It’s been a couple of days since the Academy Award nominations were announced. As the dust settles and the initial feelings of joy, surprise, shock and disappointment subside, we can take a step back and look for patterns and trends in the final nominations. Here are some winners and losers that tell us where the Academy has been in the last few years and where it’s going.
WINNERS
Cinemas and Box Office
At a time when streaming is so prevalent and all video content is easily accessible on our phones, 2022 was a huge year for the cinemas. It’s been well over a decade since the Best Picture category had so many bona fide blockbusters — Everything Everywhere All At Once ($104 million), Elvis ($287 million), Top Gun: Maverick ($1.5 billion), and Avatar: The Way of Water ($2 billion and counting). Audiences flocked to see Maverick in the summer, and Avatar: The Way of Water is still keeping screens occupied. It’s only fitting that the Academy celebrates the movies that gave cinemas a new lease of life after two years of the pandemic.
Asians
It is a big year for Asian representation at the Academy Awards. Everything Everywhere All At Once scored big with nominations for directors, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, and actors Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, and Michelle Yeoh. Hong Chau was recognised for her role in The Whale. In the animated feature category, Domee Shi is looking to follow her Animated Short Oscar for the delightful Bao (2018) with Pixar’s Turning Red. Elsewhere, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro was nominated in the Adapted Screenplay category for Living, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). And lastly, unprecedented, India won three nominations: for Naatu Naatu from RRR garnering a nomination for composer MM Keeravani and lyricist Chandrabose for original song; Shaunak Sen's All That Breathes is nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film; and Kartiki Gonsalves' The Elephant Whisperers nominated for Best Documentary Short Film. Though, Park Chan-wook's South Korean Decision to Leave (2022), India's Last Film Show (2022) and Pakistan's much-feted Joyland (2022) missed out on nominations in the Best International Feature Film category.
First-time nominees for Acting
Barring two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett, none of the other 19 nominees have ever won an Oscar. And only three of the others — Michelle Williams, Judd Hirsch, and Angela Bassett — have ever been nominated before. Some of them are long-overdue for stalwart actors with storied careers like Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Nighy, while others are the future of the Academy — Paul Mescal, Ana de Armas, Barry Keoghan, Brian Tyree Henry, and Stephanie Hsu.
Comebacks
Everyone loves a comeback story and this year has a bunch of them. Ke Huy Quan gave up on acting after his iconic turns as Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Data in The Goonies (1985), which were an indelible part of everyone’s childhood. And now he’s back in the limelight giving emotional speeches from the winners podium. Colin Farrell was a shining star in the 2000s before he burnt out and went through rehab, only to reinvent himself as a character actor. Just this year, he’s given us characters as varied as Pádraic Súilleabháin in The Banshees of Inisherin and The Penguin in The Batman. Brendan Fraser was one of Hollywood’s leading actors in the '90s and stepped away for years before returning with a stunning performance with The Whale. Comeback stories make for great speeches, and a Brendan Fraser acceptance speech will surely leave everyone teary-eyed.
LOSERS
Streaming Platforms
Apple shocked Hollywood last year by becoming the first streaming platform to win Best Picture with Coda (2021), stealing Netflix’s thunder which had seven Best Picture nominees in the last four years. But the bloom is off the rose with streaming platforms. The big 3 — Apple, Amazon, and Netflix have seen declining performance at the Academy, Netflix has gone from 36 to 27 in the last 2 years to 16 this year (aided by a solid nine nominations from All Quiet on the Western Front), while Apple and Amazon have a measly three nominations between them this year.
Women Directors
In stark contrast to previous years, 2022 had a wide range of amazing movies directed by women — a sword-and-sandals action epic (Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Woman King), a journalistic thriller (Maria Schrader, She Said), a delicate father-daughter drama (Charlotte Wells, Aftersun) a civil-rights biopic (Chinonye Chukwu, Till), and a searing chamber piece drama (Sarah Polley, Women Talking). But the Academy failed to nominate any of these deserving directors, threatening to undo the progress it made in the last two years with wins for Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion.
Movies about movies
The Artist (2011), La La Land (2016), Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), Mank (2020) — The Academy loved nothing better than to pat itself on the back by nominating movies about filmmaking. Notwithstanding The Fabelmans, which is arguably as much or more about Steven Spielberg and his personal family traumas, this year had a wide field of movies about movies to choose from. Damien Chazelle followed up La La Land’s 14 nominations and six wins with three below-the-line nominations for Babylon; Sam Mendes followed up 1917’s (2019) 10 nominations and 3 wins with just one cinematography nomination for Empire of Light, and five-time nominee and four-time winner Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths received just one nomination for cinematography.
CONSOLATION PRIZE
James Cameron
Cameron is on top of the world, having once again proved naysayers wrong as Avatar: The Way of Water sailed past the $2 billion milestone earlier this week. And while the sequel received four nominations, including Best Picture, Cameron himself was not recognised for his directorial effort.
Tom Cruise
Cruise brought cinemas back to life with Top Gun: Maverick, earning a career-best $1.5 billion along the way. Maverick received six nominations, including Best Picture, and a surprising but well-deserved nomination for Adapted Screenplay. However, while Cruise himself is a nominee as a producer of the movie, he was not recognised by his peers for one of his finest performances as daredevil pilot Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell.
RRR
SS Rajamouli’s anti-colonial epic was a global blockbuster and found unexpected but well-deserved appreciation in the West. The makers capitalised on a genuine wave of love and admiration for the film. The catchy Naatu Naatu made history as the first Indian movie song to be nominated. While the movie never realistically stood a chance in Best Director and other categories, it’s more than a little disappointing that the movie did not crack Best Picture. The Academy doesn’t release voting counts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if RRR just missed the cut-off.
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