The 2020 Oscar nominations are now out and, as always, there are a few snubs and surprises in its midst. Every awards season, it seems that the conversation regarding the Academy Awards only grows more and more vexing; while, on the one hand, the industry appears to be making steps in the right direction in terms of its diversity and inclusion (and not to mention the fact that its leading figures are calling for more action on this front); on the other, the people Hollywood then chooses to honor doesn’t seem to reflect that goal.
Hosted every year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Oscars are still considered to be the be-all, end-all when it comes to Hollywood’s awards season. The nominations are carefully selected by a broad voting body, which includes over 8,000 active members and, unlike many other awards shows, only allows members to vote for categories that they are qualified in and have a professional perspective on.
But even so, every year, certain deserving films, filmmakers, and artists appear to get cut out of their rightful celebration, while others get to go to the Oscars instead. Here are the biggest snubs and surprises to come out of the 2020 Oscar nominations.
Snub: Greta Gerwig Or Any Female – Best Director
This has been one of the leading conversations going into the Oscar nominations: the apparent lack of female filmmakers in the Best Director category. While many female directors helped lend their voices to last year’s extensive and impressive filmography – including Lulu Wang for The Farewell, Olivia Wilde for Booksmart, and Céline Sciamma for Portrait of a Lady on Fire – Greta Gerwig’s work on the Louisa May Alcott adaptation Little Women seemed like the best opportunity for a female director nod.
And yet, despite the unequivocal charm of the adaptation, with a whole cast of heartwarming characters and performances, Gerwig was ignored at the helm entirely by the Academy – though they did nominated her for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Surprise: Florence Pugh – Best Supporting Actress
Florence Pugh’s has been one of the most prolific and blooming actresses to come out of 2019. From the WWE family dramedy Fighting With My Family to Ari Aster’s cult horror Midsommar, Pugh maintained a steady stream of impressive employment to close out the decade – and all of that is without mentioning her role in the upcoming MCU movie, Black Widow.
While her charismatic and wide-ranged performance at the forefront of Midsommar was one worthy of following up Toni Collette’s in Aster’s previous contribution to arthouse horror, Hereditary, Pugh’s work on the Greta Gerwig adaptation Little Women was the perfect close to her remarkable year. Playing Amy, the artistic member of the March family, Pugh morphed a sense of vulnerability and strength together that was not only indicative of the character from the classic novel, but also a timely exhibit of femininity. And besides, her sourpuss face and mini anxiety attack following her troublesome in-class punishment is one of the most adorable images to come out of 2019 cinema.
Snub: Awkwafina – Best Actress
The fact that Lulu Wang’s startlingly personal and heartbreaking feature debut, The Farewell, was completely ignored by the Academy is frustrating enough as it is. But the fact that Awkwafina’s lead, Golden Globe-winning performance was ignored is particularly vexing.
As Billi, a Chinese-American who ventures to China to say goodbye to her dying grandmother, the rapper really established her acting chops for this film. Navigating through a plethora of culture gaps and frustration, Awkwafina displayed a remarkable amount of resilience, exhibiting the occasional glance of humor in the face of an impending tragedy. Her performance, compared to that of Crazy Rich Asians or Ocean’s Eight, is considerably low-key, and in being so, is also deceptive; even without the glitz and the glamour of those previous roles, Awkwafina swallows the viewer whole.
Since she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, hopefully her win at the Golden Globes will be enough to give The Farewell the recognition it deserves.
Surprise: The Lighthouse – Cinematography
A very pleasant surprise, Robert Eggers’ maritime thriller The Lighthouse can now call itself an Academy Award-nominated production. Though the category it is going up for – Best Cinematography – seems like a shoe-in for master cinematographer Roger Deakins’ breathtaking work on the one-shot war epic 1917, Eggers’ follow-up to the 2015 period piece The Witch surely deserves its place on this list.
The nomination, directed towards director of photography Jarin Blaschke, can be attributed to the film’s grainy appearance. Matched with a black-and-white aesthetic and an Academy aspect ratio (1.37:1), The Lighthouse’s cinematography makes it hard to look away from, while the film’s unnerving story and remarkable lead performances make it hard to look at. It’s a great duality of forces, one that makes The Lighthouse one of the strangest and best films of 2020.
Snub: Robert De Niro – Best Actor
The Irishman, the return to mobster genre form for Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci, greeted the Netflix screen late last year like an old friend. Re-establishing their dominance over the genre nearly 25 years after Casino first hit theaters, the somewhat true story production was a critical success coming out of the gate and was, for a long time, a frontrunner in the Oscar’s Best Picture race.
Recently, however, the film seems to have lost a good chunk of its steam. The Scorsese movie noticably didn’t win any of its categories at the Golden Globes, and now, its lead, Robert De Niro, was omitted from the Best Actor category. That being said, his co-stars, Pesci and Al Pacino, were recognized for their work on the film, but the fact that De Niro, who headlines the bulk of the 3.5 hour movie, missed out on his eighth acting nod is surprising to say the least.
Surprise: Kathy Bates – Best Supporting Actress
While Kathy Bates’ work in the Clint Eastwood true story production Richard Jewell was among the most inspired the actress has put out in a long time – arguably since her co-starring role in the Jack Nicholson vehicle About Schmidt – her getting nominated still felt surprising. In a year that also included remarkable supporting roles from women such as Jennifer Lopez, Julia Fox, Shuzhen Zhao, and Yeo-jeong Jo, to name a few, having Bates on the ballot feels a little stale.
Snub: Adam Sandler – Best Actor
Adam Sandler wasn’t given an Oscar nomination for his dramatic turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. So, it’s surprising that the Happy Gilmore star missed out on another nod. In the Safdie Brothers’ unnerving Uncut Gems, Sandler delivers what is, without a doubt, the best performance of his career. As an eccentric, gambling-obsessed jeweler in the heart of New York’s diamond district, Sandler’s typical onscreen persona is almost entirely swallowed. The things that stay – the intense neuroticism, the boiling anger, and the wonderful displays of yelling – cannot be beat; and in a film that was written around him, Sandler shines.
Surprise: For Sama – Best Documentary
Another pleasant surprise from the Oscar nominations is the inclusion of the startling and pulsating documentary For Sama. Presented as a letter from mother to daughter, it documents life during five years of unrest and seizure in Aleppo, Syria – specifically, a woman’s life. This alternate and much needed perspective reigns heavily upon any conflict’s acidic effects on family and community.
And from a filmmaking standpoint, the documentary is a harrowing exhibition of carnage. With the same camera that its subject (Waad Al-Kateab) uses to coo her daughter, she lingers on the complete cycle of warfare. The ultimate assembly of this film is a product of great cinematic and journalistic courage, preserved by the creator’s juggling needs of reportage and purpose.
Snub: Jennifer Lopez – Best Supporting Actress
Ever since the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival late last year, Hustlers has been beckoning the awards buzz for its supporting actress Jennifer Lopez. Playing a stripper who helps initiate and run a con operation of her wealthy clients, Lopez helped bring a complex combination of justification and wretchedness to not only the events in the movie, but to the film itself.
This snub is one that has been particularly dissected and debated online, with many social media users calling to attention the film’s proximity to other incendiary class productions like The Wolf of Wall Street (which was nominated for five Oscars) and rhetorically asking what the defining difference was in the Academy’s eyes between the films.
Surprise: Scarlett Johansson – Best Supporting Actress
Going into the Oscar nominations, everybody was expecting to see Scarlett Johansson’s name up on the Best Actress ballot. That being said, there were probably a great number of people who were shocked to see the Lost In Translation actress receive her first Academy Award nomination not for Marriage Story, but for Jojo Rabbit.
Aside from the BAFTA Awards, Johansson’s performance as the sympathetic mother to a Nazi fanatic in Taika Waititi’s “anti-hate satire” has been widely swept under the rug. The Black Widow actress certainly deserves this nomination, acting as the key component to the emotional heart of Waititi’s film.
Snub: Lupita Nyong’o – Best Actress
Arguably, Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Academy Award in 2014 for her supporting role in 12 Years a Slave, deserved to be nominated twice for her performances in Jordan Peele’s Us. Starring as both the victim of a heinous, supernatural crime and its perpetrator, Nyong’o’s performance is acrobatic, sincere, and terrifying on both sides of Peele’s aisle.
This was another grand opportunity for the Academy to include a woman of color in its depressingly unrepresentative ballot – one that wouldn’t feel as token as Cynthia Eviro’s in Harriet – but the motion picture “scientists” really missed out on this one.
Surprise: I Lost My Body – Best Animated Feature
Competing in a category that is largely dominated by major blockbusters from the Mouse House or one of its many big studio opponents, the fact that I Lost My Body, an intimate, foreign-language animated production, can be nominated is one of the few steps the Academy took this morning to show that it might be thinking outside the box. The film, which follows a severed hand embarking on a trek to find its owner, is sweet and neurotic, and a very happy addition to the Oscar ballot.
Snub: Portrait of a Lady on Fire – Best International Feature
Admittedly, the newly re-named Best International Feature category was stacked this year. On top of Almodovar’s searing, semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory, there was also Bong Joon-ho’s socially-sensitive thriller Parasite to consider (the latter would also be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar). But Celine Sciamma’s provocative romance, following a female painter falling in love with one of her subjects, was one that added a certain zest to the foreign picture scene this year.
This isn’t to say that France’s eventual selection for the category, Les Miserables, isn’t worthy of the nomination – actually far from it – but while the Academy’s rule for foreign pictures restrict countries to only one entry, it’s a shame that Portrait of a Lady on Fire got booted out.
Surprise: Tom Hanks – Best Supporting Actor
The last time Tom Hanks was nominated for an Academy Award was in 2001 for his lead performance in the Robert Zemeckis tragedy adventury film Cast Away. To see him get nominated for his heartfelt embodiment of Mister Rogers this year, the same year he was also honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes, is particularly special – and perhaps the Academy’s way of apologizing for omitting Morgan Neville’s documentary on the beloved TV host last year.
Snub: Willem Dafoe – Best Supporting Actor
The Academy apparently didn’t like Willem Dafoe’s cooking in The Lighthouse. While it was nice to see the Robert Eggers thriller horror get nominated for an Oscar, it would’ve been even nicer for it to have been for Willem Dafoe’s smelly, intoxicating, and almost Shakespearean performance.
Bolstering a gruffly voice and an epic beard, Dafoe transforms into the sea shanty role of Thomas Wake, a grumpy old lighthouse keeper. Just as he had in The Witch, Eggers prepares for him several booming monologues that simultaneously escalate the tension, heighten the fear, stretch the imagination, and perfectly exploit the actor’s talents. It’s a joy of a performance to behold.
Surprise: Frozen 2 – Best Animated Feature
Again, the Best Animated Feature category is one that is widely dominated by films that attract mainstream audiences and have a well-known logo attached to the front of it. Films exactly like Frozen 2. Now, while the nominations also included other animated sequels, such as Pixar’s Toy Story 4 and DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, omitting Frozen 2 to add less known films like I Lost My Body was very mature.
And, given the fact that the sequel, while an impressive technical achievement, also holstered a strange colonialism story, unappealing songs (except for one or two), and a script which trapped characters like Anna and Kristoff in a repetitive and annoying subplot, it was the right choice as well.
More: Oscars 2020: Best Actor Predictions
