Well, the Academy has its headline now: It’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” vs. “Top Gun: Maverick” at the Oscars! The two highest grossing films of the year going head to head for the most prestigious award in cinema! Box office king and Oscar winner James Cameron vs. Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer, neither of whom have been nominated for Best Picture before!
The 2022 Best Picture Academy Award nominations mark the first time in history that two of the Best Picture nominees have grossed more than $1 billion at the box office, and that’s after a year in which only one nominee had exceeded $100 million. So if the Academy hopes to boost ratings with a showdown between movies people have actually seen, they’ve got one.
But that’s just one facet of these nominations, and to be honest, the chances of the 95th Academy Awards Best Picture race coming down to those two movies are slim at best. (“Top Gun: Maverick” has a chance to win, “Avatar” probably doesn’t.)
However, for other Oscar intrigue, you can also check out the top three movies in total nominations. Atop the rankings with 11 nominations is “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a deliberately cartoonish, chaotic multicultural romp totally unlike the kind of film that would once have been taken seriously by famous conservative voters in the past. the Oscars.
Just behind is “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a German-language film based on the same novel already produced by the 1930 Best Picture Oscar winner of the same name, and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a Irish black comedy that can break your heart even when it hinges on seriously disturbing acts of self-mutilation.
All three films are extreme in their own way and indicative of a somewhat chaotic list of Oscar nominees that managed to be both predictable (most of the time) and shocking (on occasion).
When you consider the Best Actress nomination for Andrea Riseborough, one of the most surprising last-minute surges in Oscar history…and the fact that Paul Mescal edged out Toms Cruise and Hanks to get a Best Actor nomination for a witty standalone work, “Aftersun,” which didn’t receive any other nominations… and the Best Picture lineup that’s prone to whimsy (“Elvis!”) but also found room for the minimalism of “Talking Women,” well, even if the Academy doesn’t end up embracing “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the movie, come Oscar night, seems to be embracing everything everywhere at once, the concept.
This is an increasingly international voting body, and they once again proved it by putting non-American films in high places, not just the nine nominations for “All Quiet,” but nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. for the swedish “Triangle of Sadness” by director Ruben Östlund, a class satire that includes an extended scene based on projectile vomiting and other bodily fluids.
When the fall festival season kicked off, you wouldn’t have guessed that Netflix’s only Best Picture nomination would be for a German-language war movie about “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” or “White Noise” or even “William You wouldn’t have guessed that “Everything Everywhere” would easily beat Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” (which, by the way, did whatever it took to remain a serious Best Picture contender) in nominations for almost every awards shows.And you certainly wouldn’t have seen Riseborough coming in for a South by Southwest movie with a total gross of $27,000 at the box office and no money for a campaign.
It seemed absolutely clear to me that not enough people had seen Riseborough’s “To Leslie” to get a Best Actress nomination for two powerful performances by black actresses, Danielle Deadwyler for “Till” or Viola Davis for “The Woman King.” . But the ranked-choice voting system used by the Academy prioritizes passion over consensus in the nomination round, so a last-minute ad campaign clearly got enough people to look at the link and get it to the top of the page. their tickets.
The other surprise in the acting categories was Brian Tyree Henry for “Causeway” over Paul Dano for “The Fabelmans,” and voters prized Judd Hirsch’s small supporting performance in that latest film over Dano’s big supporting performance.
Elsewhere, surprises included “Top Gun: Maverick,” which entered the Best Adapted Screenplay category but fell out of cinematography, where it had been considered a favorite; “A House Made of Splinters” becoming the fifth nominated documentary for feature film about “Bad Axe”, “Last Flight Home” or “Moonage Daydream”; and “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” absent in both musical categories.
And speaking of music, yes, Diane Warren was nominated for the 14th time for a song from a movie, “Tell It Like a Woman,” which was certainly seen by fewer voters than “To Leslie.” But why not? In the multiverse that Oscar voters built this year, there has to be a place for Diane Warren.
