Oscar nominations betray #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite

Oscar results should always be taken with a pinch of salt. As a rule, Best Picture never goes to the film of the year. If you’ve watched past winners like Crash, Argo, A Beautiful Mind and Forrest Gump lately, you’ll know they’ve aged about as well as a bruised peach in the sun. Other Best Picture winners were rotten right out of the gate – think American Beauty, Driving Miss Daisy, The King's Speech and Gandhi. Still, there's a sinking feeling seeing today's Oscar nominations, where middlebrow Oscar-bait receive undeserved love while female filmmakers still can't catch a break. 

Black Panther and Spike Lee break through

At a glance, though, today's Oscar nominations look pretty forward-thinking and progressive. After all, an Afrofuturistic superhero movie with a predominantly black cast has just walked away with six nominations, including one for Best Picture. Black Panther is joined on the Best Picture list by Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman. Incredibly, this is the first Spike Lee joint ever nominated in the top category, and the legendary director also received his first ever nomination for Best Director. Has the #OscarsSoWhite campaign at last struck a chord with the Academy? 

Green Book's nominations leave a bad taste in the mouth

Unfortunately, with these steps forward there's also a few steps back. Green Book – an anachronistic race-relations drama about the supposed friendship that formed between a racist slob with criminal connections and African-American pianist Don “Doc” Shirley (Mahershala Ali), when the former was the latter’s driver on a tour of the Deep South in the early 60s – is also on the Best Picture nominations list and is many commentators' dark horse to win the award on the night given it recently took top prize at the Producers Guild of America awards. Not only is Green Book a rather mediocre film, its racial politics glib and wrongheaded, the film’s message of interracial healing seems even more hollow after it emerged that the film's co-writer Nick Vallelonga, Tony Vallelonga’s son, sent tweets in 2015 falsely claiming that Muslims living in America were cheering when the Twin Towers fell during the 9/11 attacks.

In addition to the Islamophobia from Vallelonga, Green Book's director Peter Farrelly has had to apologise for his past conduct after he was revealed to be a serial flasher on his film sets. “It’s true,” the Dumb and Dumber director admitted. “I was an idiot. I did this decades ago and I thought I was being funny and the truth is I’m embarrassed and it makes me cringe now. I’m deeply sorry.” Coming after a year of #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns, it appears that the Academy are yet to catch up with the mood in the film industry right now.

Female Filmmakers locked out

Women filmmakers didn't fare well at all in this year's nominations. No surprise there. In the history of the Oscars, only 13 films by women have been nominated for Best Picture, and only one, Kathryn Bigelow's 2009 war thriller The Hurt Locker, has taken the top prize. Still, given the number of exceptional films from female filmmakers this year, it’s disappointing that none could find a spot on the Best Picture nomination list, which includes eight this year (Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Green Book, Roma, A Star is Born and Vice). 

We had reasonably high hopes for Marielle Heller’s delightful comedy Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which follows writer Lee Isreal and the period in the early 90s when she made ends meet by creating forged letters by the likes of Noël Coward and Dorothy Parker. Can You Ever Forgive Me? will have to make do with its three nominations: Best Actress for Melissa McCarthy, Best Supporting Actor for Richard E Grant, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty. Other great films from women filmmakers this year include Debra Granik’s sublime Leave No Trace, which follows Ben Foster as a PTSD-suffering war vet who’s chosen to live off the grid with his 13-year-old daughter, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's knockout crime thriller You Were Never Really Here, Karyn Kusama's LA noir Destroyer and Tamara Jenkins' Private Life, a drama about a couple coping with infertility struggles. None received any Oscar love. 

Perhaps the most disappointing winner of today is Bohemian Rhapsody, which picked up five nominations including Best Picture and Best Actor. This drama about the life of the great Freddie Mercury has very little to recommend it. Not only is it a paint-by-numbers musical biopic where the ridiculous false teeth worn by Rami Malek to portray the Queen frontman do most of the acting, it should also be out of contention given that its credited director, Bryan Singer, continues to dodge decade-long accusations of sexual assault. When Bohemian Rhapsody won Best Drama at the Golden Globes, Singer was conspicuous by his absence and wasn’t thanked in any of the speeches on the night, but that didn’t stop him celebrating the win on Instagram. A Best Picture award would be even more unpalatable given the question marks hanging over his past behaviour.

The Favourite and Roma get most nominations

It's not all doom and gloom though. Few could argue with The Favourite and Roma picking up the most nominations, with ten apiece. The former is a raucous comedy that's the antithesis to the safe, middlebrow period films that usually go down well with Oscar voters, while Alfonso Cuarón's extraordinary Roma, which follows a young housekeeper in Mexico City during the early 1970s, is not only tender and gorgeous, but its characters speak entirely in Spanish and Mixtec, making it one of the few foreign language films to break out of the Foreign Language category and into Best Picture contention – only ten foreign language films have done so previously, the last being Michael Haneke's Amour in 2012.

A Star Is Born's eight nominations are also well-earned. As well as being a moving, rousing and forceful piece of filmmaking, this musical-melodrama starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper (who also directs) gave birth to powerhouse ballad Shallow and a million memes riffing on the film’s central relationship. If the Oscars had a host this year (Kevin Hart stepped down over homophobic comments he made in the past, and is yet to be replaced), A Star Is Born would be the source of the most playful gags. 

A Star Is Born, Black Panther and Bohemian Rhapsody's bagful of nominations should also be a balm to the people in the Academy who briefly mooted last year that the Oscars should introduce a new category for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film, the thinking being that no one goes to see the films nominated for Best Picture. This pandering suggestion was quickly shot down online, and looks even more ridiculous now given that those three films combined grossed $2.5 billion at the box office.

Still, Green Book? When Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film Moonlight famously won Best Picture over La La Land in the most memorable Oscar night in recent memory, it felt like a landmark moment for the Academy. Not only was Moonlight centred on a gay protagonist and featured an entirely African-American cast, it was also as daring in its form as it was in its content. An art film had beat the Oscar-bait! Two years later, with Green Book among the favourites to win with a month to go, Moonlight’s win seems less a sea change, more an anomaly.

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The 91st Academy Awards will take place 24 Feb. The full nominations list is below:

Best picture

Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
Roma
A Star is Born
Vice

Best director

Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
Adam McKay (Vice)
Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite)
Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman)
Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War)

Best actor

Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)
Christian Bale (Vice)
Viggo Mortensen (Green Book)
Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born)
Willem Dafoe (At Eternity’s Gate)

Best actress

Glenn Close (The Wife)
Lady Gaga (A Star Is Born)
Olivia Colman (The Favourite)
Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Yalitza Aparicio (Roma)

Best supporting actor

Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
Richard E Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Sam Elliott (A Star Is Born)
Adam Driver (BlacKkKlansman)
Sam Rockwell (Vice)

Best supporting actress

Emma Stone (The Favourite)
Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
Amy Adams (Vice)
Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)
Marina De Tavira (Roma)

Best adapted screenplay

If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper, Will Fetters and Eric Roth)
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty)
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel and Kevin Willmott)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)

Best original screenplay

Green Book (Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly and Nick Vallelonga)
The Favourite (Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara)
Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)
Vice (Adam McKay)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

Best animated feature

Incredibles 2
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Isle of Dogs
Mirai

Best documentary

Free Solo
Minding the Gap
RBG
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Of Fathers and Sons

Best foreign language film

Roma (Mexico)
Cold War (Poland)
Shoplifters (Japan)
Capernaum (Lebanon)
Never Look Away (Germany)

Best cinematography

Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
Cold War (Lukasz Zal)
Never Look Away (Caleb Deschanel)
The Favourite (Robbie Ryan)
A Star Is Born (Matty Libatique)

Best costume design

Black Panther (Ruth E Carter)
The Favourite (Sandy Powell)
Mary Poppins Returns (Sandy Powell)
Mary Queen of Scots (Alexandra Byrne)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Mary Zophres)

Best film editing

Bohemian Rhapsody (John Ottman)
Vice (Hank Corwin)
BlacKkKlansman (Barry Alexander Brown)
The Favourite (Yorgos Mavropsaridis)
Green Book (Patrick J Don Vito)

Best makeup and hairstyling

Border
Mary Queen of Scots
Vice

Best original score

If Beale Street Could Talk (Nicholas Britell)
Mary Poppins Returns (Marc Shaiman)
Isle of Dogs (Alexandre Desplat)
BlacKkKlansman (Terence Blanchard)
Black Panther (Ludwig Goransson)

Best original song

Shallow (A Star Is Born)
All the Stars (Black Panther)
I’ll Fight (RBG)
The Place Where Lost Things Go (Mary Poppins Returns)
When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs)

Best production design

The Favourite (Fiona Crombie and Alice Felton)
First Man (Nathan Crowley and Kathy Lucas)
Roma (Eugenio Caballero and Barbara Enriquez)
Mary Poppins Returns (John Myhre and Gordon Sim)
Black Panther (Hannah Beachler and Jay Hart)

Best sound editing

First Man
A Quiet Place
Bohemian Rhapsody
Black Panther
Roma

Best sound mixing

A Star Is Born
Bohemian Rhapsody
First Man
Roma
Black Panther

Best visual effects

First Man
Avengers: Infinity War
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Ready Player One
Christopher Robin

Best animated short

Animal Behaviour
Bao
Late Afternoon
One Small Step
Weekends

Best documentary short

Black Sheep
End Game
Lifeboat
A Night at the Garden
Period. End of Sentence

Best live action short

Detainment
Fauve
Marguerite
Mother
Skin