...especially if we are expecting something really freaking stupid to happen. More on that in a sec.
Here we are in 2025, and it turns out I again forgot to blog for the rest of last year after the Oscars ended. Oops! Yes, #IAmVeryBusy but that's really no excuse. Ah well, that said, we're back with another year's nominations and it is time to again keep a little online diary. Let's go!
This year we once again have a situation where it's easy to complete a whooooole bunch of categories by simply seeing a handful of films. Look at these numbers: the excellent films Conclave and A Complete Unknown each have 8 nominations, the wonderful Wicked and the brutal The Brutalist (at least its honest in its title) each have 10, and the ridiculous Emilia Pérez led the pack with 13. By the way, in case you were wondering if that necessarily means that last one is a good movie, please don't be so naive. Have I taught you nothing about the Oscars over the years?
Anyway: how did I do on Oscar noms day?
I don't think anyone is actually reading this here and now, but for the historical record for when my gifts and wisdom are finally realized, let me note that we are in the midst of a tragedy of wildfires in Los Angeles. The worst things about this are of course, the loss of so many innocent animal lives - animals who had no option to escape their burning domestic or wild homes in the fires' paths - and the ongoing destruction and seeming inability to just make the fires stop. Among the totally inconsequential in the scheme of things effects of the fires was the postponement of the Oscar nominations. That meant that my long-prepared day off work Friday, January 17 was unnecessary, so I did log on and work a bit that morning, and then went to The Brutalist, or as I like to think of it, The Brutal-est, that afternoon. I thought, hmmm, with the postponement of the announcement, I might be able to see all the likely Best Picture contenders before Noms Day! I had already, at that point, seen Wicked, Conclave, Anora, A Complete Unknown, and Sing Sing. I thought, if I can see The Substance, Emilia Pérez, Nickel Boys, and Dune: Part Two in the next few days, I might be there -- but September 5 might be in there instead of Sing Sing -- nonetheless, I should try... I did end up seeing three of those in time, not Nickel Boys yet, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered, because I'm Still Here got a Best Pic nom instead of either of those two S-es and I wasn't able to see that before nominations day at any rate.
That said, as of nominations announcement morning, I already had three completed categories! Thanks to those aforementioned films getting five billion nods apiece, I had Directing, Supporting Actress, and Editing already complete, and I shall blog about those in the next few days. Then, on the evening of new-Nominations-Day Thursday January 23, I headed to the theatre down the street and saw Nosferatu (so much yikes!), thus completing two more categories. Five complete, and I hadn't even written a blog entry! What a year.
But this post is for what I think of the nominations overall. Here's what I think:
- It is definitely now A Thing to have an international film (if you will) in the ten Best Picture nominations. This year, we get two, sort of. I'm Still Here is Brazilian and Emilia Pérez is (a f*cking mess but) sort of French although about "Mexico." Those both got nominated in both the Best Picture and International Feature Film categories. All I want is for them to both lose International Film and have that prize go to the marvelous Flow, which is about a cat!, and which is also nominated in Animated, another thing that we have seen happen in recent years -- International + Animated, International + Documentary, etc.
- A while back, Angelina Jolie had a lot of buzz for playing Maria Callas. After seeing the film, I thought she deserved a nomination for digging way deep and playing a really, deeply messed up individual at a really, deeply fraught time at the end of her life. Then her buzz faded, but on nominations morning when they announced Maria in the Cinematography category I perked up: Would this mean Angelina was in?! Alas, no.
- Instead, the five Lead Actress nominees were more or less what we thought, even Fernanda Torres for I'm Still Here who had looked more and more sure since her Golden Globes win. She joins other GGlobes winner Demi Moore, whose buzz is building, shoo-ins Mikey Madison and Cynthia Erivo, and the first man to be nominated for Lead Actress, Mr. Juan Carlos Gascon (credited here as "K@rla S0fia" Gascon). Why is a man nominated for Lead Actress, you ask? Well, it's because we as a society have jumped the shark and decided that in public discourse, professions, politics, education, and a whole bunch of other places, men can pretend to be women and women can pretend to be men and the meanings of words don't matter because being a man or a woman isn't about being male or female anymore, silly! It's all about the transgender joy! So, that's really dumb - I mean, really really dumb, as I have elsewhere pointed out - but we knew this was coming, ever since Emilia Pérez did its thing at Cannes. Is it the worst thing the Oscar nominations have ever done? I mean - well, no. But it is certainly among the top two or three if not the number one absolute dumbest. Gascon is a man pretending to be a woman in real life, and in the film plays a man who "changes" into a woman (again: note, this does not really happen, in real life, ever). Interestingly, this isn't even the reason why the film is terrible. You can make a great film about all kinds of stupid shit, but that is not what Emilia Pérez is. It's a hot mess.
- Do we have category fraud this year? Why, yes, of course we do! This is the Oscars! In Supporting Actor, co-star of A Real Pain Kieran Culkin is nominated, and in Supporting Actress, we have not one but TWO category frauds, Zoe Saldana in the mess of Emilia Pérez and Ariana Grande in Wicked. And surprise surprise that they are the two most likely to win, according to pundits. Being on screen for the entire film and even more than the stars can do wonders for your chances of winning Supporting Actress! Wheeeee, category fraud!
- Were you worried about Diane Warren getting another Original Song nomination? Again, have I taught you nothing? She wrote "The Journey" for The Six Triple Eight and secured her spot. Goooo, Diane! We'll talk more about that when I complete that category.
Well, we have a little over a month, and I have only 24 movies to see (if you count each set of shorts as "a movie" - otherwise I have 21 features and 15 shorts), so there will be time to do this easily, even for those of us who #AreVeryBusy.
How was your Oscar nominations morning? What was your favorite nomination? How is your Awards Season going? Which films have you seen? What do you love and hate?
(What, I can ask questions to the Void. It's totally allowed.)
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