Oscar Nominations

The Baffling 2016 Oscar Nominees

Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant.” His performance was among those nominated for a 2016 Oscar. Credit PHOTOGRAPH FROM 20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP / EVERETT

The Kremlinology of Oscar predictions remains as baffling as ever, reinforcing pessimism about how the Academy’s members define artistic quality—or, rather, how they define how they want to be seen defining it. The first thing to leap out from this morning’s nominations is the incredible whiteness of the nominees for performance. “Creed” should have been a shoo-in for a Best Picture nomination, and its star, Michael B. Jordan, who carries the movie on his well-muscled shoulders, should have been a contender for Best Actor. (I also thought that Tessa Thompson’s supporting role was among the year’s best, but I harbored no expectation that she’d be nominated.)

I agree that Sylvester Stallone gave a hearty, worldly-wise performance as the aged Rocky Balboa, and thought that he’d be one of the few intersections between my own year-end picks and the nominations. But the Academy’s choice of no one but Stallone to represent “Creed” at the awards—no Jordan and no Ryan Coogler, who wrote and directed it, and, for that matter, no Maryse Alberti, whose distinctively agile cinematography is integral to the movie’s emotional impact—is a grotesque distortion of the viewing experience. It’s a distortion that, in effect, filters out the blackness from Coogler’s remarkable drama about the modes and ironies of black American experience and reduces the film to “Rocky 7.” That distortion says much about the Academy—much that the Academy wouldn’t like to acknowledge about itself.

Regarding acting, I made a category error—I figured that Christian Bale would get a Best Actor nomination for his performance in “The Big Short”; in fact, he got one for Best Supporting Actor. I counted on much more enthusiasm for “99 Homes, ” Ramin Bahrani’s drama about a young man who, after his family loses its home in the subprime-mortgage crisis, takes a job with the banker who foreclosed on it; I didn’t figure on the wind being diverted from the film’s sails to those of “The Big Short, ” which, I think, is the one movie that has a chance of pipping “Spotlight” at the post. Yet I also underestimated the Academy’s enthusiasm for the supporting performances in “Spotlight” and overestimated the impact of Michael Keaton’s lead performance there.

In the Best Actor category, never underestimate the Academy’s prostration before British stage acting and genteel British dramas such as “The Danish Girl” (or simply never bet against Eddie Redmayne). Instead of Oscars, they ought simply to give its director, Tom Hooper (who also made “The King’s Speech” and “Les Misérables”), the mold to make statuettes of his own for his actors. Michael Fassbender’s performance as Steve Jobs is flimsy as interpretation but impressive as impersonation. I think that Fassbender’s best role isn’t any that he plays onscreen but the one that he plays in the industry: classic leading man, tall and suave and athletic, redolent of energetic virility. It’s a masterwork of marketing—which may well be his closest connection to the role of Jobs.

I’m surprised and happy to see Jennifer Lawrence get nominated for her lead role in David O. Russell’s “Joy, ” a movie for which she’s miscast but in which she nonetheless works wonders. I’d have wanted to see that lead role played by an actress with a more streetwise and garlicky charm—someone more like Marisa Tomei, for instance—but that’s only one side of the character. Joy herself isn’t charming but charmed—she’s a sort of secret genius who stands out for her character even when it stands far ahead of her accomplishments, a prodigy (albeit of untapped talents). Lawrence, herself a charmed performer of precocious groundedness and irrepressible curiosity, here does exactly the opposite of what she does in her brilliant but shallow character turn in Russell’s “American Hustle”—rather than laying on the accent and the mannerisms, she blanks herself out a little and effaces her technique in order to model the character of Joy not on her skill but on her inner strength. I didn’t expect the Academy to reward her for it.

I expected, based on a combination of star power and gestural precision, that Cate Blanchett would be nominated for Best Actress for her role in “Carol, ” and so she was—and it’s good that her partner in drama, Rooney Mara, was nominated as well, for Best Supporting Actress. I consider their performances inseparable, in effect one leading role, and I’m glad to see their colleagues acknowledge as much—along with the screenplay, by Phyllis Nagy, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt, ” which gave them such a showcase. Nagy thins out the text and, for that matter, the characters, in order to give the images a relatively quiet space in which to sing. I’m all the more delighted that Ed Lachman’s extraordinary cinematography was nominated as well—it’s inseparable from the construction of those performances, the tone that they set. (It would be asking too much for Todd Haynes’s perceptive directorial orchestration to be recognized—it’s simply too refined an art not to slip through the Academy’s gross filter.) If Lachman doesn’t win, it may well be the fault of the system—the distribution of DVD screeners to Academy members, most of whom will see one of the cinematographic marvels of the year on their television sets, when it should be seen in a theatre and up close (and “Carol” is one of the few films where it matters).

Blanchett delivers what is perhaps the best cinematic gesture of the year—with her hand, to accompany the phrase “I like the hat.” Mark Rylance’s nomination for Best Supporting Actor, for his turn as Rudolf Abel, in “Bridge of Spies, ” is due, I think, to a similar synergy of actor and material: his delivery of a single recurring line—“Would it help?”—is the hook that catches voters. That script, too—by Joel and Ethan Coen and Matt Charman—was nominated, for Best Original Screenplay. The phrase in question has the Coens’ fingerprints all over it (and the movie’s director, Steven Spielberg, confirms the surmise).

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