If You Want to Have a Staring Contest With the Oscars, You Will Lose: On a Historic Set of Nominations
With several surprising turns, including a shocking six nominations for Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Phantom Thread,’ this year’s Academy Awards field marks a major shift that could portend a new future. Here’s how it happened.
What precisely is the nature of my game? Many people may be asking the same question as Phantom Thread’s Reynolds Woodcock as they puzzle over a historic and fascinating group of Oscar nominees Tuesday morning. By its nature, Oscarology is a fool’s errand, but the late-breaking surge for Paul Thomas Anderson’s lush, poison-spiked period drama about a meticulous couturier and his mysterious new lover has even the sharpest prognosticators surprised. Phantom Thread’s six nominations, including shockers for Best Picture and Best Director, was the loudest possible indicator of a shift in how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences votes. Just four of 32 experts at the predictive awards site Gold Derby tapped Phantom Thread for a Best Picture nomination and not a single one predicted Anderson. (For my sake, I hit on 47 of a possible 58 nomination predictions—whatever you do, do it carefully.) His film is inspired by stately, paranoid dramas of the past, like Rebecca and Suspicion, but it is a disturbingly modern movie, too. It’s keen on obsession and routine, disruption and desperately physical love. It’s patient, funny, and choked by its own atmosphere. It’s an unlikely Academy movie and proof that there is still a great unknowable in the Oscars, a chance for the truly strange.
But there were more momentous—and more significant—nominations than a six-time nominee like Anderson reeling in a surprising round of nods. Let us count the ways. Mudbound cinematographer Rachel Morrison became the first woman nominated in her category in the Oscars’ 90-year history. That film’s writer-director, Dee Rees, was recognized for her screenplay adaptation (with Virgil Williams) of Hillary Jordan’s novel—the first black woman to be nominated in the category. Lady Bird writer-director Greta Gerwig became just the fifth woman nominated for Best Director, ever. Jordan Peele became just the fifth African American nominee in the same category. Timothée Chalamet became the youngest nominee for Best Actor in a Leading Role since Mickey Rooney in 1939’s Babes in Arms. Eighty-eight-year-old Christopher Plummer has a chance to shatter his own record (set six years earlier), after becoming the oldest acting nominee in history. Not to be outdone, 89-year-old James Ivory became the second-oldest nominee in Oscars history, for his screenplay of Call Me by Your Name. And the oldest, born just one week prior, is Faces Places director Agnès Varda, whose film was named among the five Best Documentary entries. Transgender documentarian Yance Ford’s powerful Strong Island was also cited, as was Pakistani American Kumail Nanjiani for The Big Sick’s original screenplay. With Logan’s nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, we officially have our first prestige comic book movie. Hell, Kobe Bryant became the first NBA player to be nominated, for his short film, Dear Basketball. This is an unlikely and astonishing collection of people who will appear on screen before tens of millions of people on March 4.
What does it all mean? There are simple readings and there’s perhaps a more complex subtext. Plainly, the Academy’s voting body, long thought to be old, out of touch, and largely white, is … less old and less white. (Whether it’s less out of touch is a subject better left to my Twitter mentions.) So today we see a significantly more diverse group of nominees. Is the word for this “progress”? Maybe, though applying a word with such import to a pageant makes me wince just a little. But coupling this raft of surprising acknowledgments with the absence of James Franco on the heels of allegations of sexual misconduct feels like … something. A palpitation, or a convulsion.
This is not a turn to the commercial, per se. The nine films nominated for Best Picture combined to earn more than $566 million in the United States—less than Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s domestic box office. But you can feel the future in many of these choices. After being trumped by Amazon last year, Netflix earned four nominations thanks to a strong showing from Mudbound. (Amazon earned just one.) Whether it’s a sign of a streaming reign to come is not yet apparent. Clear the decks for Bright 2 in 2019.
The perceived front-runners in the race, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Shape of Water, feel traditional seen from one angle—auteur-driven, classically composed metaphorical pieces—and completely obtuse and strange seen from another. The fustiest entries, both historical reenactments—Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour and Steven Spielberg’s The Post—are thought to be long shots. The strong showings for Lady Bird and Get Out—a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story and a sociologically-minded horror movie—are thrilling. Both films were financed by smaller production houses—Lady Bird by the ever-strategic and taste-first upstart A24 and Get Out by Jason Blum’s pennywise and producer-savvy Blumhouse (which is girded by distribution from Universal Pictures). That both films have a chance to be competitive, if not outright favored in major categories, is an enormous sea change that has been decades in the making.
During her four-year reign as Academy president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs added more than 1,500 new members to the organization, widening the scope, including more women, minorities, and international members than ever before. Her legacy reverberates Tuesday morning. #OscarsSoWhite was just two years ago. The issues underlined during that protest movement are not resolved—that isn’t how this works. But they feel materially heard, reckoned with. A win for the controversial Three Billboards could feel like two steps back. A win for The Shape of Water could feel like a win for old-fashioned fairy tales. A win for Dunkirk could feel like history repeating itself. A win for Darkest Hour could feel, well, weird. But the Oscars doesn’t live to satisfy idiosyncrasy and it doesn’t flatter personal preference. It’s a crapshoot by design, a jumbled collection of opinions, scattered across dozens of films, countries, performers, technicians, and artisans. Its history is rewritten every year, recast, and reprioritized. One man’s Dance With Wolves is another man’s Goodfellas.
Some of this is all quite obvious, and not everything changes. Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep are nominated again—together they’ve been nominated 30 (!) times. Composer John Williams, 85, is celebrating his 51st (!!!) nomination Tuesday morning, for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. And Wonder Woman did not receive a single nomination, despite a fervid campaign and an exceptional standing among critics and fans. Only so much can change at a time. And we are still 35 voting days and six long weeks away from Jimmy Kimmel’s return to the stage at the Dolby Theatre. That site last year was the setting of the most extraordinary Oscars moment ever, the Moonlight milestone. For director Barry Jenkins and the dozens of people who made that film, that Oscars must have felt like a dream. This year’s feels like a new reality.
