It’s that time of year: award season! This is the time of year that the Grammys, SAG Awards, BAFTAs, and more arrive on our television screens to grant awards to the best of the best, or so they say.
The 94th Academy Awards ceremony will be on March 27th on ABC. Amy Schumer, Regina Hall, and Wanda Sykes will be hosting. This will be the first ceremony in three years that the Oscars will have a host. There will be a full red carpet, so you can expect new photos of your favorite celebrities that night.
The Oscars seems to be trying to combat the #OscarsSoWhite (2015) controversy as shown in who they have chosen to host, and in their nominees. However, many award shows nominate BIPOC actors, directors, producers, and more, but they rarely win. A show like the Oscars makes it a point to nominate them, but when the day of the award show comes it usually ends with a majority of white men taking home the prizes for the films they made. There has been progress, such as wins in the past for Moonlight (2016) and Spike Lee’s recognition for BlacKkKlansman (2018).
The LGBQTIA+ community remains underrepresented both in front and behind the camera in nominations too. There has also been a push to see more female directors and producers nominated as well. This goes for most major award shows to date. It will be interesting to see who wins and how the show will feel different with three women, two of which are women of color, hosting the show.
For this year’s nominations, there has been buzz about the snubs of those who were believed to get nominations. For instance, Lady Gaga did not get nominated for Best Actress for House of Gucci (2021). Jennfier Hudson also did not get a nomination for Best Actress for her nomination in the Arethra Franklin biopic. One other major snub was for the Dune (2021) director, Denis Villeneuve, but the movie is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.
A surprise for a first-time nomination is Kristen Stewart for Best Actress for her role in Spencer (2021), the movie portraying Princess Diana’s life. Another actor who I hope to win in his category is Andrew Garfield for Best Actor. His role in Tick, Tick…Boom! (2021) (and other multiple movies this year) deserve the recognition for the amount of effort and craft he puts into every single one of his roles. He learned to sing for this role, and I think he did a phenomenal job. I hope the Academy recognizes all the work he has done this year, and especially in this film.
One snub that I was not expecting, as well as a majority of movie-goers in general, is the Best Picture snub for Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). The movie is nominated for Best Visual Effects, but it truly deserved more. Marvel Studios put out all the stops to try and get this movie nominated by having it in theaters longer and through heavy promotion during Oscar campaign season. However, the Oscars have a hard time nominating any superhero movie in the main top categories.
This movie represents generations of cinema and brings it all together beautifully. This is Tom Holland’s best Spider-Man performance to date with raw emotion and love for the character at the core of the film. The film has become the third-biggest movie ever at the domestic box office beating Avatar (2009). The movie helped save movie theaters in general, and brought back the collective movie-going and watching experience. When I saw it in theaters, it was a moment I will cherish forever as everyone was cheering and sobbing together. I personally believe that after social distancing and the distress of the pandemic, the movie has brought people back together in a way that has not been done since Avengers: Endgame (2019).
The Oscars typically do not nominate these movies despite how they break box office records, and have the most discussion around them. Many people in Hollywood have spoken out against the Oscars for not nominating it for Best Picture. Jimmy Kimmel, late night host, talked about it on his show. He says, “How did that not get one of the 10 nominations for Best Picture? There were only 11 movies made this year. Forget the fact that the movie made $750 million and is still going. This was a great movie. It wasn’t in the top 10 best movies of the year?” He continued with a question many of us have been wondering all these years: “When did we decide that the Best Picture has to be serious?”.
In my opinion, these movies that do so well in the box office deserve recognition. Because of this, the Oscars should create a category for Best Popular Movie or a category based on the ones that do well in the box office. The exclusion of these films reflects how pretentious Hollywood has gotten in order to deem a movie “Best Picture.” I hope in the years to come we can see these types of movies get the recognition they deserve for the people who make them, and the people who love going to the theater to see them.
Here is the list of the full nominations: