I think before we get into the Andrea Riseborough of it all, we should perhaps talk about the way that the nominating process works. First things first, the academy has 17 branches. And each branch nominates in specific categories. A member can only be a member of one branch, and if she is invited to join more than one branch, she has to choose. There is an actor branch, a costume designer branch, a casting director branch, a director branch, a music branch, a writer branch, a documentary branch, etc. And there are ten more: cinematographers, executives, film editors, sound, makeup artists and hairstylists, marketing and public relations, producers, production design, visual effects, and animation and short films (which are grouped together for some reason). There are also two member-at-large groups – one for artists and one for agents. During the nomination process, each of the 23 Oscar categories is nominated by the branch responsible for it. If you're a costume designer, at this stage you get to vote to nominate two Oscar categories only: costume design and best picture. For actors that is more: there are four acting categories plus best picture. Music has two plus best picture; so do the writers. You get the picture. (International film has a whole other complex process that has changed a lot over the years.) But there is a very specific key to the nominating process: You get to vote for a slate of 5 nominees in each category, but you rank them. And only one of your votes counts.
If you want BTH to get nominated, you put his name at the top. |
Let's take my list of nominees for Best Supporting Actor this year: I would have voted for 1. Anton von Lucke in Great Freedom, 2. André Holland in Bones and All, 3. Jeremy Strong in Armageddon Time, 4. Albrecht Schuch in All Quiet on the Western Front, and 5. Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin. When they count the ballots, they put them all in large piles. So: let's just assume that most people voted for Ke Huy Quan and Brendan Gleeson. They get nominated and all the votes that put them at the top get removed. (If you voted for one of them at the top of your list, that's who your vote counts for. No one else on your list matters.) Next: they take the people got the least amount of votes (like Anton von Lucke) and they redistribute. Now they put my vote in the André Holland pile, but of course, he's also eliminated quickly, so they move it to the Albrecht Schuch pile. Maybe my vote never counts at all, or maybe my vote ends up in the Barry Keoghan pile. (There's no ballot anyway, since I'm just an amateur Oscar fan.) But if you're really, really set on someone, you put that name at the top and you move the big names – who you love but are less passionate about – lower on your ballot. This is how Paul Mescal got an Oscar nomination, and Brian Tyree Henry got an Oscar nomination, and Stephanie Hsu ended up with a surprise Oscar nomination. And this, of course, is how Andrea Riseborough got one. There's one in every category, actually. The fifth slot ends up working exactly the opposite of how you'd expect it to. Rather than it being a consensus vote – where the eventual nominee would be the person everyone sort of likes but no one is obsessed with – it is a passion vote. The eventual fifth nominee in each category is mostly unexpected; it represents a surge of affection within (in this case) the acting branch of the Academy. You can see this in other categories too: for the writers with Glass Onion (the film's only nomination), for example, or for Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris in the costume category.
This year's nominees:
- Actress: Andrea Riseborough
I think it's a generally good thing that a bunch of celebrities figured out how to beat the bushes – avoiding all of the usual campaigning – in order to get a film with no powerful distributor this surprise nomination. I refer to nomination morning my Christmas morning because I'm in it for the surprises. This was an enormous surprise, and the whole thing is very interesting. As it turns out, Riseborough is great in To Leslie – she's great in almost everything she does – and the movie itself is pretty good too. It's a story of addiction and potential redemption that I felt managed actually to work despite the clichéd pitfalls surrounding this narrative. The "scandal" of her nomination will be one for the Oscar history books, but it isn't really a scandal at all. The scandal, it seems to me, is that usually the Academy just sees a handful of about 30 movies all year (if that), and they're the movies the big studios tell them to watch. They send them screeners and campaign to get them to watch them, and then the critics groups and other awards organizations fall in line and nominate around 20 films for everything. It becomes boring and predictable, and it just goes to show how few movies these experts are actually watching. The To Leslie campaign tried something else, and what do you know? It worked! I guess I find it pretty remarkable. And the movie's actually good.
- Actress: Ana de Armas
- Adapted Screenplay: Rian Johnson (Knives Out)
This was a very boring movie. I know a lot of people liked it, but I just was very bored the whole time. It's weird: I used to really like Rian Johnson, and I've always thought he was good at mysteries (I was very into Brick in my twenties). But for me these new mysteries he's doing are not interesting. They feel too formulaic and glossy to be of any actual interest. That said, I think it'll probably win the adapted screenplay Oscar. What I want to talk about is how this is an adapted screenplay. In short, Glass Onion isn't an adapted screenplay. You know what else isn't an adapted screenplay? Top Gun: Maverick. Both of these films, instead, involve characters who have appeared in other places. But their storylines, their dialogue, and a majority of their characters are original. These scripts are actually not adapted from another document the way Living or All Quiet on the Western Front or The Whale or Blonde are. (I've already made known my feelings about Triangle of Sadness being considered "original".) This is a very odd policy in regard to writing that the Academy has had in place since around 2004, and I think it makes no actual sense. It has meant "adapted" nominations for completely original scripts such as Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Before Midnight, and most insanely, Toy Story 3. It makes no sense. How are these scripts that remix characters and do new things with them any different from scripts considered "original" that use old characters like Midnight in Paris or The King's Speech or The Trial of the Chicago 7. That last film had to be adapted from actual transcripts from the actual trial, for example, with the screenwriter adapting some speeches wholesale from historical documents. Yet that is an "original" screenplay and Glass Onion, which is literally not based on anything; it merely repurposes a single character from a different film to follow a new, convoluted story with original dialogue, an original scenario, and a dozen original characters. It's nonsense.
Will Win: Adapted Screenplay
- Supporting Actor: Brian Tyree Henry
7. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Pinocchio, Puss in Boots: the Last Wish, Turning Red, and The Sea Beast
8. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Empire of Light, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, RRR, and Tell It like a Woman
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