NEW YORK (AP):
Jane Campion’s gothic western The Power of the Dog led nominations for the 94th Academy Awards, where streaming services more than ever before swept over Hollywood’s top honours.
Campion’s Netflix film landed a leading 12 nominations in nominations announced Tuesday, including nods for Best Picture, Best Director and for all of its top actors: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Campion, a nominee for 1993′s The Piano, became the first woman ever to be nominated twice for Best Director. Last year, Chloé Zhao became just the second woman ever to win the award. Campion’s director of photography, Ari Wegner, also became the second woman ever nominated for Best Cinematography. The only previous woman to do so was Rachel Morrison for Mudbound in 2018.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune followed closely behind with 10 nominations spread out largely in the technical categories as the academy gravitated to the craft of Villeneuve’s science-fiction epic.
The nominees for Best Picture are: Belfast, The Power of the Dog, Dune, Drive My Car, West Side Story, Don’t Look Up, Licorice Pizza, CODA, King Richard and Nightmare Alley.
Best Picture has never been won by a film from a streaming service, but half of the 10 nominees came from streaming services. This year, the odds may be better than ever that a streamer will finally barrel through one of the last walls of Hollywood tradition.
Apple notched its first Best Picture nomination with the deaf drama CODA. Netflix backed both The Power of the Dog and Adam McKay’s apocalyptic comedy Don’t Look Up. And both King Richard and Dune (despite the protests of its director) debuted simultaneously in theatres and on HBO Max.
In pulling from films released in myriad ways, the Oscar nominations reflected the tumult of pandemic year for Hollywood that began with many theatres shuttered and ended with Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: No Way Home smashing box-office records. Spidey, though, landed only a single nomination, for visual effects.
VIRTUAL AWARDS SEASON
A largely virtual awards season added some unpredictability to this year’s nominations, which were announced by actors Leslie Jordan and Tracee Ellis Ross. This year’s Oscars will be delayed to make way for the Olympics. The Oscars will be held on March 27 and will return to their usual venue, the Dolby Theatre.
And there were surprises all around. Lady Gaga, star of House of Gucci, was overlooked in the uber-competitive Best Actress category. Nominated instead were Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye; Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter; Penélope Cruz, Parallel Mothers; Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos; and Kristen Stewart for Spencer — whose hopes for her first Oscar nomination had seemed dashed after she was snubbed by the Screen Actors Guild.
Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s masterful three-hour Japanese drama, scored major nominations including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The academy, which in 2020 made Bong Joon Ho’s Korean thriller Parasite the Best Picture winner, has drifted overseas in recent years, as more international members have been added to help diversify the organisation.
The nominees for Best Actor are: Will Smith, King Richard; Javier Bardem, Being the Ricardos; Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog; Andrew Garfield, Tick, Tick … Boom! and Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth.
The nominees for Best Supporting Actress are Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter; Ariana DeBose, West Side Story; Judi Dench, Belfast; Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog and Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard.
The nominees for Best Supporting Actor are: Ciarán Hinds, Belfast; Troy Kotsur, CODA; Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog; Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog and J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos.
The nominees for Original Song are: Be Alive from King Richard; Dos Oruguitas from Encanto; Down To Joy from Belfast; No Time To Die from No Time to Die; Somehow You Do from Four Good Days.
The nominees for Best Animated Feature are: Encanto, Flee, Luca, The Mitchells vs the Machines, and Raya and the Last Dragon.
The nominees for documentary feature are: Summer of Soul (Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Flee, Attica, Ascension, and Writing With Fire.
Nominees for Best Director are Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza; Kenneth Branagh, Belfast; Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog; Steven Spielberg, West Side Story and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car.
As COVID-19 cases surged in the last two months due to the omicron variant, much of Oscar season also turned virtual. Last year, the pandemic led the academy to host a delayed Oscars in a socially distanced ceremony at Los Angeles’ Union Station. Ratings plummeted to an all-time low of 9.85 million viewers.
This year, the academy has yet to map out plans for its show, except that it will include a host for the first time since 2018. For better or worse, the Academy Awards will also be without its usual lead-in. The Golden Globes in January were an untelevised non-event after NBC said it wouldn’t air them in 2022, while the beleaguered Hollywood Foreign Press reformed itself after ethics and diversity criticism.
Other changes were more subtle but potentially impactful. For the first time, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences ruled out hard-copy DVD screeners for its members, who instead could watch submissions on the academy’s streaming platform.