, Euro-history romance Cold War. With Pawlikowski and Roma’s Alfonso Cuarón both receiving Best Director nomination, it marks the first time since 1977 that two foreign-language films are in the category (then it was Ingmar Bergman for Face To Face and Lina Wertmüller, the first-ever female Best Director nom, for Seven Beauties). There’s three foreign-language films competing for Best Cinematography, with Cold War and Roma joined by the German epic Never Look Away, which was perhaps the most unexpected nomination. With those two cats, Cuarón is up for the behind-the-lens grand-slam, nominated as Producer, Director, Writer, and Cinematographer.

Roma’s presence —and possible firming into Oscars frontrunner— may, ultimately, be enough to make these Academy Awards, in hindsight, not seem too embarrassing. We’ll surely look back, in future years, and wonder what-the-fuck-were-they-thinking? re: Green Book, but as long as that film doesn’t actually win anything, who cares. For all the narratives of change and progress and diversity, the Oscars remain as they always are: baffling, absurd, grotesque, hilarious, and, on rare occasions, actually about good cinema.