The 2018 Oscar nominations were announced on Tuesday morning, and for the most part, they went as expected. The awards-season favorites so far this year, including Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird, and The Shape of Water, all scored multiple nominations. Here, the biggest surprises and snubs from the list:
Surprises
Jordan Peele’s Get Out came out in February 2017, and many of the major run-up awards left him out of the Best Director conversations—though he did receive several nominations in smaller races. His Oscar nomination finally recognizes the big box-office and cultural impact of his debut directorial effort. Peele is only the fifth African-American director to be nominated for Best Director, and would become the first to ever win if he’s successful in March.
Lady Bird has made a habit of being nominated for best screenplay, but director Greta Gerwig hasn’t made a big splash in the Best Director race until today, with her first ever nomination in the Oscars category. She’s only the fifth ever woman to be nominated in the category, with the last being Kathryn Bigelow in 2010 for The Hurt Locker (also the only woman to ever have won the award).
Sadly, the history of awards-season nominations isn’t very diverse, and inevitably we see several “firsts” when nominations are announced. Mudbound‘s director of photography, Rachel Morrison, is the first woman to ever receive a Best Cinematography nomination. Mudbound‘s director and writer, Dee Rees, is the first black woman to have been nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay category; she is also only the second black woman to have ever been nominated for a writing award (Suzanne de Passe was nominated in 1973). If she wins the Oscar, she’ll become the first black woman to do so.
Lesley Manville bypassed the SAG Awards and the Golden Globe to earn her first Oscar nomination, for her role as the formidable Cyril in Phantom Thread.
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Snubs
Possibly the most egregious snub was Mudbound director Dee Rees. The film rightfully earned nominations in the Best Supporting Actress (for the sublime Mary J. Blige), Original Song, and Adapted Screenplay categories. But even after receiving an astonishing critical reception at Sundance, the film didn’t spark the expected bidding war, and Variety reported that some distributors were experiencing a kind of post–Birth of a Nation squeamishness. (Never mind that the films cover entirely different stories and eras, and that the circumstances surrounding that film’s director–star Nate Parker, against whom rape allegations were made, were simply not relevant to Rees in the slightest.) Then, Mudbound was acquired by Netflix, which simply doesn’t have the same awards-season experience and heft as the traditional studios. The film also wasn’t nominated in the Best Picture category.
In the Best Actress category, we didn’t see either Jessica Chastain or Michelle Williams, both Golden Globe nominees.
In her twenty-first Oscar nod, Meryl Streep predictably landed a nomination for her portrayal of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham in The Post, but director Steven Spielberg was closed out of the Best Director category.
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Call Me By Your Name‘s Timothée Chalamet continued his run of lead actor nominations, while Sufjan Stevens’ exquisite song “Mystery of Love” finally received its awards-season due. The film also received a starting position in the Best Film category. But apart from the Gotham Award for Best Film, its director Luca Guadagnino has now been left out of the awards conversation completely. Armie Hammer, who played graduate student Oliver, was also snubbed in the Best Supporting Actor category, after being nominated for Golden Globes, Independent Spirit, Critics’ Choice, and several other awards.
Battle of the Sexes, whose stars have received nominations steadily throughout the past few months, also received no nominations.
Big genre blockbusters don’t tend to take out the major Academy Awards, but while Blade Runner 2049 and Star Wars: The Last Jedi were nominated in several technical fields, the critically acclaimed Wonder Woman, also the third-highest box office earner of the year, received no nominations at all.
From: Elle.com
