Let's Talk About It: Oscar Nominations
Discussion thread.
I’ll be checking this thread all night and tomorrow. Something else: if you’re watching and loving/grossed out by The Last of Us, there’s a nice season-long chat for the paid list in the Substack app 🦠
This morning, Riz Ahmed and the scientist responsible for M3gan (Allison Williams) announced the Oscar nominations. The best television of the morning was the Senate’s Ticketmaster hearing, but the Oscar nominations put on quite a show: 11 nominations for Everything Everywhere All at Once, first-time Oscar nominations for Brian Tyree Henry and Paul Mescal, Riz Ahmed solemnly reading “My Year of Dicks,” the title of an animated short film nominee.
The big shocker was a Best Actress nomination for Andrea Riseborough, who starred in To Leslie, a movie it doesn’t appear anyone outside of Los Angeles county has seen. (“Leslie is a West Texas single mother struggling to provide for her son when she wins the lottery and a chance at a good life,” goes the synopsis.) Over the last month, there’s been a groundswell of support from A-list actors (Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton) for Riseborough to pull out an Oscar nomination.
The maestro behind the campaign, per Puck, is In Plain Sight actress Mary McCormack. “The actress and wife of Riseborough’s To Leslie director Michael Morris took it upon herself to contact every famous person she knows, for weeks on end, asking them to see the low-budget drama and post something nice,” Matt Belloni reported. “Her manager, Jason Weinberg, also reps Riseborough. Howard Stern, McCormack’s Private Parts co-star, started talking up the film, and she really hit paydirt over the holidays, with dozens of star endorsements and screenings.”
The chorus of gasps and groans online today was that Riseborough (and, to some extent, Ana de Armas for Blonde) got in, presumably over Viola Davis for The Woman King, or Danielle Deadwyler for Till. I haven’t seen Till yet, but Deadwyler’s shattering work in Station Eleven is still on my mind. A phenomenal actor. (Viola Davis was fine in The Woman King, but it was Lashana Lynch I found myself missing every moment she wasn’t onscreen.)
The criticism, after those snubs, was how often black actors don’t benefit from the same network of white elite power maneuvers. And that’s true! (I think smaller movies in other categories sometimes do, like Julia Roberts co-hosting a screening of Moonlight, first example to come to mind. I once wrote for Vulture about how that kind of thing happens a lot. And actors do FYCs for other actors all the time, too, but the best is Diane Ladd buying an ad for her daughter Laura Dern’s campaign for Wild, and signing it “In light with love.” I love a mother!) The Riseborough thing is wacky enough to make me feel a little bit of unhinged glee: The word salad copy pasta in a lot of the tweets, the out of nowhere onslaught of support, the randoms of randoms rolodex lining up to support an actress who is not famous or even that broadly familiar. I mean, come on, that’s a Veep B-plot.
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