This year's nominations may not reflect the world we live in, but they sure reflect the Academy.
It was only 11 months ago that Steve McQueen leapt for joy at the Oscars, his searing 12 Years A Slave becoming the first film directed by a black filmmaker to win Best Picture, and the first film written by an African-American to do the same (for John Ridley, who also won Best Adapted Screenplay). With a Best Supporting Actress award going to Lupita Nyong’o, and six other nominations in its pocket, the wild success of 12 Years A Slave made for a narrative that wrote itself: the Oscars, so long seen as too old and too white, had finally made peace with both their past, and America’s.
But with today’s announcement of the nominees for the 87th Academy Awards, that narrative has suddenly reversed. If 2014 were the year the Oscars were proven no longer racist, 2015 throws us right back into the fray, begging the hot-button question: are the Oscars racist?
"One must wonder whether the overwhelmingly male, white, and old make-up of the Directors branch came into play."
Taken in isolation, Selma — a dramatic depiction of Martin Luther King during the civil-rights protest marches of 1965 — receiving two awards, one of those for Best Picture, hardly says so. But with its maker, Ava DuVernay, missing out on becoming the first black woman to be nominated for Best Director, one must wonder whether the overwhelmingly male, white, and old make-up of the Directors branch came into play. And though it’s easy to make a case that David Oyelowo’s performance as MLK didn’t deserve a Best Actor nomination (especially when Jake Gyllenhaal’s electric turn in Nightcrawler was shut out), his absence means that, for just the second time in 20 years, the 20 actors nominated happen to be all white.
What does this mean? Well, everything and nothing. There’s a complicated conversation to be had about privilege, tokenism, and merit. About the way movies are cast, who gets to make them, and which films get the backing of an Oscar campaign. And about whether a self-congratulatory celebration of Hollywood celebrity actually needs to be a barometer of broader social issues.
If you just want to be happy for good cinema, you can be glad that Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater, long two of America’s most interesting and distinctive auteurs, have finally gotten their Oscars recognition: The Grand Budapest Hotel leading all nominees, surprisingly, with nine; Boyhood, the presumed frontrunner for Best Picture, receiving six.
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
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"The 2015 Oscar nominations may not reflect the world we live in, but they sure reflect the Academy."
If Selma was ‘snubbed’, even though it has a Best Picture nomination, what of Wild, which earned acting nominations for Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern, but couldn’t crack the Best Picture conversation for, likely, daring to be about women? What of David Fincher’s almost entirely-ignored Gone Girl (just one nomination, for star Rosamund Pike), whose ruthless satire of sexual politics and media hysteria didn’t earn Gillian Flynn a much-deserved, much-expected nomination for adapting her own novel?
Instead, she lost out to the ultra-violent, ultra-macho adaptation of American Sniper, from a gleefully-racist, fabrication-filled autobiography about shootin’ “savages” in Iraq. The deplorable film received seven nominations, including for Best Picture, proving that the pull of 84-year-old Clint Eastwood is still strong. And why shouldn’t it be? The demographic makeup of Oscar voters is 94% white, 76% male, and averages 63 years-old. The 2015 Oscar nominations may not reflect the world we live in, but they sure reflect the Academy.
Best Picture
American Sniper
Birdman
Boyhood
The Imitation Game
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash
Best Actor
Steve Carell for Foxcatcher
Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game
Bradley Cooper for American Sniper
Michael Keaton for Birdman
Eddie Redmayne for The Theory Of Everything
Best Actress
Marion Cotillard for Two Days, One Night
Felicity Jones for The Theory Of Everything
Rosamund Pike for Gone Girl
Julianne Moore for Still Alice
Reese Witherspoon for Wild
Best Supporting Actor
Robert Duvall for The Judge
Ethan Hawke for Boyhood
Edward Norton for Birdman
Mark Ruffalo for Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons for Whiplash
Best Supporting Actress
Patricia Arquette for Boyhood
Laura Dern for Wild
Keira Knightley for The Imitation Game
Emma Stone for Birdman
Meryl Streep for Into the Woods
Best Director
Richard Linklater for Boyhood
Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdman
Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher
Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel
Morten Tyldum for The Imitation Game
Best Cinematography
Birdman: Emmanuel Lubezki
The Grand Budapest Hotel: Robert D. Yeoman
Mr. Turner: Dick Pope
Unbroken: Roger Deakins
Ida: Lukasz Zal, Ryszard Lenczewski
Best Screenplay
Boyhood: Richard Linklater
Birdman: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo
Foxcatcher: E. Max Frye, Dan Futterman
The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes Anderson, Hugo Guinness
Nightcrawler: Dan Gilroy
Best Adapted Screenplay
American Sniper: Jason Hall
Inherent Vice: Paul Thomas Anderson
The Imitation Game: Graham Moore
The Theory Of Everything: Anthony McCarten
Whiplash: Damien Chazelle
Best Animated Film
The Boxtrolls
Big Hero 6
How To Train Your Dragon 2
Song Of The Sea
The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya
Best Foreign Language Film
Tangerines: Zaza Urushadze
Ida: Pawel Pawlikowski
Leviathan: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Wild Tales: Damián Szifrón
Timbuktu: Abderrahmane Sissako
Best Documentary
Citizenfour
Finding Vivian Maier
Last Days In Vietnam
The Salt Of The Earth
Virunga