This year's nominations revealed that Hollywood is nowhere near as woke as it likes to think it is, wrote our film expert Brian D. Johnson. Will you still be tuning in tonight?
A homicidal clown, a Mafia hit man, a washed-up actor, a First World War soldier, a 10-year-old Nazi, and a family staging a quietly subversive home invasion. Those are the protagonists driving Hollywood’s annual Grand Prix in the half dozen leading contenders for Best Picture in the Oscar nominations announced Jan. 13—Joker, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, 1917, Jojo Rabbit and Parasite.
While each member of the Academy’s 7,000-strong pool of eligible voters may fill out the ballot with most virtuous intentions, they end up finger-painting the zeitgeist in more grisly terms than any of them might have calculated. And this year’s results offer a composite portrait of Hollywood culture that confirms some of the industry’s worst fears about itself, and its most deeply embedded stereotypes.
In this context, the two names we expect to be routinely nominated—De Niro and Meryl Streep —should not feel too slighted at being left off the list. And they’re in good company. Adam Sandler’s excoriating performance as a jewel dealer in Uncut Gems topped critics polls but left the Academy stone cold. Apollo 11’s eye-popping chronicle of the moon landing mission was frozen out of the documentary field. And “Spirit,” Beyonce’s song from Frozen 2, was snubbed, along with the movie.
World cinema pokes its head out of the foreign language ghetto When Parasite director Bong Joon-ho won the Golden Globe for foreign-language fare, he tempered his gratitude with a sly reprimand/tip: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” This year the Academy revised its cultural optics by renaming the longstanding Foreign Language Film category to what’s now called Best International Feature Film.
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