9 of the 2022 Academy Award nominations’ biggest snubs and best surprises
Drive My Car and Dune lead our list of surprises, while Zola, Alana Haim, and Wes Anderson got snubbed
Film Features Academy Award
A fresh batch of Academy Award nominees came out of the Hollywood oven earlier this morning, and the scent of sweet excitement cut with the bitter smell of disappointment is wafting over the hills of Los Angeles as we speak. When it comes to the Oscars, the behavior of voters is just predictable enough to make critics’ eyes roll to the back of their heads every February. At the same time, it’s inscrutable enough to spawn a sub-industry of bloggers dedicated to following fortunes of different films and performers on the awards circuit.
In the end, though, it’s all just betting—particularly in recent years, when a rapid expansion of AMPAS membership has prompted a shift in the awards body’s activities (mostly for the better). Still, Oscars gonna Oscars. And so there’s a distinction to be made between mere acceptance (see: the presence of the critically drubbed Being The Ricardos and Don’t Look Up on this year’s nominee list) and true disappointment when it comes to the Academy Awards.
On the more positive side, worthy films can also make a strong showing that surprises no one: The Power Of The Dog’s performance in the lead-up to the Oscars made it a safe bet, but that doesn’t detract from the film’s quality. (Speaking of positive movement, not being shocked to see Jane Campion, the only woman to be nominated twice for a Best Director Oscar, on this year’s ballot is a new and nice feeling.)
With this wiggle room in place, writing a list of the biggest snubs and surprises has room for both personal taste and professional prognosticating. We’re favoring the former on our list.
85 Comments
Drive My Car is absolutely beloved in my corner—I didn’t see it since I didn’t like Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II and watching it now would feel like homework—but it’s had consistent buzz.
I loved Licorice Pizza, but the ending was all wrong and super gross. It should have ended like Rushmore, with the teen protagonist realizing he was wrong to try to pursue an adult romantically. Not with the adult being won over and basically saying, “Yeah, I will fuck a child!”
I feel like you’re taking his declarations at the end at face value. To me it’s not much different from Miss Cross dancing with Max at the end- a sign that she’s willing to still be in his life and be a friend, without taking the fantasy any further.
Did you actually see the movie? That’s not what happens.
She does not at any point say she’s going to fuck him so why assume that changed?
idk anything about the movie, but I just saw the ending scene on YouTube and a 25 year old romantically kisses a 15 year old. This is a bad thing.
“idk anything about the movie but I just saw the ending scene on Youtube” Then you still don’t know anything about the movie.
Well, and spoiler for the last line spoken in the movie: it’s Alana saying “I love you, Gary.” It’s possible, I guess, PTA meant for an ambiguous ending that didn’t approve of her seemingly winding up falling in love with him, but I didn’t sense such a thing when I saw it.
Love can mean many things, you understand.
They’re definitely banging
You are right, she does not clearly state she is going to fuck him but that kiss definitely implies they may be doing some hand stuff later. That was a romantic kiss, not a “I’m going to stay in your life as a friend” kiss. Im not knocking the movie. I liked it and love is complicated and weird and the age restrictions that are put on it are complicated. I am surprised there is not more talk about the movie and the ending and wonder if there would be a lot more of the sexes were reversed.
I feel like the complications work better if the movie took a little more time to explore exactly why age of consent laws exist and why it’s fucked up for an adult to date a 15-year-old. Instead Gary kinda just wears her down, his immaturity is treated like a character flaw to work around, the movie makes a pretty questionable parallel with a gay relationship, and off we go. If you’re not actually going to deal with the central issue, I’m not sure you lose much by aging him up to 19 or so.
Those last few seconds really don’t sit right with me and they tainted the movie. Throughout the movie, she keeps trying to enter the adult world and in every case she is disillusioned: they are all creepy, or racist, or they’re using her, and nobody gives a shit about her. So she retreats to the relative safety of Gary and his friends, who worship her and put her on a pedestal. And that’s all fine, as long as the movie acknowledges why that’s bad for both of them. At the very end, though, it seems like PTA suddenly went, “Actually, no, this is good and it’s a love story.” Maybe we’re supposed to still think it’s wrong but I dunno.
I don’t really understand how the quality of a film could be determined by the moral instruction it does or doesn’t offer the audience.
I was surprised by how much I didn’t like Licorice Pizza being that PTA is one of my faves. But Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman were great. I don’t know if Haim’s performance was Best Actress-worthy but for her first film, wow. And I don’t like Haim-The Band either.I don’t like a lot of things. But the things I like…I lurve.
I believe that her and Lady Gaga suffer from the fact that they are musicians first which requires almost more roles before they will be considered for nomination. I mean the old days of both like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Judy Garland are gone. I mean most think of musicians and their smaller roles in films like Tom Waits.
I know everyone always bitches about sideshows and the writer is dealing with what they’re told to do (as in, I know exactly where the pivot to goddamn slideshows is coming from- it’s not your fault) but seriously, I went from vaguely interested in this article to immediately clicking out and not reading past the first slide and shrugging.Please, please, please can these articles be actual articles again?
Narrow your browsing window until the black bar at the bottom of the page ( [< Previous] 1/11 [Next>] ) disappears and then refresh. You can now just scroll down through each slide.
Now I haven’t seen The Lost Daughter, but is Jesse Buckley doing a motion capture CGI character? The screengrab is unsettling.
Logged in to say pretty much the same. That looks like Buckley’s in a cutscene from Last of Us II.
I watched it and it’s certainly not CGI… but I agree with your statement.
It looks almost like some Uncanny Valley filter you can slap on your Instagram photos.
The actual film is not representative of that awful screengrab, no. It is also an excellent film, well worth the watch.
But Best Original Screenplay came as a surprise
Certainly surprising, since Dune is an adaptation!
That also isn’t very good!
Nic. Fucking. Cage.
Is this comment an ode to your Pig avatar?
It’s an elephant. But sure.
I have no idea why my brain went to Pig (other than the movie, obviously).
Well, yeah. But I did fucking adore that movie.
Seriously, Pig was my favorite movie of the year. The scene in the restaurant between Robin and Chef Finway is amazing and it has been living in my brain rent free since the first time I watched it.
1000000%. That scene hit me hard. But in the best way. I keep telling people to watch it. That it’s not at all what they expect. That it’s so much better. Nobody has taken me up on it yet. They’re missing out.
The fact that The French Dispatch wasn’t nominated for anything actually gives me a little bit of hope since that’s the type of movie that usually gets a truck load of noms.
Huh? Wes Anderson films historically perform really poorly at the Oscars. Especially in Best Art Direction/Production Design, which is really strange.
Maybe it’s all the love his movies get from the critics, but I’ve always been under the impression that he usually gets a lot of noms.
I’m not even a huge Anderson fan, but yeah, that’s weird.
Nobody wanted to keep having to say the whole title every time a nomination came up.
no mention of Spiderman literally saving Hollywood.
I long to live in the world where Titane is nominated for an Oscar
People were annoyed that Dune was only half a movie? Critics were annoyed? It was well reported beforehand that this was only going to be half a movie. The book has sold 12 million copies so presumably a few people have read it. Pretty much everybody who thought about it for a split second knew exactly where they were going to break it.
Fuckin’ A yeah. I don’t know a single person who thought anything less than a minimum of two feature-length films would do the book justice.Anybody upset about it being just the first part, is either full of shit, or setting a completely unrealistic standard for the film to live up to, because they would’ve been at least as disappointed by any attempt to tell the whole story in a single go.
I agreed with you before the movie came out. And then it turned out to be such a dull slog that I think the film could only have been improved by squeezing the whole book into one feature and just burning through plot.
Well the book ain’t exactly blockbuster material. 🤨 A ‘slog’ is pretty much the correct pace for taking in everything. The determining factor for whether it’s dull or delight is whether the content is your particular jam. This adaptation of Dune is very clearly intended to be pervert-grade material meant almost solely for the enjoyment of Dune nerds.Sorry, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A ‘slog’ is pretty much the correct pace for taking in everything.But my point is that they managed to make it feel like nothing was happening. “Slog” by definition is never the right pace. If the argument is that there’s just too much plot to fit into one movie, why am I sitting there waiting through 80% of the film’s run-time for something, anything, interesting to happen.
I think you’re approaching this as some who loves Dune, and is eager to see it on screen. You’re asking what the best way was to bring Dune, a difficult movie to film, to the screen. But critics and the audience are not required to come in with those preexisting beliefs. If you say, “Look, Dune was never going to work as a single movie,” it’s fair to ask why then someone made a Dune movie.
I think it’s silly to get to nit picky, like I’m not gonna get too bent out of shape about it BUT if we are strictly judging how good an artist/writer “adapted” something that previously existed to the big screen, you would think that exercise includes the beginning, middle, and end of the source material. CODA, Drive My Car, The Lost Daughter, and The Power of the Dog, while making a range of changes to adapt the majority of the story. In that sense I feel like The Tragedy of Macbeth, West Side Story, Cyrano, & Nightmare Alley —- All of which have been adapted in the past, were at-least attempting to put their own spin on the complete story. Also, as someone who really enjoys Dune the book, I do think Denis, as he normally does was trying to create more of a vibe then hitting each story beat from the book hard, in fact they added scenes that played into vibe over narrative. Which I thought really worked, especially for the 2nd half, but I could easily see someone being confused about a number of things (Bene Gesserit & The Prophecy, among a lot of other things). So while I’m really excited for the 2nd part, I don’t think it was one of the BEST SCREENPLAYS of the year.
I think it’s reasonable for critics to expect that a movie will work, on a fundamental level. If it doesn’t work, it’s no answer to say that the movie will work once you see some promised future part, which will come out years from now, or would work if you understood the book. That doesn’t have to mean that the movie’s story must be absolutely complete. The Godfather, for example, certainly benefits from the expansion of the story that comes from its sequel. But if the Godfather ended, say, midway through Michael’s time in Italy, that would be a valid criticism, and it wouldn’t resolve the problem to say that Godfather II was coming at some unspecified future date, or that everyone should just have read Mario Puzo’s book before seeing the movie anyway.I haven’t seen Dune yet (though I want to). I hope it has a satisfying ending that feels like an ending. That does not have to mean it wraps up all or even most of its storylines, but I think it will be disappointing if it only feels like it’s in service of some broader project, not a satisfying piece that can be evaluated on its own.
It does not. I love the movie, the visuals are superb, if slightly undersaturated, the performances are all stellar, and the technology and special effects are stunning. But it… just ends. So that is somewhat of a failure of adaptation. When Fellowship of the Ring ended, you knew there was more story, but major character arcs had been fully explored. Which again, is not to say that Dune isn’t a major achievement. But especially since the second movie had yet to be greenlit, I would have added just one more scene to wrap it up better. It was long already, but I still wanted more time in that world.
Right, and complaining that the movie couldn’t have been told in a single movie with a satisfying ending is not, I think, a convincing response to that problem. It’s like making a newspaper comic strip of the novel Ulysses, and responding to criticism by saying that translating the book to a comic strip was an impossible thing to do. Like, no one put a gun to your head and made you do that thing.I think fans of Dune would be better off acknowledging the criticism. It’s certainly fair to say, “That is a weakness of the movie, but the way they did it was the best of several undesirable options for making the book work as a movie, and overall it’s good.” Even very good films often have elements that are less than ideal.
I really wanted “Zola” to get Best Adapted Screenplay, but the Academy always shuns sex-work in films unless it’s highly sanitized and cliche. That’s why “Hustlers” and Jennifer Lopez wasn’t recognized their year.
Not quite sure what Katie and Alex saw in Zola. I felt similarly about Zola and House of Gucci. Both films wanted to be a fun romp with a playful tone, but neither had the right plot to support that kind of tone. I found both to be more boring than fun.
I don’t think Zola was meant to be fun at all. It was supposed to be traumatic under a kind of sickly sweet veneer.
You don’t include all the tweet sounds and other stylistic quirks if you’re not attempting to make a playful film. Though you’re right that it’s supposed to be traumatic as well. Neither aspect really worked for me, sadly. Most of the film is just the protagonist sitting or standing around watching other people do things. I get why people were drawn to it as a tweet thread, but the story isn’t compelling enough to support a 90 minute film.
It reminded me of weekends where you end up in a drug pick up gone bad (in recovery now), and I think it captured the absurd and often terrifying reality of that world. Which is a world a lot of sex workers exist in on the regular. There’s moments of levity, but a lot of it is just one fucked up thing to the next.
I liked Zola up until it ended. I recall the tweets that birthed it, and I thought they had more narrative resolution than the movie wound up with.
I’m glad you remembered the car-fornicating ladies. I’d also add Pig and Nic Cage’s performance. Also Passing in picture, director, and the lead actors.
Pig was totally robbed. Cage gave a career-great performance.
Best Supporting Actress for Cate Blanchett in Nightmare Alley should have been a given. Ah, well.
I was surprised to see it get a Best Pic nod since I figured it was mostly being ignored after bombing/being dumped into a busy box office season with confusing promotion. But yeah, if they were gonna nominate it I don’t see why Blanchett wouldn’t be in there (unless voters got split between her and Toni Colette.)
Slide #11 should be PIG and Cage’s performance in same.
It absolutely baffles me that it got overlooked.
Titane was last year? Jeez, time really is a flat circle, isn’t it?
The Academy cannot be trusted as an authority of the art of filmmaking if they cannot recognize the mastery of nearly every aspect of Anderson’s film.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: democracy simply doesn’t work.
agreed about Zola.I couldn’t get into Titane, and I feel like a bad movie watcher since it seems so well loved 🙁
A Hero was robbed. I will always stan for Asghar Farhadi.
Doesn’t The French Dispatch look like all of his other films?
Yes and no
A Hero is the best International movie of the past 5 years. I do not understand the reason for not being nominated by the academy!?
SNUB: Pig. Anything.
Seriously. It was easily Best Picture material, was an amazing directorial debut, and Nic Cage gave a career-great performance. It was robbed. so. much.
Weird list. Dune was a lock in Adapted Screenplay. The surprise is the Best Director miss for Villeneuve.Also, Titane didn’t even make the shortlist for International Feature.
Dune was way overrated. I didn’t find anything that really stood out as a film, even in comparison to David Lynch’s Dune, other than being much easier to understand but everything about it was so sterile and subdued that it was altogether forgettable. It had no character or identity unless you count sterile and subdued as such.Even the special effects didn’t particularly blow me away.
It was a tedious slog without any of the visual inventiveness of the Lynch version, which was a total mess but a fun one. Didn’t find any joy in the new one.
Of the speculative fiction movies this year, a thought The Green Knight did a much better job of feeling like a fresh take on an old story with some fine visual weirdness. Dune basically seemed to hit on a lot of the “space, but with magic powers and a chosen one” stuff that Star Wars already does. I realize that that’s probably not fair given the age of the source material, and that SW probably stole more from Dune than vice versa, but that doesn’t stop the movie from feeling kinda samey.
THE GREEN KNIGHT
Is this finally a site that has to only do slideshows for views?
So how do I actually read read this article or comment section without the page skipping all over the place because of constantly loading ads? Your site is absolute dogshit.
I loved Zola, but Riley Keough’s performance was practically a caricature. I think that worked, because it was Zola’s perspective, but as a performance it wasn’t deeply layered or nuanced. I’m surprised to see so little love for Taylour Paige in the title role though, I thought she was phenomenally charismatic as the centre of the storm, playing the most real-seeming person in a cast of otherwise over-the-top characters. She and Colman Domingo did great work bouncing off each other too, at times quietly expressing solidarity, and then at others touching on incredibly complicated power differentials of being African-American versus a recent black immigrant; a black woman in America versus a black man; sex worker versus wannabe pimp; etc.
Biggest Surprise Don’t Look Up gettinga Best Picture nod. A really bad movie.
French Dispatch and Jeffrey Wright, Nic Cage for Pig, get rid of Don’t Look Up and West Side for best picture
You want snubs? There’s an *entire category* that is still waiting to appear. And you’ll have to agree that showing the nominees will make the whole dang show worth watching…..“And the nominees for Best Stunt Work are….”https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsjr5KYtrL2QUPLLMFhGsgkPqOSFSln18
No Best Actor nod for Udo Keir in Swan Song? A snub of epic proportions.
The biggest snub for me was The Green Knight failing to get nominated for well… anything. Not even a production design or technical award.
Sorry, but you’re nasty looking mascot for gen Z dread Alana Haim isn’t going to come close to winning.