But we have the next six weeks to celebrate all of those wonderful achievements, so today they can take a backseat to a different set of emotions: confusion, incredulity, despondence, and outrage at a handful of surprising selections that range from head-scratching to tone-deaf to outright spiteful. As always with these things, it’s worth remembering that no film you love is any different today than it was yesterday. They’ll all still be there, ready for your next rewatch, same as they ever were. Unfortunately though, Oscar snubs do mean these films will get fewer eyes on them than they otherwise might have, and there’s real sadness in that. But as smarter people than me have said, the Oscars are merely a first draft of history, and we can hold out hope that our favorites will still get discovered by eager viewers in due time (as I’m hoping with my beloved “The Promised Land,” cruelly left out of the Best International Film race).
With that in mind, let’s break down this morning’s most notable omissions, and try to make sense of what they mean.
1. “Barbie”
We have to start here. Though it was a decent morning for “Barbie” overall, and eight total nominations is certainly nothing to shake a stick at, perhaps the two most jaw-dropping omissions of the nominee slate were the two women behind the highest-grossing film of the year. Greta Gerwig’s snub for Best Director, coming from a branch that doesn’t tend to honor a lot of women (though “Anatomy of a Fall” director Justine Triet at least got in the field this year), unfortunately started to feel like the worst kind of quasi-inevitable in recent weeks. But Margot Robbie missing out on Best Actress was truly shocking. The silver lining, if there is one here, is that at least Gerwig and Robbie were nominated in other categories (Gerwig for her delightfully subversive “Barbie” script and Robbie for producing the film).
2. The Cast of “May December”
Few actors that ultimately failed to get an Oscar nomination have dominated the critics awards quite like Charles Melton did over the last few months (the last time was probably Ethan Hawke for “First Reformed,” five years ago) and his pileup of honors from regional critics groups and film societies became so overwhelming that it started to feel like an Oscar nomination was really in the cards. But it was not, and nor was it for Melton’s “May December” cast mates, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. Perhaps the writing was on the wall when all three missed out with the Screen Actors Guild a few weeks ago—the movie might’ve been just a bit too scathing of actors (and their fabled “process”) to resonate with voting bodies made up entirely of actors.