The Critics Choice Awards nominations were announced yesterday (I am a voting member of the CCA), giving a huge boost to the ongoing Oscar campaigns of Wicked and Conclave, which banked eleven nominations each.
Dune: Part II, a lower key presence in awards season so far, got ten nominations, tied with Emilia Pérez for the second most overall. The difference maker for Dune? The presence of craft categories. Like the Oscars, the CCAs award things like costuming, hair and makeup styling, and production design. Dune: Part II was nominated in every craft category, while also picking up topline nominations like Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. This is a preview of things to come on Oscar nomination morning on January 17.
Like the Golden Globes, the CCA doesn’t have overlap with the Academy, so it’s not a great bellwether for the Oscars, especially this year as the CCA telecast is on the same day Oscar nominations end, so a good winning speech won’t have any impact. But in this very competitive year, every time your name gets called matters, so these nominations do have the potential to get some fence sitters to pick a side. Which is why Dune: Part II getting so many nominations is such a shot in the arm for that film.
There are some surprises in these nominations, too, such as Hugh Grant pulling a Best Actor nomination for Heretic and Margaret Qualley FINALLY getting her name called for The Substance (I nominated both of them!). Also, Challengers’ editor Marco Costa pulling a nomination for Best Editing—he just won that award from the Chicago Film Critics Association, of which I am also a voting member, and he’s nominated by the editors’ guild for the ACE Eddie Awards in the feature/comedy category, too—is a sign that he’s gaining traction in the Best Editing race, which is competitive thanks to Furiosa’s Margaret Sixel (she previously won an Oscar for editing Mad Max: Fury Road) and Dune 2’s Joe Walker (he won an Oscar for Dune). Keep an eye on Marco Costa.
Other, less cheerful surprises include Sebastian Stan getting shut out of nominations after being a double nominee at the Golden Globes. His Oscar campaign isn’t over, but he’s looking increasingly like a bubble guy, sliding toward an outside chance guy. Timothee Chalamet has come to claim his presumptive place as a nominee, and I think Daniel Craig and Sebastian Stan are battling it out for the last slot at the Oscars. The Academy is weird about handsome young men, and they’re already accepting Chalamet, so I expect it to lean Craig’s way, in the end. Also, Pamela Anderson is still coming up short in the extremely competitive Best Actress race, and Nicole Kidman also missed with the CCA. I don’t think this will hurt her with the Academy, but after missing at the Globes, too, it looks increasingly like Saoirse Ronan’s campaign is over.
As for Best Picture, the CCA nominations could very well align with the Oscars next month. They are:
A Complete Unknown
Anora
The Brutalist
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Pérez
Nickel Boys
Sing Sing
The Substance
Wicked
You could maybe substitute RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys for Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, but this very much looks like a potential Oscar ballot. I don’t mind any of these nominees except A Complete Unknown, it’s not THAT good; Wicked, it’s a phenomenon so it’s unavoidable but it looks like gray sludge, and it has no ending; and Emilia Pérez is ridiculous, and we’ll all regret it in a few years, but the Oscars gave Green Book Best Picture, so all bets are off. Anything can happen at the Oscars.
Check out the full list of CCA nominees here.