The Oscar nominations are finally here (someone stop Emilia Pérez)

After a couple of weeks of delays and fire-related chaos, the nominees for the 97th Academy Awards are here, and I am in a VERY “I told you so” mood because Monica Barbaro snagged that Best Supporting Actress nomination that I’ve been saying she could get since last fall. 

I wrote up a list of nomination predictions at The Squawk yesterday and also called Sebastian Stan for that contentious fifth Best Actor spot and he landed that, too. And I went eight-for-ten on Best Picture nominations, but I can’t say I’m mad about Nickel Boys and I’m Still Here getting nominated, though it does kind of feel like A24 botched the handling of Sing Sing, though Colman Domingo did complete the back-to-back Best Actor challenge.

The nominations this year are largely as expected, given the interruption of the fires and how they brought the machinery of awards season to a grinding halt over the last couple of weeks. There are some pleasant surprises, such as Nickel Boys getting Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay nods, and Coralie Fargeat becoming a double nominee for Best Director—far from a sure thing—and Best Original Screenplay. But overall, it’s a lot of the same names we’ve been hearing since December: Timothee Chalamet, Ralph Fiennes, Kieran Culkin, Zoe Saldaña, Demi Moore, Mikey Madison, Anora, Emilia Pérez, Wicked, The Substance.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not mad about most of these nominations. Emilia Pérez I’m never going to understand, it’s not good and giving it thirteen nominations is tomfoolery of the highest order. Wicked I at least understand in the tradition of Technicolor Hollywood musicals, and it has good songs. Emilia Pérez doesn’t even have good songs. But the Crash and Green Book-like specter of Emilia Pérez aside, 2024 was a year with a lot of good movies, and these Oscar nominations largely reflect that. 

Emilia Pérez is, embarrassingly, the most nominated film with 13 nods, followed by Wicked and The Brutalist with ten nominations each, then Conclave and A Complete Unknown with eight apiece. Anora got six, then Dune: Part Two and The Substance with five each. These are all films we’ve been talking about for months as Oscar heavy hitters, and indeed, they make up the meat of the nominations, dominating across technical and craft categories, with several of these films featuring multiple acting nominations, too. 

Even the exclusions are unsurprising—not “snubs” because it was too competitive of a year, someone was always going to get left out. But after missing SAG nominations, indeed, Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie were not nominated. In fact, Maria only scored one nomination, for Best Cinematography. Babygirl proved entirely too much for the Academy, which is still a pretty stuffy group of people, and didn’t get any. But again, 2024 had a lot of good movies, and nominations are finite. I don’t consider these snubs because they were never a sure thing, though one wonders how Angelina Jolie feels after the sheer amount of gladhanding she did only to stop at the Golden Globes. A little bit of an ouch, there. 

But the other side of that coin is Fernanda Torres being nominated for I’m Still Here, which is well deserved, but almost certainly happened because of her lovely speech at the Golden Globes, the last thing Academy voters saw before fire took over LA. And while it sucks Pamela Anderson didn’t complete the fairytale with a nomination, Demi Moore finally being recognized by her peers is a similar kind of heartwarming. It’s just hard to get too mad about the exclusions when the inclusions are also feel-good stories of their own. In a similar vein, darling animated animal adventure film Flow is not only a Best Animated Feature nominee, but it is now Latvia’s first Oscar nomination for Best International Film. As much as people like to sh-t on the Oscars, these nominations mean so much to people outside Hollywood. 

With the nominations in place, we now enter the final stage of awards season, the six-week wait for the Oscars. The Academy has said the show will go on, though they intend to “honor Los Angeles” after Hollywood’s home was ravaged by wildfire (with new fires now burning to the north and south, around San Diego). We’ll have to see how and if momentum resumes for the nominees, though at this point, I don’t think the frontrunners have deviated much from expectations. Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña continue their march toward trophies, Demi Moore is now the Best Actress frontrunner, Adrien Brody is the top contender for Best Actor, but Ralph Fiennes could decide to play the “it’s his time” card and make things interesting. Timothee Chalamet still has to overcome being young and handsome, two things the Academy resents in actors. 

And while I would LOVE to see a film like The Substance win Best Picture, the fact that it didn’t get a Best Editing nomination means that it is unlikely. With the uneven split between the number of nominees in those two categories, there might not be an editing/picture lockstep winning combination, but I DO think the editing nominees tell you who the serious Best Picture contenders are. Which means we are never escaping the gravitational pull of Emilia Pérez. Brace yourself for an Emilia Pérez Best Picture win right now. It will hurt less down the road if you do. 

View the complete list of nominees here. 

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