For a brief moment, Amy Adams’ name was listed amongst the best actress nominees for the 2017 Oscars.
But sadly for her, and her legion of fans, it was simply a typo.
Soon, #NoAmyAdams was trending on Twitter.
« How could she not be nominated for Oscar?  » asked one. Another wrote: « Ugh they did not just snub Amy Adams.  »
So why was it such a surprise the star failed to pick up a nomination, either for her role in best picture nominee Arrival, or for her other Oscar contender, Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals?
Denis Villeneuve, director of the sci-fi film that sees Adams’ linguist character Louise Banks attempt to speak to aliens, is no doubt pleased it is up for best picture.
But he could not hide his sadness the star missed out.
« This is the big disappointment, » Villeneuve told US media. « I’m deeply disappointed for Amy.
« She was the soul of this movie. For me, it was a given! She had the movie on her shoulders, she’s the one who made it happen.
« It’s a strange feeling to celebrate and feel sad at the same time.  »
Film critics were unanimous in their praise of Adams in Arrival.
The New York Times said : « By turns inviting and opaque, Ms Adams turns softness and quiet into heroic qualities, keeping her voice low, modulated, and using stillness to draw you near.  »
The Los Angeles Times agreed : « Arrival is really Adams’s film, a showcase for her ability to quietly and effectively meld intelligence, empathy and reserve.  »
The Telegraph said : « Adams is one of the best actresses Hollywood has.  » And it praised « the supreme subtlety and screwed-down focus of her work » in the film.
The film topped the UK box office in November after taking £2.9m on its opening weekend – and it’s received such a popularity boost in awards season that it’s heading back to US cinemas with extra footage.
« Arrival is one awesome film. Must watch. Brilliant acting by Amy Adams, » Arvind Ramanathan tweeted last month.
Anna Escurriola agreed, writing : « Arrival is extraordinary and the acting of Amy Adams is superb. When I see movies like this I love cinema even more.  »
Writing after the Oscar nominations had been announced, Christian Kelly said : « I must say, it is disappointing to not see Amy Adams nominated for Arrival. She was fantastic and drove the story beautifully.  »
Adams has quietly amassed an impressive list of acclaimed screen roles which has seen her nominated for Oscars five times in just over a decade.
She was most recently recognised for playing Sydney Prosser in American Hustle, being nominated for best actress in 2014.
She also picked up best supporting actress nods in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2013 for roles in Junebug, Doubt, The Fighter and The Master.
The Academy sometimes likes to reward people who’ve been waiting for a while for a trophy. Leonardo DiCaprio finally won best actor for The Revenant last year after campaigning by fans in his repeated nominations for other roles.
But Adams is yet to pick up the elusive trophy.
Arrival picked up a handful of nominations for this year’s Oscars, with her other big film Nocturnal Animals scoring one. But did that split the vote and scupper her chance of success? It could well have done.
Other actresses who have been nominated this year include Emma Stone and Natalie Portman – for La Land and Jackie respectively.
Their performances in those films have been widely praised and are the only roles both actresses have been associated with this awards season.
By appearing in two critically-acclaimed movies near the Oscars, Adams may well have scuppered her own chances of a nomination, with Academy voters splitting their nominations between them.
Astonishingly, Adams has received best actress nominations for her part in Arrival at 33 other film awards so far this season – and already won five of them.
Among those recognising her include the Golden Globes, Bafta, London Critics Circle and Screen Actors Guild. They can’t all be wrong can they?
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The least surprising Academy Award nominations in recent memory were announced today in Los Angeles. The good news is that the OscarsSoWhite controversy is behind us, at least for this year. What we have in its place is OscarsSoPredictable. In its incestuous, self-regarding way, Hollywood loves Hollywood stories, which is why La Land has netted so many nominations – 14 in total, equalling the record shared by Titanic and All About Eve – and why it will score big on the night. It’s a diverting but shallow movie, reassuringly uncontroversial, which has coasted to glory on a wave of goodwill that will culminate at the Oscars ceremony.
There were a handful of surprises. A Best Actress nomination for Ruth Negga, for her quiet, understated performance as a black woman imprisoned for marrying a white man in 1950s Virginia in Loving , is very welcome. It is good also to see Mica Levi nominated for her adventurous score for Jackie and Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou in the running for their screenplay for The Lobster.
More controversially, Mel Gibson is a contender for Best Director for his violent war movie Hacksaw Ridge , which indicates that the industry has decided to forgive the drunken antisemitic outbursts, which seemed at one point to have ended his career for good.
But La Land is up for all the biggies – Best Picture, Best Director (Damian Chazelle), Best Actor (Ryan Gosling), Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Original Screenplay (Chazelle). It could feasibly win them all except for Best Actor. I had hoped that the Best Actress award would go to Natalie Portman, who is brilliant as Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie , but a clued-up colleague assured me recently that the La love is likely to dominate in that category too. Imagine that! All those trophies going to a candyfloss fantasy which tickles the eye but leaves the brain untroubled. La Land? Looks like more like Cloud-cuckoo-land to me.
Chazelle’s movie isn’t a Best Picture by any stretch of the imagination. But then Best Pictures so rarely are. The King’s Speech instead of The Social Network? My Fair Lady rather than Dr Strangelove? Argo over Amour? Argo over anything, come to that? That film, which won in 2013, was another beneficiary of the tendency for Academy voters to favour movies about their own kind, their own world. Movie-movies. (See also: Birdman , the 2015 winner.) That tendency will give La Land an extra push.
Its closest competitor, which still isn’t that close, will be Kenneth Lonergan’s intense drama Manchester By the Sea. Casey Affleck has the Best Actor prize sewn up for his brooding, minimalist turn as a grieving handyman saddled with his teenage nephew. It’s a deserving performance and Affleck must already be thinking about where in the house he’s going to put his statuette. At last count, he’d already scooped 16 awards for this film alone. I reckon someone’s going to be putting up a new shelf. A whole den or anteroom may be in order.
Another dead cert is Viola Davis for Best Supporting Actress in Fences , directed by her co-star Denzel Washington, which opens in the UK on 10 February.
Mahershala Ali should take the Best Supporting Actor award for playing the drug dealer who becomes a surprisingly tender mentor to a young Miami boy in Moonlight (out here on 17 February). Ali’s chief rival will be Jeff Bridges, who gives one of those grizzled-but-affectionate veteran performances as a good-hearted sheriff in Hell and High Water. Moonlight is to my mind one of the few genuinely great titles vying for Best Picture and would have been my choice by miles – except that I don’t have a vote.
That said, I did have a vote in the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards , which were announced last weekend. We made some choices of which I heartily approve, such as naming I, Daniel Blake Best British/Irish Film and giving the Best Actress award to Isabelle Huppert for Things to Come. She is up for an Oscar in that category for a very different film, Paul Verhoeven’s thriller Elle.
Then again, we also handed our Best Film prize to La Land. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. Unless you’re La Land , that is, in which case it’s win-win all the way.
The 89th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on 26 February.
I wanted to like Apple Tree Yard (Sundays, 9pm), the BBC’s four-part adaptation of Louise Doughty’s bestselling novel (which, incidentally, I haven’t read). First, I have the highest regard for its writer, Amanda Coe, whose own novel Getting Colder I strongly recommend for its emotional veracity. Second, I am, for perfectly obvious reasons, all in favour of dramas involving smart, middle-aged heroines who have lots of unbridled sex – even if I would draw the line at a quickie in a House of Commons broom cupboard, irrespective of whether or not the suffragette Emily Davison once hid herself there (the fear of being interrupted by Nicholas Soames leading his constituents on a tour would seem to me to put the breaks on the full orgasmic experience). But usually, to like something, you have to believe it – and I didn’t believe this hokum at all.
Yvonne Carmichael (Emily Watson) is a “top” geneticist with two adult children, one of whom will shortly make her a granny, and an academic husband, Gary (Mark Bonnar), who may or may not be sleeping with his research assistant. Over at the Commons, having given some not very convincing-sounding scientific evidence to a select committee, she meets a nameless man with a cocky manner and good hair (Ben Chaplin), and moments later they’re at it, in the aforementioned cupboard. Is this a one-off? No. But neither is it an affair, exactly. How can it be, when she knows nothing whatsoever about him, save that he is weirdly knowledgeable when it comes to CCTV cameras? (Because of this, she deduces that he is a spook, rather than just someone who works for, say, Chubb.) Mostly their relationship seems to be a game of sexual chicken – and one that we already know won’t end well (in an opening scene, we saw Carmichael in a prison van).
Look, location is one thing. Friskiness does occasionally occur in pub loos. I know this because I used to clean one. If she wants to whip off her knickers while he gets in the Chardonnays that’s fine by me: I’ll shove my disbelief in her handbag alongside them. But the nature of this couple’s attraction for one another was, from the outset, entirely obscure, a problem that is exacerbated by there being no chemistry between Chaplin and Watson. Their talk, like most sex talk, is banal, and when it’s not banal it’s plain silly. “Sex with you is like being eaten by a wolf,” Carmichael wrote in one of her middle-of-the-night sessions at her computer. What does this even mean? Ow-ow-ooooowww! Ordinarily, I might be tempted, at this point, to say something feminist about the dubious role rape looks likely to play in Apple Tree Yard ’s creaking, listing plot. Unfortunately, laughter is the enemy not only of hot sex, but of a certain kind of anger, too.
What to say about the temazepam haze that was Donald Trump’s inauguration (21 January)? They feel so distant now, the robot movements of the weirdly gloved Melania, the stretched grins of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, whose zombie rendition of “America the Beautiful” might as well have been a jingle for Baja Blast Mountain Dew. And yet I’m the polar opposite of tranquillised. I will be haunted by Kellyanne Conway’s terrifying drum majorette outfit for the rest of my life. In the small hours, as I fight insomnia and doom, it is Barron Trump’s inability to meet his father’s eye that will power my panic attacks.
Technically, we have reason to believe that Donald Trump is a human being: his stertorous breathing hints strongly at lungs, nasal passages and other corporeal actualities. But in my imagining he is the creation of a children’s entertainer who set out to make an orange balloon dog, only to keep blowing and blowing until. . aaaah! Take heart, then, dear readers. Some balloons, rudely punctured, go with a bang. Others, air leaking slowly, end with a whimper. Either way, they do not last for ever. As my favourite Methodist, Hillary Clinton, doubtless tells herself every time she heads out into the woods at Chappaqua, this too shall pass. Meanwhile, in the months ahead, we must keep a good thought in our heads, and a metaphorical pin always in our hands.

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