In the middle of the Conan/Leno Tonight Show fiasco of early 2010, David Letterman had to weigh in. After all, he and Leno had a similar skirmish almost 20 years prior. According to Letterman, "every day I have people come up to me and ask me about this Tonight Show thing." Initially, Letterman planned to stay out of the whole debacle. "I don't have a dog in this fight...Lord knows I've got my own problems," Letterman remarked before taking a pause. Then a wicked grin flashes on his face before he says a few little words: "But I just can't help myself."
Similarly, I really shouldn't even talk about the egregious oversights in this year's Academy Awards nominations. I was talking about award season's hideous exclusion of movies from marginalized perspectives a little over five years ago, after all, and little in the film industry informing those practices has changed. Way smarter people than me have been talking about #OscarsSoWhite for over a decade now. In a week where America's oligarchical fascism is more apparent than ever, when people prepare for ICE raids, as my fellow trans folks advocate for their rights, there are infinitely more important things to do than talk about what did and didn't get Oscar nominations.
But call me Letterman folks, because, well, "I just can't help myself."
The nominations began with the heads of the Academy announcing that this year's Oscars would feature special tributes to first responders, Los Angeles, and the film industry in response to the devastating wildfires. Then, Bowen Yang and Rachell Sennott showed up to announce the nominations proper. Right away, things got off to a horrible start with Clarence Maclin in Sing Sing getting snubbed for Jeremy Strong in The Apprentice. A Different Man getting a Best Makeup and Hairstyling nomination shortly after was cool, but Challengers getting no Best Original Score is insane!!! What the fuck, guys?
Really, the first half of the Oscar nominations were a travesty, a weird reflection of an excellent recent Los Angeles Times piece called "How Hollywood Lost The Culture War." Films about working-class people from around the world (like Hard Truths or All We Imagine as Light) got excluded from Best Original Screenplay, while Emilia Perez (about rich people), A Complete Unknown (about famous musicians), and September 5 (about people occupying a sector of the entertainment industry*) got in. Of course Hollywood lost the culture war if it's lavishing praise on films so out of step with ordinary life. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, I'm Still Here, Hard Truths, All We Imagine as Light, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, these films got excluded. Thank God Nickel Boys, Sing Sing, and Anora got into screenplay at least.
Best Documentary Feature nominations I didn't have a problem with, though I have to catch up on Porcelain War. The other four nominees rock, though. Disappointed Kneecap got shut out from Best International Feature and Best Original Song (yay more working-class people got excluded), but at least Sacred Fig and I'm Still Here got in. As the nominations went on, though, it was so frustrating how the same movies just kept getting nominated constantly over and over again. Emilia Perez in Best Sound?? What?? Over titles like Nickel Boys, which made the sound of a marble falling down the stairs incredibly idiosyncratic???
Alien: Romulus and its terrible visual effects (remember that Ian Holm deep-fake) getting into Best Visual Effects is hysterical but yay for Better Man! You will always be famous CG monkey Robbie Williams. Had to laugh at Maria suddenly reviving from the award season grave for Best Cinematography. They just love Pablo Larrain movies in this category! Handing Perez and Maria Best Cinematography nominations over Nickel Boys, though, is an egregious crime worthy of being charged at The Hague. Guys, what the hell? That movie's first-person POV camerawork is integral to the film and groundbreaking in the history of cinema.
Heartbreakingly, All We Imagine as Light got snubbed from the ceremony entirely, another frustrating demonstration of the Oscars excluding cinema from India (remember when RRR, 2022's cultural phenomenon, only got one Oscar nod two years ago?) Light filmmaker Kapadia and Sacred Fig director Mohammad Rasoulof getting snubbed in Best Director in favor of James Mangold for A Complete Unknown and Jacques Audiard for Emilia Perez is so staggeringly miscalculated I can't even comprehend it. Rasoulof had to shoot several Sacred Fig sequences away from his actors in a car just so he could evade getting caught by the authorities, yet he still delivered a pulse-pounding thriller I still can't get out of my brain. If only he'd remembered to fill the movie with musicians Western baby boomers recognize or had a "PENIS TO VAGINA" song.
Ten years ago (God, time goes by too fast), I remember reading an "anonymous" Oscar voter's thoughts on that year's nominations films in The Hollywood Reporter. This person found it impossible to sympathize or grapple the life of Patricia Arquette in Boyhood because she was a working-class ordinary woman in Texas who didn't always do the right thing. Moral complexity, especially in women, confounded this woman. I was thinking of that this morning when Marianne Jean-Baptise's unforgettably captivating Hard Truths work got snubbed in Best Actress. 11 of this year's 20 acting nominees were playing either pre-existing characters (either historical figures or Wizard of Oz figures) and/or people in period pieces. A distinctly original modern-day role like Jean-Baptise's (and one that *GASP* asked audiences to identify with an "unpleasant" woman) just wasn't up to the Academy's tastes this year.
Then we got to the Best Picture nominees, which were bonkers, absolutely bonkers. A Real Pain, All We Imagine as Light, September 5, and Sing Sing got left out of the nomination pool. Instead, the ten nominees were:
Anora
The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Pérez
I’m Still Here
Nickel Boys
The Substance
Wicked
Emilia Perez brought its Oscar nominations total to a whopping 13 with a Best Picture nod. Per this Collider piece, that makes it only the 15th movie in history to get 13 or more Oscar nominations. Fun fact: that's four more nominations than the country of Mexico has ever received in the Best International Feature category. Meanwhile, Nickel Boys joined a rare category of films this morning. It's now among the few post-2008 (when the Best Picture category ballooned past five nominees) films to score only one Oscar nomination outside Best Picture. The Blind Side, A Serious Man, Selma, Past Lives, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and The Post are the only other examples of this phenomenon (that I can find right now) post-2008.
I'm Still Here, meanwhile, is only the second post-2008 foreign language Best Picture nominee financed and produced out of the U.S. (following All Quiet on the Western Front) to get a Best Picture nod but not a Best Director nomination. That's an interesting reversal of the long-standing norm (dating back to the 60s!) where the Academy nominates acclaimed foreign films for Best Director but not Best Picture. Post-2008, two examples of this trend are Cold War and Another Round.
The genuinely exciting sight of Nickel Boys and I'm Still Here making it to Best Picture diluted some of the sting of this ceremony, which was otherwise business as usual for the Academy in the worst ways possible. Two of my three favorite movies of last year (Nickel Boys and Anora) made it into Best Picture and it's surreal a movie with a climax reminiscent of Meet the Feebles like The Substance got into Best Picture. Recent studies have shown that Hollywood has made minimal progress in creating opportunities for marginalized artists over the last 16 years. Ten years since the #OscarsSoWhite campaign began, it also feels like barely anything has changed. Only four of the 20 acting nominees were actors of color. Across ten screenplay nominees, only three had women screenwriters. No women-directed films appeared in Best International Feature Film while women of color continue to get excluded from Best Director.
Emilia Perez, meanwhile, got 13 Oscar nominations while a slew of films from trans directors in 2024 went unrecognized. This happened a year after D. Smith's masterful Kokomo City didn't even make the SHORTLIST for Best Documentary Feature at the 96th Academy Awards. A little over five years ago, Honey Boy helmer Alma Har'el said it best when the Golden Globes excluded women filmmakers:
"They’re immersed in this perpetuated activity of basking in male excellence and overseeing this whole new world we’re trying to build with new voices of women and people of color being part of the conversation...they don’t pay attention to new voices or value them in the same way they value men they are familiar with...our perspectives are the future of cinema. Do not make politically and financially driven award shows be the endgame of your career. Stop looking for justice at award shows. Connect with audiences. Build communities. Take your power back.”
The Oscars have failed us and will continue to fail us as long as they're tied to the troubled film industry and capitalism. It's totally okay to feel crushed about that given how much influence this ceremony has on what gets released and financed globally. However, Har'el said it best, we must not look to the Oscars "for justice." A genuine congratulations to Karla Sofia Gascon for making history as the first openly trans-acting Oscar nominee, ditto the modern classics like Anora, Nickel Boys, and I'm Still Here that will represent genuinely challenging and sublime cinema at the Oscars. Also, I just had a good time watching Wicked, so I'm glad it was "popular" enough to score some love.
Right now, though, allow me to shout "THIS IS BULLSHIT" put positivity into the world and spotlight some trans-centric films that are actually interested in trans existence (only three of them are helmed by cis-filmmakers). Because these films don't cater to white cis-het sensibilities, they've been overlooked by the Oscars, so now you can discover them as amazing cinematic gems. Let's go spread and champion art that actually reflects the world and cinema's limitless possibilities.
The films I'm spotlighting today are:
Two quick notes:
Rachel Sennott and Bowen Yang did make me laugh constantly while announcing the nominations, they were so clearly running on caffeine and jitters and it was so endearing. Sennott's "Alt-comedy is like the comedy scene except for gay men and women" line was perfect, what an icon.
* = No, not everyone in Hollywood is a rich person living in a mansion, obviously. 99% of the people making a living in Los Angeles are working-class people. However, the Oscars have a history of preferring films related to the entertainment industry in any way over folks from other walks of life.