The nominations for the 95th Academy Awards were announced on Jan. 24, 2023. The ceremony will be held on Sunday, March 12, and will be hosted by comedian and talk show personality, Jimmy Kimmel. Now, what makes me qualified to speak on the best movies of the year, you ask? Absolutely nothing sans my Regal Cinemas unlimited pass. As much as film industry execs would like consumers to be interested in which films have the most interesting lighting design, it just isn’t the draw of the Oscars. So for that reason, I will stick to seven categories that the average movie-goer would likely take an interest in.
The nominees for best picture for 2022 are as follows: Top Gun: Maverick, Women Talking, Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, Triangle of Sadness, The Fablemans, All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, and Tár. While these movies certainly earned their place on the list, there are two that stand out much bolder for me; one in a good way and the other in not such a positive light. Everything Everywhere All At Once, produced by Studio A24, was the best movie of 2022 in my eyes. The story follows an immigrant mother and her daughter as they navigate their complicated relationship throughout the multiverse. It stars Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis, all of whom were nominated in their respective acting categories. Everything in this film, from the script to the tiniest google eye, is truly something to behold. However, despite my bewitchment with Everything Everywhere All At Once, there was one film I wasn’t as thrilled about. I am sure Triangle of Sadness is a great film…once you get past the excessive expulsion of stomach acid that goes on for way too long for the joke to still be funny. However, I wouldn’t know if the movie gets better after the barf-o-rama or not, because it is the only movie I have ever walked out of mid-way through in my life.
The list for best actress is chock-full of insanely talented women. As previously mentioned, Michelle Yeoh has been nominated for her work in Everything Everywhere All At Once, a very much-deserved nomination, and she is the first Asian-identifying woman to be nominated in that category. She is nominated alongside Angela Riseborough in To Leslie, Michelle Williams in The Fablemans, Cate Blanchett in Tár, and Ana de Armas in Blonde. Ana de Armas is incredibly skilled in her art; her work in Knives Out was admirable. However, I think that Blonde being nominated in any sort of category (or even being greenlit as a film at all) is one of the things that makes it clear that the film industry is still very much a man’s game, and there was little regard for the sexist implications of Blonde receiving Academy recognition.
The nominee list for best actor includes Hollywood’s newest heartthrob with a fake southern drawl, Austin Butler, for his role in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. The list also features Brendan Fraser in The Whale, Colin Farrel in The Banshees of Inisherin, Bill Nighy in Living, and Paul Mescal in Aftersun. Recently, Butler did take home the Golden Globe for best actor, but that isn’t to say that he’s a shoo-in at the Academy Awards. Every nominee is excellent in their own right, and it’s anyone’s game.
While the main characters are important, many people love a sidekick, a best friend, a supporting actor or actress if you will. Angela Bassett has been nominated for her role of Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which tugged on the heartstrings of audiences in the wake of actor Chadwick Boseman’s death back in 2020. Stephanie Hsu, who has been on the up-and-up since she originated the role of Christine in the off-Broadway run of Be More Chill, has been nominated alongside her Everything Everywhere All At Once co-star Jamie Lee Curtis. Additionally, Hong Chau has been nominated for her role in The Whale, and Kerry Condon for The Banshees of Inisherin. Brendan Gleeson, who you may recognize as Mad-Eye Moody from Harry Potter, has been nominated for The Banshees of Inisherin as a supporting actor along with Barry Keoghan. Brian Tyree Henry was nominated for Causeway, Judd Hirsch for The Fablemans, and Ke Huy Quan, who gained fame in the 1980s with his roles in The Goonies and Indiana Jones, has been nominated for Everything Everywhere All At Once. Quan is certainly a favorite as Waymond Wang in the A24 film, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he came out as the winner, but only time can tell who will take home the elusive golden figure.
Onto the two categories that led me to have a bone to pick with the Academy as a whole: best director and best original screenplay. As far as Best Director goes, I agree that the people nominated deserved it. Steven Spielberg is a seasoned professional who brought me to tears with his most recent feature, and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert perfectly executed a very difficult concept with Everything Everywhere All At Once. Again, in the original screenplay category, there are many great pieces of work, and for my partner in film crime, Tara Siegel, a 19-year-old student at Pace University, The Banshees of Inisherin stood out for phenomenal writing. She says the screenplay was “[U]nique and funny in a way I have never seen before but managed to execute serious themes. It was very clever that it disguised these topics of the effects of mental illness within comedic dialogue.” Despite this, in both the category for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, there was not a single nominee who doesn’t identify as male. This isn’t to say that people should be nominated purely because of their gender, regardless of whether or not they deserve the award. However, I think that men, primarily white men dominating the categories year after year, speaks volumes about who the film industry supports and who it doesn’t. For example, the film Till, directed by Chinonye Chukwu, was an incredibly well-done film of 2022 and was rated 98% Fresh by Rotten Tomatoes. Chukwu took the true story of Emmett Till, a lynching case that shook the world, and put it through a uniquely feminine lens with a focus on Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, and her journey following her son’s death. It continues to be an incredibly relevant story, and for it to be left out of the Academy Awards completely feels pointed. The camera work in this film particularly stood out to me as interesting, and overall, Chukwu made an incredibly emotional movie that didn’t receive the credit it deserves. Additionally, Danielle Deadwyler’s performance as Mamie was so moving, achieving the challenging acting task of portraying a very real person, with real trauma that was seen by the whole world. It is frankly shocking to me that Ana De Armas was featured in the Best Actress category this year for her work in a biopic that was inferior to Till by a wide margin, while Deadwyler’s performance didn’t make the list.
In summary, there are a lot of nominations I agree with, and there are a lot of things that made me question the credibility of the Academy. I look forward to seeing which films come out on top, and I look forward to hopefully watching Studio A24 take the 95th Oscars by storm.