The Oscars Nominations Were Announced Overnight: Here Are The Biggest Talking Points

Congratulations to The Academy for highlighting some of their very worst tendencies, and getting #OscarsSoWhite trending on Twitter almost immediately.

by Glenn Dunks 16 January 2015

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Step right up! Step right up! It’s the annual circus that is the Academy Awards. A circus where it would seem women and people of colour are not welcome outside of their preordained corners and tokenistic pats on the back. A circus where movies about complicated and complex men trump those about crazed bitch women (hello sarcasm).

A circus where a biopic (perhaps the Oscars’ favourite genre of all) about a great, iconic American leader can get a Best Picture nomination, and nearly nothing else.

“SELMA? One of the best pics of the year. But the directing, script, all the acting, & cinematography? Meh. Nice song, though.”

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 15, 2015

Congratulations to The Academy for highlighting some of their very worst tendencies. However, despite the plethora of Caucasian penises, the nominations that were announced this morning at 5am Los Angeles time (roughly midnight in Australia) were… okay. Catch up on the full roster of nominees at the end of this article — many of them are great and worthy some of them less so — but first, let’s take a look at some of the big talking points.

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Gone Girls

Sometimes it feels like Oscar stats were invented to shame Hollywood, and yet they never, ever learn. One of this year’s most damning is that all 15 nominees for screenplay across two categories are men. Every. Last. One.

Despite high profile writing wins in the past for the likes of Callie Khourie and Thelma & Louise (1991) or Diablo Cody and Juno (2007), female screenwriters continue to struggle. Ava DuVernay could have been the first African American woman ever nominated for Best Director, but she wasn’t. Angelina Jolie could have been only the fifth woman ever nominated in that same category, but she wasn’t. Nicole Perlman could have been the first woman ever nominated for writing a comic book screenplay for Guardians of the Galaxy, but she wasn’t.

Maybe it just feels more obvious this year because such heavily female-focused films like Gone Girl, Selma, Into the Woods, and Beyond the Lights all received disappointing nomination tallies – and that’s without mentioning women-directed films like Belle, The Babadook, and Obvious Child, that got zilch – but it really did feel like women were being kept very much in their place this year.

Only one of the eight Best Picture nominees has a leading female performance, and even Felicity Jones is only there because The Theory of Everything is about brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking. Wild, about a severed mother-daughter relationship from the director of three-time Oscar winner Dallas Buyers Club, received only two acting nominations.

They clearly (and wrongly) prefer the McConaissance to the Reesurgence.

As always, the costume, production design, and documentary categories were kind to films by and about women, but as reported by Joe Reid of The Atlantic, the correlation between Best Actress nominees and the rest of the categories is remarkably paltry. Indiewire labelled it “a dark day for women in Hollywood”, and for one of the lowest correlations ever between Best Picture nominees and Best Actress.

Most shocking of all was that author-cum-screenwriter Gillian Flynn wasn’t nominated for her blockbuster adaptation of Gone Girl. But, hey, you know, it’s not like Graham Moore’s adaptation of an Alan Turing biography — which scored eight nominations — left out all the interesting parts about his sexuality and the tragedy of his early death.

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Boys and Birds in Budapest

This year’s nominations aren’t just predominantly about men; many of them are positively dripping with steroids. Junkee’s Mel Campbell may have thought Whiplash was the best film of the year, but it as well as American Sniper and Foxcatcher are so man-centric that they became off-putting. Furthermore, it was as if by accident that the actresses of Boyhood (Patricia Arquette) and Birdman (Emma Stone and Naomi Watts) became the most memorable parts of their films. As for the polite British biopics The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, they do have prominent female roles — but nominees Keira Knightley and Felicity Jones are given so little to do you’d be forgiven for thinking they weren’t there at all.

Thank heavens then for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, I say. I personally wasn’t as sold on the film as seemingly everyone else in the world, but any day in which a weird, super-stylish original film can snag nine nominations is a good day. Would you believe that this is the first time Anderson has been nominated for Best Director? Or that no other Anderson film has ever been nominated for its sets, costumes or make-up? Crazy, but true.

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The Race Card

The Oscars love biopics. Perhaps even more, they love actors portraying famous people. They love nothing more than watching actors slathering their faces in make-up to look more like somebody else, and mimicking their cadences. They have been nominating these actors for as long as the awards have been around (87 years!); this year brought Foxcatcher (Steve Carell as homicidal philanthropist John Du Pont), The Imitation Game (Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing), and The Theory of Everything (Eddie Redmayne contorting into the role of Stephen Hawking).

Apparently, however, that love of films about important, famous, and note-worthy people doesn’t extend to Martin Luther King, or films that hold necessary mirrors up to society.

Maybe next year the DGA will recognize a black, woman-directed studio masterpiece on Dr. King…another one along any minute, right? — Stacie Passon (@StaciePasson) January 14, 2015

Some blamed Selma’s bad Oscar performance on the film being released too late, and not sending enough DVD screeners to lazy voters who won’t leave their house in the middle of the US winter to see the most acclaimed films of the year.

Others have blamed smear campaigns and games of Chinese Whispers by rival studios, and other parties with vested interest in its failure who accused the film of inaccurate portrayals, and fudging history.

Meanwhile, in the real world, The Academy have given their coveted Best Picture prize to A Beautiful Mind (2001), which was hardly unimpeachable over its portrayal of mathematician John Nash; and Braveheart, which, amongst many other historical inaccuracies…

I keep hearing that charges of inaccuracy are going to hurt SELMA with Oscar voters. Meanwhile, BRAVEHEART couldn’t even get the kilts right

— Michael Cusumano (@SeriousFilm) January 14, 2015

It’s somewhat ironic then that 2015 will stand as the whitest set of nominees in 20 years since – well wouldn’t you know – Braveheart won five statues. David Oyelowo was not nominated for playing King, which is rather ironic considering they nominated Bradley Cooper for his role as a real-life racist, thuggish navy seal in Clint Eastwood’s right wing cause célèbre American Sniper. It’s his third nomination in three years. Meanwhile, the extremely talented Gugu Mbatha-Raw was barely a blip on the award season radar despite great performances in Belle and Beyond the Lights (both directed by women of colour, just by the way).

Social media has reacted in kind to the results and started the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag on Twitter.

#OscarsSoWhite that the statue counts as a Person Of Color. — Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) January 15, 2015

#OscarsSoWhite They snubbed “Gone Girl” bc they thought the title was actually black slang.

— skittles. (@chasemylovex) January 15, 2015

#OscarsSoWhite we’ll see a lot of “Je Suis Charlie” buttons on the red carpet, but no #BlackLivesMatter — April (@ReignOfApril) January 15, 2015

As everyone chimes in, it’s worth remembering that even Big Hero 6, a nominee for animated film, has central Asian characters that look suspiciously white-skinned. Jokes about Iggy Azalea and the Oscar’s reputation as being an old white man’s country club retreat abound, with Canadian comedian DeAnne Smith making perhaps the most alarmingly prescient prediction of them all.

Oscar prediction 2045: Newcomer Kale Haggerty wins Best Actor for his moving portrayal of Darren Wilson in “Ferguson” #OscarsSoWhite

— DeAnne Smith (@DeAnne_Smith) January 15, 2015

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Marion Crashes the Party

Speaking of women, this year’s Best Actress line-up is pretty great. It’s no surprise that Julianne Moore got the nod for playing a college linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease (she will be 0 for 5 if she loses, but everyone expects her to finally win the gold), and the likes of Rosamund Pike for Gone Girl, Reese Witherspoon for Wild, and Felicity Jones for The Theory of Everything were also universally agreed upon as sure-fire contenders.

What people weren’t counting on was Marion Cotillard sweeping in and snatching the fifth slot for her role in the Belgian drama Two Days, One Night, about a woman trying against the odds to fight the stigma of depression and reclaim her job at a factory. Her nomination kicked Jennifer Aniston to the curb for her performance in Cake, a not-very-good movie that David Ehrlich of Slate labeled “one of the very worst films of 2014”, which nonetheless won nominations at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild.

Jennifer Aniston today:

Marion Cotillard today:

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Everything Is Not Awesome for The Lego Movie

Several months back, I wondered into the abyss that is the internet whether The Lego Movie would be too obvious of a commercial for the Lego brand to be nominated by Oscar’s animation branch. Turns out I was right; the best Hollywood cartoon of the year was left behind. Hopefully this doesn’t discourage studios from making strange, over-achieving animations in the future in favour of sequels like the ho-hum How to Train Your Dragon 2.

We can be very happy that tiny foreign animations like Song of the Sea from Ireland and The Tale of Princess Kaguya from Japan found nominations in its place, and that Lego’s catchy-as-all-get-out theme song ‘Everything is Awesome‘ was nominated in the Best Original Song category, against a song written by the man behind the New Radicals’ ‘You Get What You Give’! Don’t feel too bad for directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller: they already have an Oscar statue.

It’s okay. Made my own! pic.twitter.com/kgyu1GRHGR

— philip lord (@philiplord) January 15, 2015

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Oh, Poop!

Not since John Travolta embarrassed himself on last year’s Oscar stage by announcing Idina Menzel as ‘Adele Dazeem‘ has such a ridiculously flubbed name reading caused such a ripple-giggle effect across the internet.

Unfortunately for the usually very regal and composed Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, when announcing the nominees for Best Cinematography, she gave Mr. Turner’s Dick Pope an unexpected and unfortunate name change.

Yes, yes, it’s all very juvenile to snicker at his name being read as “Dick Poop”, but if we as adult humans cannot find something to laugh at amidst the misogyny and the racism then what point is there?

Laura Dern, a wonderful surprise nominee for Wild, was getting in on the fun, too.

Doesn’t that about sum it up? Gotta scoop out the good stuff from within.

The full list of nominees can be read here or below; the 87th Academy Awards will be held on 22 February.

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OSCARS NOMINATIONS 2015:

Best Picture

American Sniper

Birdman

Boyhood

Interstellar

Unbroken

Whiplash

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Best Visual Effects

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Guardians of the Galaxy

Interstellar

X-Men: Days of Future Past