Observations on the 2016 Oscar Nominations (with No Bitching About What Didn’t Make It)

The 2016 Oscar nominations were announced Thursday.  Going down through them there are a few eyebrow raisers, but no out and out WTFs like a few years ago when Ben Affleck didn’t even get nominated for Best Director for the movie that ended up winning Best Picture (Argo).

Here are the eight Best Picture nominees:

The Big Short

Brooklyn

Bridge of Spies

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Room

Spotlight

I will post reviews for as many of these movies as I would recommend prior to the Oscar telecast on February 28^th.  At this point I have seen five of the eight and would recommend all five.  I will also post my predictions in the days leading up to the ceremony.  And I may have my yearly Oscar quiz.

Most nominations among the Best Picture nominees:

The Revenant – 12

Mad Max: Fury Road – 10

The Martian – 7

Bridge of Spies – 6

Spotlight – 6

The Big Short – 5

Room – 4

Brooklyn – 3

Multiple nominations among other “Oscar bait” films:

Carol – 6 (Actress, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Score, Costume Design)

The Danish Girl – 4 (Actor, Supporting Actress, Costume Design, Production Design)

Sicario – 3 (Cinematography, Score, Sound Editing)

Steve Jobs – 2 (Actor, Supporting Actress)

I’m not sure if any of these will win an award.  My best guess would be Carol for Costume Design.

Mainstream movies with nominations:

Mad Max: Fury Road – 10 (Picture, Director, Cinematography, Editing, Costume Design, Production Design, Makeup/Hairstyling, Visual Effects, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing)

The Martian – 7 (Picture, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Visual Effects, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – 5 (Editing, Score, Visual Effects, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing)

The Hateful Eight – 3 (Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Score)

Ex Machina – 2 (Original Screenplay, Visual Effects)

Cinderella – 1 (Costume Design)

Fifty Shades of Grey – 1 (Song)

Spectre – 1 (Song)

Straight Outta Compton – 1 (Original Screenplay)

Two years ago there was only the usual assortment of technical nominations.  Last year, however, Interstellar received five nominations.  And this year is a bonanza for popular films with three getting at least five nominations, two of those even for Best Picture.

Best Animated, Foreign Language, or Documentary nominees with any other nominations:

Inside Out – 2 (Original Screenplay, Animated Feature)

Last year not one of the nominees for Best Animated Feature received a Best Original Song nomination and that continues this year.  In fact, no animated film was nominated in the Best Song category this year (last year had one – The Lego Movie). 

Surprisingly, though, not one but two documentaries were nominated for Best Song this year – The Hunting Ground and Racing Extinction – but neither was nominated for Best Documentary.  The only other docs I remember having a Best Song nominee were the recent Chasing Ice (2012) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006).  Maybe this is a new tactic to get more people to watch documentaries.

Movies Nominated Only for Acting:

Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender – Actor, Kate Winslet – Supporting Actress)

Trumbo (Bryan Cranston – Actor)

45 Years (Charlotte Rampling – Actress)

Joy (Jennifer Lawrence – Actress)

Creed (Sylvester Stallone – Supporting Actor)

The fact that two of the Best Actor nominations come from films with no other Oscar support is a little surprising.  It’s relatively common for Best Actress nominees.

No film was nominated in all five major categories:

Last year saw three films nominated in four of the five categories (Birdman, The Theory of Everything, and The Imitation Game), but this year only the little seen Room managed that feat (Picture, Director, Actress, Screenplay; missing for Actor).  And it received only those four nominations and no others.

Like Boyhood last year, Spotlight had a “mini-five” by receiving nominations for Film, Director, Screenplay, and then Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress.

Other observations:

AMPAS expanded from five Best Picture nominees to ten for the 2010 Oscars.  They must have felt that was going to be too many because it only lasted that way two years then they changed it to be “up to ten” nominees.  Nine appeared to be the magic number for them after that because the next three years saw that many.  Then came 2015 and 2016 where they have gone with eight.  Maybe they are slowly working their way back down to five nominees.

The increased nominations were done primarily to include at least one big, popular film, and/or a film dealing with minority issues.  Most years it has achieved that goal (Precious in 2010, Inception in 2011, The Help in 2012, Django Unchained in 2013, Gravity in 2014, and Selma in 2015.)  This year has seen a bonanza with Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, and even to a certain extent The Big Short, all getting Best Picture nominations.

Looking at the “real” Best Picture nominees (those that also received one of the five Best Director nominations) two of the remaining three – Bridge of Spies and Brooklyn – are not really surprises for not being nominated for Best Director.  The Martian is a bit of a surprise since it is Ridley Scott’s best film in many years.  Unlike last year, there are no Best Director nominees that did not also receive a Best Picture nomination.

Last year fully half of the Best Picture nominees were about real people/events and that continues this year with The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, The Revenant, and Spotlight.  And The Danish Girl, which many expected to be nominated, was also based on actual events.

Once again the Oscars look to other countries to fill out the nominations for Best Animated Feature.  They rarely do this in the Best Picture category, but it’s almost common in this one.  The result, though, is that some American animated films that were expecting nominations did not receive them.  The Peanuts Movie being left out this year is probably the biggest surprise here.  (As was The Lego Movie last year).

Two of the five Foreign Language Film nominees (Embrace of the Serpent from Colombia and Theeb from Jordan) are the first Oscar nominations for those two countries.

Last year all eight of the Best Picture nominees also received Screenplay nominations.

This year The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road – the two films with the most nominations – did not receive any.  If you think about it, though, it makes sense since neither actually has much story in them when you get right down to it.

Mad Max: Fury Road is also the only Best Picture nominee without a single acting nomination.  While that also happened last year with Selma, that film only received two overall nominations. Mad Max: Fury Road received ten.

The amount of nominations among the Best Picture candidates is more spread out this year.  Last year only Selma had less than five nominations and no film had more than nine.  This year we have 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 10, and 12 nominations apiece.

The Best Actress category pits two former winners (Cate Blanchett and Jennifer Lawrence) against three first time nominees (Brie Larson, Charlotte Rampling, and Saoirse Ronan).  Rampling is receiving her first at the age of 70, while Ronan and Larson are 21 and 26, respectively.  Hell, Lawrence is still only 25 and she’s already received four Oscar nominations.  For comparison, Kate Winslet did not receive her fourth nomination until she was 29.  And I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb here when I say that I am pretty sure Rampling is the only Oscar nominee to have ever played a lover of a chimpanzee in a film (1986’s Max Mon Amour – and no, it’s not a comedy).

In the Supporting Actor category Sylvester Stallone is nominated for playing Rocky Balboa, a character he first played 40 years ago.  He was also nominated for that first performance at the 1976 Oscars, although he didn’t win.  I cannot think of any other performer who received Oscar nominations for playing the same character so many years apart.  (If you can think of one, please let me know.) Paul Newman was nominated for playing Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961) and The Color of Money (1986) – a gap of 25 years.  Like Stallone, Newman lost the first time around.  Newman won the second time.  Maybe this bodes well for Stallone.

On the other hand, Stallone’s competitors include Batman (Christian Bale), Bane (Tom Hardy), and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).  Can even the Italian Stallion defeat all of them?

In the Supporting Actress category we’ve got Rooney Mara who probably had more screen time in Carol than co-star Cate Blanchett who was nominated for Best Actress.  I have not seen The Danish Girl yet, but I had read that Supporting Actress nominee Alicia Vikander is actually a co-lead in that one, too.  Kate Winslet has now received her seventh Oscar nomination.  Amazingly, this is the first one ever for Jennifer Jason Leigh, who has had many great performances over the last 35 years.  Rachel McAdams is also a first time nominee. 

Last year I wrote how Roger Deakins was nominated for a 12^th time for Best Cinematography and how he had not yet won despite shooting such movies as The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Skyfall, and many others.  He even received two nominations in 2008 for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, but did not win for either.  Guess what?  He received a 13^th nomination this year for Sicario.  And the bad news is he’s probably going to lose again to current golden boy Emmanuel Lubezki who is nominated for The Revenant, a film that is trending upward, while Sicario is already falling by the wayside.

Speaking of Lubezki, he is nominated for Best Cinematography for the third consecutive year.  He has also won the prior two years (Gravity, Birdman) so he has a chance to achieve a very rare feat if he wins again.

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.  At 63 characters its name is one longer than The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which won, coincidentally, for Best Makeup.  If The 100 Year Old Man wins I think it will be the longest titled film to win an Oscar.  Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb is 67 characters long, but it didn’t win any of the four Oscars for which it was nominated.  And if you’re wondering about last year’s Best Picture winner Birdman, its full title is “only” 47 characters long – Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

Just like the last two years (and many other years) AMPAS swaps out a single nominee from the Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing nominations to try to show that they should remain separate categories, which then allows them to continue to freeze out a Best Stunt Production category.  This year Sicario is in the Sound Editing category while Bridge of Spies is in the Sound Mixing category.  Last year it was The Hobbit and Whiplash.  Two years ago it was All Is Lost and Inside Llewyn Davis splitting them.

Oscars to Golden Globes observations:

Among the ten Golden Globe nominated films four of them did not receive a similar Oscar nomination – Carol from the Drama category and Joy, Spy, and Trainwreck from the Comedy/Musical category.  However, both winners – The Revenant (Drama) and The Martian (Comedy/Musical) – were nominated.

Among the six acting winners from the Globes – Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Brie Larson, Jennifer Lawrence, Sylvester Stallone, and Kate Winslet – all received Oscar acting nominations.  Last year the winner for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical – Amy Adams – was left out.

Like the Oscars, the Globes only have five nominations for Best Director.  They included Ridley Scott for The Martian and Todd Haynes for Carol.  AMPAS swapped them out for Adam McKay (The Big Short) and Lenny Abrahamson (Room).

Across all the Golden Globe film categories the only winner not to receive an Oscar nomination is Aaron Sorkin for his screenplay for Steve Jobs.  And the Globes do not even divide between Original and Adapted with their five nominees, so the Oscars had twice the number of films nominated and still didn’t find room for Sorkin on the ballet.

Here is the complete list of nominations in all twenty-four categories.  I will list my picks for all of them just prior to the Oscars:

Best Picture

The Big Short

Brooklyn

Bridge of Spies

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Room

Spotlight

Best Animated Picture

Anomalisa

Boy & the World

Inside Out

Shaun the Sheep Movie

When Marnie Was There

Best Foreign Language Picture

Embrace of the Serpent	Colombia
Mustang	Turkey
Son of Saul	Hungary
Theeb	Jordan
A War	Denmark

Best Documentary

Amy

Cartel Land

The Look of Silence

What Happened, Miss Simone?

Winter on Fire

Best Actor

Bryan Cranston	Trumbo
Matt Damon	The Martian
Leonardo DiCaprio	The Revenant
Michael Fassbender	Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne	The Danish Girl

Best Actress

Cate Blanchett	Carol
Brie Larson	Room
Jennifer Lawrence	Joy
Charlotte Rampling	45 Years
Saoirse Ronan	Brooklyn

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale	The Big Short
Tom Hardy	The Revenant
Mark Ruffalo	Spotlight
Mark Rylance	Bridge of Spies
Sylvester Stallone	Creed

Best Supporting Actress

Jennifer Jason Leigh	The Hateful Eight
Rooney Mara	Carol
Rachel McAdams	Spotlight
Alicia Vikander	The Danish Girl
Kate Winslet	Steve Jobs

Best Director

Lenny Abrahamson	Room
Alejandro Inarritu	The Revenant
Tom McCarthy	Spotlight
Adam McKay	The Big Short
George Miller	Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Original Screenplay

Bridge of Spies

Ex Machina

Inside Out

Spotlight

Straight Outta Compton

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Big Short

Brooklyn

Carol

The Martian

Room

Best Original Song

Earned It	Fifty Shades of Grey
Til It Happens to You	The Hunting Ground
Manta Ray	Racing Extinction
Writing’s on the Wall	Spectre
Simple Song #3	Youth

Best Original Score

Bridge of Spies

Carol

The Hateful Eight

Sicario

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Best Cinematography

Carol

The Hateful Eight

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Revenant

Sicario

Best Editing

The Big Short

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Revenant

Spotlight

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Best Production Design

Bridge of Spies

The Danish Girl

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Best Costume Design

Carol

Cinderella

The Danish Girl

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Revenant

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Revenant

Best Visual Effects

Ex Machina

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Best Sound Editing

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Sicario

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Best Sound Mixing

Bridge of Spies

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Best Animated Short

Bear Story

Prologue

Sanjay’s Super Team

We Can’t Live Without Cosmos

World of Tomorrow

Best Documentary Short

Body Team 12

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah

A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness

Last Day of Freedom

War Within the Walls

Best Live Action Short

Ave Maria

Day One

Everything Will Be Okay

Shok

Stutterer