Winners: Roma! Black Panther! Foreign films! Losers: A Star Is Born! Emily Blunt! Mister Rogers!
One of the weirdest Oscar seasons in recent history continues thanks to a weird list of Oscar nominations, one filled with great movies but also shocking snubs and heartening surprises.
Roma and The Favourite are at the top of the heap, with 10 nominations each; Vice and A Star Is Born are in second place with eight apiece. Black Panther, the first superhero movie ever nominated for Best Picture, is in third with seven.
But dig further down into the list and you’ll find some odd things going on in this oddest of awards seasons. They include a surefire documentary winner not even being nominated, the continued mistreatment of Emily Blunt, and the surprisingly soft total for A Star Is Born. Read on for more on all these snubs and surprises, and the seven winners and five losers from the 2019 Oscar nominations.
Roma came away from the nominations as one of the big winners, tying The Favourite with 10 nominations. It picked up two nominations for its actresses (lead actress Yalitza Aparicio and supporting actress Marina de Tavira), three for Alfonso Cuarón (Directing, Original Screenplay, and Cinematography), three technical nominations (Production Design, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing), Best Foreign Feature (which goes to Mexico), and Best Picture.
That’s a lot of nominations for any movie. (The record for most nominations is 14, held by 1950’s All About Eve, 1997’s Titanic and 2016’s La Land .) But it’s especially exciting for Cuarón — who is the first filmmaker to be nominated for directing and cinematography in the same year — and for Netflix, which picked up the film late in the production process, poured money into its For Your Consideration campaign, and turned it into the streaming giant’s first Best Picture nomination. And for a slow, black-and-white, foreign-language film with no bankable names, that’s especially impressive.
And it capped off a successful day for Netflix: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs also picked up three nominations (Adapted Screenplay for the Coen brothers, Original Song, and Costume Design). So no matter what happens in a month at the ceremony, Netflix has proven it can draw critical plaudits and Academy attention to a film — and an unlikely one, at that.
Before the 2019 Oscars, Spike Lee was an Oscar nominee. Of course he was an Oscar nominee; he’s one of the most significant directors in American film history, the guy who made Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X and Inside Man and 25th Hour, and, honestly, insert your Spike Lee favorite of choice here. (Shoutout to the little-seen 2000 movie Bamboozled!)
But despite his tremendous career, Lee has been nominated just twice — in 1990 for his Do the Right Thing screenplay and in 1999 for his documentary 4 Little Girls . (He received an honorary award in 2016.) You might notice that neither of those nominations is in the Directing category, nor have any of his films been nominated for Best Picture. Despite Lee’s storied career, he has been one of the foremost victims of the Academy’s lack of diversity over the past several decades.
Until now, that is. With BlacKkKlansman, Lee added three more nominations to his shelf, for Adapted Screenplay, Directing, and Picture, and the movie managed three other nominations as well (for its score, its editing, and supporting actor Adam Driver). The movie is very loosely based on the true story of a 1970s Colorado policeman who went undercover with the Ku Klux Klan by calling its members on the phone to win their trust, then undertaking an elaborate sting with a white man in the department (Driver’s character) who starts attending in-person Klan meetups.
The movie was critically acclaimed and a mild box office hit, and its ending, which ties the racism of the past to the racism of the present, gives what can be an otherwise fun genre story an added level of oomph.
But even within the confines of the cop movie, Lee is asking questions about onscreen representation, the relationship between black people and the police, and the roles of racism within all American institutions. BlacKkKlansman has its flaws, and it might not be Lee’s best movie ever, but a lot of people win long-overdue Oscars for what isn’t their best movie ever.
Black Panther already won 2018: It was the highest-grossing film of the year, widely beloved and critically praised, and it’s had a discernible cultural impact.
But its Oscar nominations solidify its legacy because it’s the now first superhero film to ever be nominated for Best Picture (something even The Dark Knight couldn’t pull off, despite its eight nominations in 2009).
Black Panther netted seven nominations total including technical and musical nominations. That’s a game changer for the Academy, and if it wins Best Picture, it will broaden the definition of what an “Oscar movie” could be, yet again.
Poor Emily Blunt! Despite coming close numerous times (especially for 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, 2014’s Into the Woods, and 2015’s The Girl on the Train), and despite always being a damn delight every time she appears onscreen, and despite being one half of Hollywood’s new favorite couple (along with her husband, actor and director John Krasinski), she’s still not an Oscar nominee.
This was supposed to be her year, too! Not only was she Mary Poppins in the Christmastime hit Mary Poppins Returns, but she garnered unexpected heat for her badass work in the spring horror hit A Quiet Place, a movie in which she somehow makes it plausible that she could give birth without making a peep (the better to hide from the ultra-sensitive-to-sound monsters that stalk the movie’s setting). In fact, in December, she received two nominations from the Screen Actors Guild — lead for Mary Poppins and supporting for A Quiet Place. Surely one of those would translate to her first Oscar nod.
Nope! Instead, the women of Roma seemed to push Blunt out of both categories, leaving her once again on the outside looking in. We could speculate as to whether Blunt ended up being her own worst competition, since many Oscar voters may have voted for her performance in A Quiet Place in the Lead Actress category as well, and that would be appropriate in a weird way.
