Film

Toni Collette And Paddington Were Robbed: All The Biggest Snubs At The Oscars

Where was Paddington's award?

by Joseph Earp  23 January 2019
Hereditary on Netflix, Toni Collette.

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Being an obsessive Oscars watcher is a little like giving the keys to your car to Prince Philip; you are entrusting something you genuinely care about to an old white man who is almost guaranteed to fuck it up.

Sure, every once in a while you get an exciting year of nominations: the 2018 Oscars race, for example, saw a bevy of instant classics all vying for the top prize. But most of the time, Oscars obsessives are forced to sit back and watch as their favourite films get spurned by an Academy that still to this date skews old, white, and unbearable stuffy.

But as inured to painful surprises as awards nerds might be, the 2019 Oscar nominations are a particularly disappointing bunch. Some of the most exciting films of the last 12 months have been passed over in favour of the kind of awards season piffle that will stop taking up mental real estate in all our minds the second the Oscars are over.

Shit always sucks; this year it sucks more, is what I’m saying. And ’cause it’s sometimes fun in a “I can’t stop picking this scab” kinda way, here are the snubs that really sting.

Toni Collette Was Robbed

Almost exactly a year ago, it looked like that rarest of awards season pleasures was going to unfold: a horror film was going to be nominated for Best Picture. A little film called Hereditary, helmed by a first-time director and starring a mixture of newcomers and character actors, was terrifying critics at Sundance, and the reviews were unanimously excellent.

Before the film had even been picked up by a distributor, an Oscar nomination for Toni Collette’s turn as a mother whose grief slowly curdles into something more sinister seemed inevitable, not to mention at the very least a nod for director Ari Aster.

Academy-baiting ads were dropping over ten months ago, highlighting Collette’s performance as one of the greatest turns in the actress’ career.

The Academy refused to take the bait. Hereditary, miles away one of the best films of last year, failed to pick up a single Oscar nod. We should have been genuinely entertaining the idea that the film might nab Best Picture; instead, it hasn’t even been nominated.

First Reformed Deserved Better

It’s not a good idea to look gift horses in the mouth, particularly during the notoriously shitty awards season, but it’s hard not to feel bitter about the generally short shrift given to Paul Schrader’s masterpiece First Reformed.

Unlike Hereditary, the film did pick up at least one nod, a nomination for Best Original screenplay. Astonishingly, it’s the first ever nomination for Schrader, the screenwriter behind all-time classics like Taxi Driver and American Gigolo. 

So yes, that’s great news and all: but where are all of First Reformed‘s other nods?

Ethan Hawke missed out on Best Actor nomination for his turn as Reverend Toller, a conflicted priest confronted with the realities of the environmental apocalypse.

But, despite what the awards conversation over the last six months would have you believe, First Reformed should have been in contention for a lot more nods than that. If the world were just and fair, it should really have been in the conversation for everything from Best Picture to Best Director to Best Supporting Actress for Amanda Seyfried.

First Reformed is one of the best film of the last ten years. The fact that it got snubbed in favour of pap like Green Book and the directed-by-an-alleged-paedophile monstrosity Bohemian Rhapsody is a crying shame.

A Star Is Born kinda got given the cold shoulder

It sounds strange to suggest that A Star Is Born got ignored when the film was nominated for a bevy of awards, including nods for Lady Gaga and Best Picture. But there’s one snub that practically assures that the film will lose pretty much everything it’s been nominated: Bradley Cooper didn’t pick up a nomination for Best Director.

Given how rare it is for a film to win Best Picture without earning a Best Director nomination (it’s only happened four times in the history of the awards), A Star Is Born has barely any chance of taking out the main prize; Lady Gaga will almost definitely lose to Glenn Close, who has been nominated for her work in The Wife; and Cooper, nominated for Best Actor, stands no chance against Christian Bale’s make-up heavy turn as Dick Cheney in Vice.

So yeah, given not that long ago we were talking about A Star Is Born like it would sweep every category all awards season, these are strange times indeed.

What the fuck happened with Burning?

The Best Foreign Film category is usually where the real exciting stuff goes down. The taste of Oscars voters might skew mainstream when it comes to the big categories, but Best Foreign Film is usually the place where challenging, subversive pictures go to shine.

Not so this year. Burning, a bona fide masterpiece based on a short story by acclaimed author Haruki Murakami, should have won the Best Foreign Film Oscar; instead, it hasn’t even been nominated, passed over in favour of crowd-pleasing nonsense like Cold War. The Oscars are always disappointing; this year they’ve been disappointing in strange, fresh new ways.

Where Was That You Were Never Really Here Energy?

Listen, You Were Never Really Here, a strange, auteur-driven revenge picture from all-time great director Lynne Ramsay was never going to get a Best Picture nomination. It’s too bloody, and it made too little money at the box office to seriously be in contention.

But that thing was custom made for the Best Director category. That’s where the Academy usually lets masters of the form sneak their way in (who can forget Michael Haneke’s surprise nod for Amour?), and You Were Never Really Here was helmed with panache and with skill.

We Shoulda Been Sat Here Talking About Eighth Grade

Eighth Grade is an easy sell for the Oscars: it’s funny, which Academy voters like; it’s got a series of great performances; and its script crackles with light and with wit. It’s the new Ladybird, is what I’m saying, and it should have had the awards trajectory that Ladybird had.

Instead, Eighth Grade has fizzled out this awards season. Elsie Fisher, the film’s young star was robbed; Bo Burnham, its writer and director was robbed; and rather than honouring it with a Best Picture nod, the Academy decided to keep the nominees at eight, rather than the full ten they could have used. Silly!

Where Are My Annihilation Fans At?

Annihilation was never going to be in contention. Netflix, who released the film internationally, didn’t even really campaign for it.

But that’s not a slight against Annihilation; that’s a slight against the Oscars. There is no reason that a smart, difficult, challenging, beautiful film like Annihilation shouldn’t have had a good chance across the board, or at the very least, in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.

It’s good evidence that the Academy’s notorious bias against genre cinema in general and sci-fi in particular hasn’t softened. The Shape Of Water win proves nothing; the Academy can still be horrendously stuffy.

Oscars, You Have Disrespected Paddington Bear; Now You Must Pay

Listen, even if Hugh Grant’s (brilliant) turn in Paddington 2 was too silly for the Academy, 2019 was the perfect time for the Oscars to get over their deeply-entrenched bias, and set up a new category just for Paddington: Best Bear In A Motion Picture.

Instead, they disrespected the most kind, perfect film star of the last ten years. And they disrespected me, personally. I will never forgive them.