7 Oscar Nominations That Need To Happen On Thursday: Michael Keaton, Julianne Moore, Richard Linklater, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, J.K. Simmons, Emmanuel Lubezki, Patricia Arquette and Eddie Redmayne are among the many people who should expect to hear their names called when nominations for the 87th annual Academy Awards are announced on Thursday. But there are still a surfeit of contenders on the bubble at the moment. Here are seven who should be anything but underdogs -- aka if the Oscars dont nominate this group, something went terribly wrong. Ava DuVernay, Best Director for Selma To consider Ava DuVernay a fringe candidate in this category is an outrage, but after the brouhaha over the historical precision of Selma and several snubs from prominent guild groups, thats what this Oscar race has become. When the movie screened for press around Thanksgiving, the critical conclave sent up white smoke that pointed to Selma having locked up one of the haziest Best Picture races in recent memory. I still think itll make that shortlist, but it seems like Ava DuVernay, who would become the first black woman nominated for Best Director, will not. To encapsulate the contemporary cultural milieu and make the years most expertly crafted film, yet still walk away empty-handed, is the years biggest awards transgression. -- Matthew Jacobs Damien Chazelle, Best Director for Whiplash For months, a great many awards pundits have put Damien Chazelle inside the box Benh Zeitlin created two years ago. Its a pretty enticing narrative: Both men are young, white and debuted what would become a major awards contender at the Sundance Film Festival (Chazelle with Whiplash, Zeitlin with Beasts of the Southern Wild). Zeitlin ended his magic run with a Best Director nomination; Chazelle should follow suit, but only if he can nudge out someone like Clint Eastwood or Morten Tyldum (both of whom appeared on the Directors Guild shortlist this week). On merit, he should: well be talking about Whiplash long after the really good The Imitation Game and the pretty bad American Sniper fade from memory. -- Christopher Rosen Laura Dern, Best Supporting Actress for Wild Patricia Arquette has been such a shoo-in for Boyhood that it seems like we stopped weighing the other four Best Supporting Actress slots long ago. That comes at the expense of Tilda Swinton, Carrie Coon, Melissa McCarthy, Rene Russo and Laura Dern, who, with Wild, gave one of the years most accomplished performances. Her screen time is relatively brief, but she has the lofty task of capturing years of backstory using only flashback scenes. Shes radiant. If nothing else, the Academy owes Dern a Wild nomination to atone for no awards groups paying any attention to her equally moving part in The Fault in Our Stars. -- MJ Bradford Young, Best Cinematography for Selma Much like how a nomination for Ava DuVernay should absolutely be a thing that happens on Thursday, so too should some serious recognition for Bradford Young. The years most discussed cinematographer worked on both A Most Violent Year and Selma, but its the latter film that should land Young among the five Best Cinematography nominees on Thursday. As with DuVernay, Young was ignored by his relevant guild -- the American Society of Cinematographers -- but it would be an egregious mistake for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to follow suit. Youngs work on Selma is wildly original and gorgeous without being showy. He stood out as the years best image maker, and should be rewarded as such. -- CR Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, Best Original Screenplay for Love is Strange Love Is Strange should have factored into the entire race, but it looks like the Independent Spirit Awards may be the only prize to pile on the praise this movie deserves. Its screenplay is probably the sole opportunity for any Oscar attention, and even that seems like a long shot. Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias managed to write a movie thats at once heartwarming and heartbreaking, simple and relentlessly layered. Those same adjectives might apply to, say, Interstellar, yet look how bloated Jonathan and Christopher Nolans script was. Sachs and Zacharias wrote a sweet, no-frills movie about growing old, living in New York, being gay, navigating family dynamics, maintaining romance and finding comfort. Love is Strange proves it doesnt even take 100 minutes to make the years most thoughtful movie (see also: Nightcrawler). -- MJ Alexandre Desplat, Best Original Score for The Grand Budapest Hotel Alexandre Desplat produced five scores this year, including one for The Imitation Game that might land him a seventh Oscar nomination. It would be well deserved -- his score for Morten Tyldums movie is quite good! -- but nothing on Desplats 2014 CV compares to The Grand Budapest Hotel. Desplats latest collaboration with Wes Anderson, following Moonrise Kingdom, is a throwback of Eastern European influences that fits the waltz-loving composer like the glove of a dowager. Its an oxymoron of delicate bombast that provides Andersons most emotional movie to date with a lot of its emotion. For the love of antique tuba parts, please dont leave this one off the nominees list. -- CR Selma for Best Picture Critics dont matter when it comes to Oscars, but Selma has a better Metacritic rating than Birdman, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Whiplash and American Sniper. (Of the major Best Picture contenders, only Boyhood rates higher.) At Oscar prognostication site Gold Derby, all 27 experts have Selma listed among their Best Picture predictions. Yet after being blanked by the major guilds -- Producers, Screen Actors, Directors -- Selma has the look and feel of an outsider. A long shot. A snub. That would be an unforgivable mistake. -- CR
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 15:56:37 +0000
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