9 unlikely Oscar nominations we’d love to see tomorrow
From The French Dispatch to Alana Haim, here are the long shots we're rooting for
Film Features Oscar
Early tomorrow morning, the nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards will be announced. By this point in the typically endless awards season, we all have a pretty good sense of who should expect to hear their names; if all goes as expected, a lot of people involved with The Power Of The Dog and Dune are going to have a very good day. Of course, there are always surprises, and it’s those that get us up at the ass-crack of dawn, hoping against hope for a favorite to slip into the race. These are the two thoughts that we hold in our heads come this time every year: The Oscars are silly, and no true barometer of cinematic quality; and it’s still nice to see the art and artists you love get some attention, if only for how it might boost a career.
To that end, let’s highlight some long shots we’re crossing our fingers and holding out hope for in nine of the major Academy Award categories. Note that in making our selections, we tried to highlight films, actors, directors, and writers who haven’t been heavily cited as likely nominees, but also ones that aren’t so outrageously unlikely that they could never happen. (Okay, we did kind of go for one of those. Prove us wrong, directors’ branch!) Check back here early tomorrow morning for the full list of nominees, which will hopefully include at least one curveball of good taste to keep us glued to our screen next year and beyond, our faith in happy surprises rewarded.
72 Comments
Id also add Jeffrey Wright in French Dispatch was supremely good and I wouldn’t complain if he got nominated.
I came here to say that. His little talk-show monologue about food in and of itself is worthy of a nomination.
I didn’t find a ton of heart in French Dispatch, but damned if that bit didn’t have it in spades
Yeah he’s the standout and I’m more confident of the film getting a nod than him doing so, simply because the supporting actor category is always crowded.
For the convenience of readers, I will list all of the AVC’s picks, alongside the current number of Gold Derby experts predicting a nomination:Best Picture: The French Dispatch 1Best Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria 0Best Actress: Alana Haim, Licorice Pizza 4Best Actor: Simon Rex, Red Rocket 0Best Supporting Actress: Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter 2Best Supporting Actor: Colman Domingo, Zola 0Best Adapted Screenplay: Benedetta N/A (not even listed as possibility)Best Original Screenplay: A Hero 1Best International Feature: I’m Your Man 2https://www.goldderby.com/odds/expert-odds/oscars-nominations-2022-predictions/
Thank you for doing this, because fuck slideshows.
You can resize your window to scroll instead. It’s what I do, and it’s annoying.
I liked Licorice Pizza more than a lot of people I hang around with, but I really don’t think the acting was its strong suit. When Sean Penn and Bradley Cooper showed up, I actually thought it was pretty rough for the film, because you go from enjoying the two kids to saying “Oh right, good acting!” Nothing against Haim or Hoffman, who were certainly charming and disarming, but I really don’t think that’s an Oscar-worthy performance.
Really, I thought Haim was fantastic. Not sure about Oscar nom worthy cos I haven’t seen most of the other likely nominees, but it was a really pleasant surprise. Her dad was great too!I also thought Penn chewed the scenery a bit too much, but agree that cooper was excellent.
I would be surprised if Alana Haim DOESN’T get nominated
because you go from enjoying the two kids to saying “Oh right, good acting!”Alana Haim is 30.
Thanks, Google!
You’re the one that called her a “kid”.
Adult-film actor. MTV personality. Sitcom player. Oscar nominee.This is the Gen Z equivalent of the EGOT: The AMOS
Surprised they included that in his bio as I never see it mentioned—which I don’t think it needs to be given the circumstances.
A “false profit”? Really? You’re better than this.
They’re doing it on purpose now
You mean on porpoise?
Colman Domingo’s performance was oh-so lacking in authenticity. He is fantastic in most films I’ve seen him, but this film was definitely not one of them.
I loved him in it, scary and funny and really captured what it felt like with those traumatizing nights when you get in the wrong car with the wrong guy after the club.
When I walked away from ZOLA, he was the main element I was thinking and talking about. It’s textbook theft by a supporting actor in a chewy, villainous role, where they elevate the performance by finding the humanity without sacrificing the menace, akin to Bardem in NO COUNTRY, Waltz in BASTERDS, Simmons in WHIPLASH, Ledger in TDK…
ZOLA was great and he was the greatest part of it.
I don’t think “authenticity” (whatever that means) was really what that movie called for.
What would authenticity look like for that character? He’s playing someone who is lying and manipulating 24/7
I’m talking about his code switching/accent drop. That is a very real thing, and I respect them for trying for it, but it failed on delivery and completely sucked me out of the film.
If “Memoria” gets nominated, I will be severely pissed off. The Academy is struggling for relevance year after year, so to nominate a movie that literally almost no one can even watch would be unbelievably tone deaf. I make it my mission to watch all of the nominees, and for the last four years I’ve succeeded (it’s a lot of fun, even for movies I end up hating, and the Shorts alone are worth the time and effort), and if this was the way that streak were to be broken, it would be criminal. There are plenty of ways for the Academy to mess up their quest for renewed interest (pandering to the youth by shortlisting/nominating Billie Eilish even though young people don’t watch the Oscars, celebrating Hollywood’s dearth of ideas by nominating a remake of a previous Best Picture winner for Best Picture, the mere proposal of the Popular Film category, etc.), but any official endorsement of a movie that created a release model so no one could reasonably see it would be the worst.
Memoria and West Side Story are good though?
I’m an aging punk/slacker/whatever, who’s never heard 98% of what’s considered ‘hip’ nowadays, but even I think that Billie Eilish totally deserves a Best Original Song nomination for ‘No Time to Die’ – hell, I bought the damn 7 inch when it first came out. Too bad the movie was lacklustre, to put it mildly.
I’m not saying it’s not good. It’s probably her best song, actually, because she does this weird thing where she sings intelligible lyrics for once. But if she’s nominated, it won’t necessarily be for the quality of the song, but an attempt to draw in a youth audience who didn’t come the last time they tried this, when they had her perform during the “In Memoriam” reel a couple years back. If you need further evidence, look at the fact that the promotional movie about her produced by her record label got shortlisted for Documentary Feature over the likes of “Val,” “Being Cousteau,” “Who We Are,” “The Sparks Brothers,” “Roadrunner,” and “The Loneliest Whale” among many other actual documentaries that weren’t just thinly-veiled marketing materials. And for what it’s worth, in that very film, there’s a scene where she’s pitched the project with the idea of doing the same thing Sam Smith did (there are a lot of moments where “No Time to Die” plays like a minor key version of “The Writing’s On the Wall”), meaning you can argue that it’s a) not original, or b) a crass attempt to campaign for more hardware (a plague that may ultimately doom the Oscars as they drift closer and closer to the Golden Globes each year). In this same sequence, she says she hates the song, hated writing it, and hates it when people “belt,” which to her means singing at any volume above a whisper, and that those who do (95-99% of all singers) are stupid. So yeah, give her all the trophies! Again, the song itself is alright, but when it gets nominated tomorr0w, it’ll be at least a 50/50 split of quality versus the Academy begging for a younger audience by thinking that glomming onto something popular will do the trick, even though it fails every time. Billie Eilish as a person and a performer is practically irrelevant in this equation. The next Bond theme could be Ariana Grande farting into a synthesizer, and it would get nominated because the Academy writ large (but in this specific case, the Music Branch) thinks that by nominating someone popular, people will show up, and they just won’t.
Well, am I wrong, or was that a highly loquacious manner of saying: ‘Yeah, I agree, but I’m too far up this road to nowhere’? Do tell.
If you think it deserved its nomination, more power to you. You can’t be “wrong” because you’re simply stating a preference. In that same vein, I recognize it has some quality, but I believe it didn’t deserve a nod, especially when compared to the music that was on the shortlist with it and the stuff that didn’t even get that far. My original point was that because the Academy cares more about pandering to youth trends in a vain attempt to win back viewers it never had, she would have been nominated regardless of quality, and I stand by that.
Don’t get pissed off at the nom, get pissed off at the distribution strategy. Best Director means Best Director, no matter if two people or two billion people saw the movie
I agree, but my point is that the Academy knows this movie is unwatchable for 99% of the public, so to make such an endorsement would be a middle finger to the audience that they desperately need back.
What makes it unwatchable?
“celebrating Hollywood’s dearth of ideas by nominating a remake of a previous Best Picture winner for Best Picture”Best Picture winners that were remakes: Ben-Hur, Gigi, The Departed, Hamlet, Around the World in 80 Days. Nominees that were remakes: A Star is Born, True Grit, Sense and Sensibility (there had been a BBC TV version), Beauty and the Beast, Dangerous Liaisons, Tess, Heaven Can Wait, Romeo and Juliet (twice), Oliver, Cleopatra, Mutiny on the Bounty (Remake of a previous Best Picture winner. I guess Hollywood was out of ideas in 1962.), Fanny, Julius Caesar, King Solomon’s Mines, Great Expectations, Gaslight, The Maltese Falcon, The Wizard of Oz, My Fair Lady, A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables (twice), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, David Copperfield and Little Women (twice). There could be more, but I just went through the list of nominees and took note of the ones I recognized. Some of the more obscure ones might be remakes as well.If remakes being nominated for Academy Awards means Hollywood has run out of ideas, then I guess they ran out of ideas around 1932. You could argue, I suppose, that most of these aren’t actually adaptations of previous movies, but of the movies’ source material. But of course that applies to West Side Story as well. I found a recent New York Times article claiming that The Departed is the only Best Picture winner that’s a remake, and that West Side Story has a chance to be the second. That’s bullshit, obviously. It’s the only one based on a movie that wasn’t previously a book or play, but if you’re excluding those, then you’d have to exclude West Side Story also.
Lord of the Rings also technically counts because of the animated versions!
The “Mutiny on the Bounty” remake is the only one that applies to my point, and the fact that it went up against “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Longest Day,” “The Music Man,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” only further illustrates it. Now, I wasn’t around back then, but would anyone seriously suggest that alongside those four timeless classics there wasn’t another option? That the voters really felt the need to go back to the “Bounty” well after already giving it the top prize? I’d submit that as evidence that there really may not have been that many good ideas in 1962 if that was on the table. Remakes themselves are not inherently bad (and in case of “The Departed” it was an Americanized remake of a foreign film), but once the Academy has already declared that a film is as good as it gets by getting BP honors, it smacks of hubris to say that it can be made even better, and it is a sad statement when we’re in a situation – rare though it may be – where we’ve got nothing better than something that’s not only been done, but been done in such a superlative fashion that it’s already gotten the highest accolade it can get. It only shines a brighter spotlight on the problem. And again, when the Academy is trying to win back erstwhile viewership AND maintain its position as the authority on film arts in this country, to then turn around and say that potentially the best movie we had last year was one they already honored, it defeats both purposes. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the Academy devoting a segment in the broadcast last year (not an ad-break) to show the first teaser (they also did this for “Summer of Soul”) is to further risk credibility by allowing a sponsorship to be used as a tacit seal of approval and bias the jury going forward.
Sure there were good ideas in 1962. They could have filmed Bob Dylan reading the phone book and it would have been more relevant.
The one thing those Academy troglodytes refuse to consider is introducing a Worst Picture category.
We should definitely make this about what pablum people will eat. It wasn’t already (ahem Braveheart). We certainly can’t afford one or two nominations for things that don’t suck. It’s super tone deaf to reward greatness, definitely not what America is about (unironic).
I also make it a point to see everything including the shorts but I do notice there are some good but marginally seen films which blossom and become popular with a nomination. As popularity grows, so does opportunity as more theaters book the new Oscar nominee. If Memoria (which yes, has not been well distributed at present) is a great film or a remake is recognized as an amazing piece of art, it should have the same opportunity no matter what the circumstances.
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I thought The French Dispatch was beautiful, but definitely the least connected I’ve felt to Anderson’s characters and stories. I still was expecting it to be a shoe in for nominations though.
Agreed – it was fun to watch, and occasionally very funny, but it was so dollhousey that I didn’t feel a single emotion for any of the characters… not in the way that I was legitimately moved by the tragic helicopter crash in Life Aquatic or by Royal realizing he’s lying to his family because he loves them. Even when SPOILER…Timmy Chalamet dies in that lightning strike, I was like “oh. I guess that’s how they end this segment.”
I saw Pig three weeks ago. I’ve watched it four times total since. I would like a Pig on this list.
Amen – I can’t count how many times I’ve rewatched that fancy restaurant scene where he cruelly tears apart that chef’s pretensions…and then gently pivots to giving him loving advice about following his heart.
That scene is so amazing. You know that he was a bit of prick when he was a chef…”demanding” might be a better word. But he was never a Gordon Ramsey/Donald Trump “You’re fired!” kind of asshole. Even when he fired that guy, he cared enough to sit with him and talk about his dreams. Sometimes firing someone is the nicest thing you can do for them, even if it doesn’t seem like it in the moment.Anyway, that scene is fantastic. So much said, with so few words.
“We don’t get a lot of things to really care about”
gordon ramsey is not like donald trump gordon seems to actually like other humans and enjoys being around children
I’m rooting for it for no other reason than that it shined a bright light on the scourge of underground chef fights.
Not even fights, just pure beatings. Won’t someone protect these chefs?
I did enjoy Pig, maybe not four times (I like seeing a lot of films rather than one over and over) but appreciate it wasn’t the usual Cage-Rage film.
So bored of Bill Murray
It’s pretty clear that he is too.
Jon S. Chu’s extraordinary, imaginative work on In The Heights is, to me, a textbook example of “Outstanding Achievement In Film Direction.” Now it seems like the movie won’t get a single nomination, while Tick… Tick… BOOM! (which I liked) is getting all the acclaim. (I don’t even want to think about Spielberg getting nominated, having been responsible for that awful Ansel Elgort performance.)
Neither would make my personal Best Picture list, but I completely agree that In the Heights was the more impressive of the two Miranda-linked musicals. It’s so much more lively and visually sumptuous than Tick… Tick… BOOM!
Three, if you count Encanto!
I know, right? Man had a busy year.
Mildly curious as to whether Kristen Stewart will get a nom or whether the Oscars will follow the SAGs’ lead
I hope, although the film lost the thread in the last third, I really think Stewart did such a tremendous job capturing Diana as someone who was really complicated. We met her in full paranoia and you felt all these versions of Diana slipping into each other, stressful performance but full of empathy.
Yep. I don’t historically like her in anything, but I’ve been singing her praises in this since I saw it.
The French Dispatch as Best Picture?? Blechh. And this is coming from someone who is a fan of the majority of Wes Anderson’s movies. For me The French Dispatch was so unengaging – particularly its characters and that fragmented vignette-style format – except for its technical artistry which you come to expect from an Anderson film. His previous film Isle of Dogs is one that while I preferred to French Dispatch, also felt was a bit subpar for Anderson’s standards. His run of Fantastic Mr. Fox/Moonrise Kingdom/Grand Budapest Hotel was Wes at his best, IMO, and he’s been shakier since.
I though christian America would love Benedetta for making fun of roman catholics, especially their appreciation for imagery (images?)
Mike Faist! Mike Faist! Mike Faist!
Nominate Censor for Best Picture, Director, Actress, etc.
Counterpoint: Wes Anderson sucks and all his movies are pretentious boring twee exercises in navel gazing.
Grand Budapest Hotel is many things but boring isn’t one of them.
I really think most of his films could be retitled Let’s All Join Wes Anderson in Joyously Sniffing His Farts. Might help for international markets, not having to translate each time?
Wow a two-fer! A troll who just found out someone pisssd in their bowl of cornflakes. Sashay away, shitbird, you’re stinking up the place with your attitude.
Oooh I found the pretentious boring twee navel gazer LOL
Why? Were you looking up your own ass or something?
I really cant find fault with any of these (except Alana Haim, who was very good but overpraised). The one I really want, not present here, is for Jeffrey Wright to win best supporting actor for French DispatchI will say I haven’t seen Zola, but Colman Domingo hadn’t really come to my attention before Ma Rainey and that dude is GOOD. Good lord does he rock a suit, can we cast him and Idris Elba as brothers?