The Oscars Suck This Year, Don't They?

notes on the nominees from an oscar enjoyer

I am extremely out of touch with pop culture at the moment, which I’ve talked about a lot already. This is in spite of what I’m telling the various media-related places I’ve been applying for jobs at. Between kicking Twitter mostly for good, using Instagram only to look at hamster videos and skinfluencers who try to peddle useless hacks to snatch your chin in three days, and just generally being preoccupied with other things since the fire that destroyed my apartment, I’ve become especially detached from the zeitgeist. I hit a record low for number of films watched in 2024 (263 — I know, tragic), and while I actually have seen every film but two that were nominated for a Best Picture Oscar this year, I just…don’t really care? About any of it. Even the relentless drama with Karla Sofia Gascón couldn’t pull me back in and I did manage to keep up with it, genuinely impressed by her ability to be racist against almost every single possible minority group.

And allegedly there is some other drama going on — a brief scroll on the Twitter timeline the other day alluded to everyone getting mad at who Sean Baker follows on social media again. “What year is it?” etc — but I have no interest in keeping up with it. I do think a good chunk of this has to do with dropping my finger off the pop culture pulse overall, but does anyone else feel like the Oscars just aren’t very fun this year? I am not really rooting for anything, or anyone, even the film I liked the most that made my Top 5 films of the year: Anora, which, as I have gleaned from bits of news I’ve caught, seems poised to take home Oscar Gold. But not even my affection for Sean Baker’s film and gorgeous bald man Yura Borisov can pull me in like last year’s #OppenheimerSweep. Watching Oppenheimer clean house last year was kinda like watching the Eagles cream the Chiefs at this year’s Super Bowl (go birds). It was easy and expected based on the odds, but nonetheless fun to watch happen, and it gave a lot of freaks the bestial power to ascend lamp posts (in my case, I had really good sex after Oppenheimer won).

Me saluting RDJ when he won Best Supporting Actor, for some reason. I was pretty drunk at this point

And the Academy Awards usually are my Super Bowl. Other cinephile losers like me generally do refer to the Oscars as such. But this year it’s more like…I don’t know…what’s another sports championship but one that people don’t care about as much as the Super Bowl? WNBA finals? Something like that. I don’t pay attention to any other awards show — I don’t know in what way the outcomes of the Golden Globes, the SAGs, the BAFTAs, etc. all indicate who will take home Oscar in the end. I’m not an awards prognosticator, and the politics of awards season don’t really interest me. I’m only tuning in to the most important of the shows to see actors I recognize talk about movies I love and hopefully make fools of themselves. And while I think a lack of nomination and defiance of the status quo often speaks more to a film’s quality than a nomination (see: Uncut Gems), still, I love the anticipation, I love the glamor, I love the drama and the pure stupidity of celebrities and presenters trying to position the Oscars as something that really matters. I’ve been watching the Oscars since I sat alone in my dad’s office learning what “Pan’s Labyrinth” was on our analog television back in 2007; not including the year Green Book won, when I skipped the ceremony to go see Alita: Battle Angel (a good decision). I watched the Moonlight/La La Land snafu, I watched “the slap,” I saw “Adele Dazeem” happen in real time. Since I don’t care about sports, I love rooting for something I do care about, and I care about la cinéma.

Things would be different this year if Challengers had been nominated, and everyone believed that its nomination was in the bag. My second favorite film of 2024 (next to The Beast, which the Oscars would never touch with a 10-foot pole), it was blatantly snubbed across the board in every category. Not even a nom for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross? Has the Academy even heard “Yeah x10” or “Challengers”?? It seems that the Academy voting body, in their aged state, only voted for the films that they could manage remember from the previous four months — and also Dune: Part Two because, well, it’s Dune: Part Two. I apologize for my ageism and understand that Awards Season is a real thing. Generally, movies released in the fall are better poised to be nominated because of their proximity to the voting period. But last year’s group at least had three summer picks: Oppenheimer, Barbie, and Past Lives. There were many great films this year, but the Oscar nominees can’t help but reek of safety and recency bias. Though I’m sure they all patted themselves on the back for nominating Emilia Pérez thinking it would get them post-Trump-win brownie points, not realizing that the lead actress has unforeseen levels of European Racism.

There is nothing particularly interesting to me this year, there are no stakes, there is no underdog who I want to see clinch an upset. Part of the fun of watching #OppenheimerSweep last year was that, in spite of its status as one of the highest-grossing R-rated films of all time and amassing nearly $1 billion at the box office, it was sort of an underdog at the beginning. It was a thing that Oppenheimer was a risk, a three-hour, big budget blockbuster film about nuclear physicists talking to each other. Nolan had parted ways with Warner Bros., and this new film was somewhat make-or-break for him. Would it be a catastrophic bomb (sorry) or give Nolan the biggest blank check in history? I mean, where are the Marvel superheroes? Where is Baby Yoda? Why isn’t Albert Einstein singing “Agatha All Along”? The fact that Oppenheimer won over the entire world still tickles me to this day, even though the film industry shows no signs of taking the right lessons from it. Even though Chris Nolan is the status quo, a filmmaker at the top who’s peddled in superhero fare himself, it was satisfying to see him defy the Great Demon Zaslav and prove that his three-hour adult drama could be both an Oscar-winner and an audience-winner.

There were other exciting moments, too: aside from the Oppenheimer of it all, it was thrilling to watch Pride of Ireland Cillian Murphy ascend to securing Best Actor, as it was with Da’Vine Joy Randolph for Best Supporting Actress. It was dramatic to witness Lily Gladstone lose to Emma Stone, it was nice to see Robert Downey Jr. take Best Supporting Actor after his decade plus in Marvel (only to come crawling back to it like a dog months later); and utterly delightful that a former composer for Community took home Best Original Score (for Oppenheimer).

But this year we have…what? Well, to quote the great sex pest Charlie Rose, “we have all these characters.” We have Conclave and The Brutalist, the movies made in a lab to be nominated for an Oscar. We have A Complete Unknown, the accessible, heart-warming biopic. We have Emilia Pérez, the “woke points” pick. We have I’m Still Here, the obligatory international pick. We have Dune: Part Two and Wicked, the blockbusters and crowd-pleasers. And we have Anora, The Substance, and Nickel Boys, the little indie engines that could. We have ten milquetoast to, at best, unsurprising Best Picture contenders, and a grouping of entirely uninteresting acting nominees as well. I curse the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for shutting out Marianne Jean-Baptiste and her blistering performance in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, a film that is leagues above almost every single actual nominee, and a performer who deserves more widespread recognition in general.

There are, however, nominations in which I hold a level of surprise, or at least amusement. I am genuinely shocked A Real Pain has made it this far, nominated in two categories. It is truly just “A Sundance Film,” but I suppose mid-tier Sundance films have been known to over-perform. Sebastian Stan being nominated for The Apprentice instead of A Different Man is a choice (I do like both performances; I actually think he’s great as Trump), as is nominating Jeremy Strong for certainly whatever he was doing in The Apprentice. Edward Norton’s Supporting Actor nomination for A Complete Unknown feels like the Academy just truly couldn’t think of another guy to nominate, but they know Edward Norton’s name — similar to Felicity Jones being nominated for The Brutalist. Four nominations for Nosferatu is pleasant to see. A Complete Unknown for Directing is… very, very funny, as is every single category that Emilia Pérez is nominated in.

Me when my head is shaped like this and I’m looking at Bob Dylan

The only real upset would come from a The Substance win, which isn’t happening. The Substance nom is the only interesting nomination of the entire ordeal — when was the last time a horror film was nominated for Best Picture? Get Out?? But unfortunately, I would care more if I liked The Substance more. I didn’t hate it, but I thought it was just okay. Still, even The Substance’s nomination isn’t much of a surprise. Anyone with a phone and a mild interest in cinema witnessed the absolute deluge of The Substance marketing from Mubi this past fall, and cheers to them for doing it because it got them to the Oscars. They played the game correctly, and the Oscars is nothing if not an advertising competition.

Last year, I read Michael Schulman’s very good nonfiction book “Oscar Wars¹,” which charts the history and inception of the Academy Awards: how the Oscars were originally formed during the silent era to give legitimacy to dirty, corrupt Hollywood and to the newly formed Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and how Harvey Weinstein’s reign of marketing terror in the ‘90s turned the Oscars into what it is today. And despite the stupid amounts of money still thrown at marketing films to turn them into award-winning juggernauts, the viewership for the Oscars has only marginally improved every year since the abysmal 2021 ceremony. As Schulman himself discussed in his Reddit AMA from two years ago, the issue partly lies in the types of films being nominated (either tentpoles or tiny indies; the mid-budget film is all but extinct), the fact that the Academy has turned to “pandering” to an audience that doesn’t even care about them, and the fact that television ratings will simply never again be what they were 30 years ago, because television is not what it was 30 years ago.

And as Schulman also points out in his AMA, movies are not the cultural anchors that they were 30 years ago. It’s been discoursed about ad nauseam, but people are going to the cinema less and less. The average person is mostly choosing to shell out $15-$30 only to see Wicked or Captain America: Brave New World, and even then many tend to just wait until they land on streaming. I showed my best friend Anora a couple weeks ago, and when my roommate popped her head in and asked what we were watching, she had no idea what I was talking about when I told her. She had never heard of Anora before in her life, and it was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Not to say that all Oscar nominees should be a display of the greatest hits, but the gap between the only two types of nominees now (indie or mega-hit) is staggering. There is less space for a passive pop culture consumer to tune in, so the Oscars are less a public showcase and more just pomp for a select few who really love movies. To which I say — fine. Just let it be that. Academy: stop trying to force a TikTok influencer in Idaho to care about the Oscars. They are gone. Let them go.

And I am going to be honest: the only two films I’m rooting for with any sense of zeal are Better Man for Best Visual Effects and Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl for Best Animated Feature. Though the latter is an expected nomination, I always want to see Disney defeated. But every time I remember that Conclave was nominated for Best Picture (a film I did indeed enjoy!) I feel fatigued and, to me, it encapsulates the total predictable snoozefest that are the Academy Awards this year.

Nevertheless, for curiosity’s sake, here is who I’d prefer to win in each of the major categories (some categories I really do not GAF either way):

Best Picture: Anora
Best Actor: Sebastian Stan
Best Actress: Demi Moore. Or Mikey Madison.
Actor in a Supporting Role: Yura Borisov
Actress in a Supporting Role: Isabella Rossellini
Animated Feature Film: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Cinematography: I’m rooting for Ed Lachman (Maria) because I see him every year in the audience at NYFF press screenings and it feels like we’re friends.
Directing: Sean Baker
Film Editing: I don’t really care. Anora I guess. Or The Brutalist.
International Feature Film: Unfortunately I’ve only seen Emilia Pérez, which I hated. I’m going to root for I’m Still Here, since it’s not getting Best Picture.
Documentary Feature Film: Didn’t see these (I know) but No Other Land should win.
Music (Score): The Brutalist
Music (Song): Better Man robbed. Don’t care.
Writing (Adapted): Conclave I guess.
Writing (Original): Anora.

Me and my boyfriend, who is balding and has a similar shaped head as Yura Borisov

1. Fun fact this is the only book of mine that survived the fire because it was with me at my parents’ house when the fire was occurring.