Last year, actress Andrea Riseborough employed a new kind of Oscar bid: Instead of waging a costly, months long awards campaign for her performance in the microbudget indie To Leslie, her team waited until the weeklong Oscar-voting window opened, then leveraged a group of famous friends that included Edward Norton, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sarah Paulson to tout the movie en masse on social media. It worked, earning Riseborough a surprise best actress nomination, and although she sought to pay it forward last week by throwing her muscle behind Ava DuVernay’s underseen Origin, the film was snubbed by the academy, while all 20 acting slots went to performers who had campaigned the old-fashioned way.

Romance was in the air

Hey, was this Oscar-nomination morning or Valentine’s Day? At least six couples scored his-and-hers nominations today, including Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan and his producer wife, Emma Thomas; Anatomy of a Fall director Justine Triet and her partner and co-writer, Arthur Harari; May December co-writers Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik; and Jared and Jerusha Hess, the directors of the animated short Ninety-Five Senses. Barbie was responsible for the other two pairs of lovebirds, with Gerwig and her husband, Noah Baumbach, nominated in the adapted-screenplay category and Margot Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerley, earning nominations as the film’s producers.

Leonardo DiCaprio gets snubbed

As the nominations were read, Killers of the Flower Moon waxed and waned: Martin Scorsese’s period drama earned key nods for picture, director, actress (Lily Gladstone) and supporting actor (Robert De Niro), but missed an expected nomination for adapted screenplay and extended a continuing snub of lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio that began with the Screen Actors Guild. Still, the film did make Oscar history in several categories, as Gladstone became the first Native American nominated for best actress and Scorsese’s 10th directing nomination helped him pull ahead of Steven Spielberg as the most-nominated living director of all time.

Wes Anderson in, Pedro Almodóvar out

Members of the short-film branch can often be hostile to directors they perceive as dilettantes, doling out snubs in recent years to big names such as Taylor Swift (for All Too Well: The Short Film) and Pedro Almodóvar (for his Tilda Swinton short The Human Voice) in favour of lesser-known filmmakers struggling to break through. This year, voters from other branches were allowed to volunteer their services to nominate films for best live-action short, and this expanded group allowed in Wes Anderson, whose miniature The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar arrived on Netflix a few months ago. Almodóvar was not so lucky, snubbed once again for his western Strange Way of Life, starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke.

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A last dance for Barbie

Barbie might have scored one more nomination if it weren’t for a rule change introduced in 2008 that forbade any film from placing more than two nominees in the original-song category. Although three of the tunes from Barbie qualified for the original-song shortlist announced in December — Dua Lipa’s disco-infused Dance the Night, the Ryan Gosling-sung I’m Just Ken and Billie Eilish’s ballad What Was I Made For? — only the latter two made it in. At least Lipa can console herself with the tune’s recent Grammy nomination for song of the year.

Godzilla stomps into visual effects

The visual-effects category is typically dominated by megabudget Hollywood productions, but the hit Japanese import Godzilla Minus One made it into the race this year alongside big-studio fare such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and Napoleon. Not bad for a foreign-language film with a budget rumoured to be under $US15 million ($23 million). When Godzilla roars, even the academy has to listen.

The New York Times

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