Team Experience Grieving the Oscar Shut-Outs
Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 8:00AM Nathaniel R
We're not supposed to use the word "snub" anymore (stop trying to make "snubbed" rehappen). It's true that it's become overused to the point of insanity. The word implies a purposeful disdain, a rebuff, when Oscar voters surely aren't saying "ugh, that Franco!" when they vote (errr, bad example perhaps they were). The point is they're merely voting on the ones they keep hearing about their favorites. Some films and performances and achievements just don't quite make the cut. And who knows? Someone or something you love might have been one vote shy of a nomination so it wasn't "snubbed" at all, just unlucky! This is what I'm choosing to believe about Jake Gyllenhaal's raw, rangey, vulnerable, and altogether stunning turn in Stronger. He's one of his generations very best actors and keeps proving it in film after film and they just keep ignoring him year after year. It's driving me mad. So...
Which omission pissed you off the most? That's the question that I ask you in the comments and that I already asked the (usually) Oscar loving Team Experience. Their angry-fun answers are after the jump...
WHICH OSCAR OMISSION PISSED YOU OFF THE MOST?
CHRIS FEIL: Tiffany Haddish wasn't exactly the likeliest of nominees, but her Girls Trip performance is one of the performances we'll be adoring long after the Oscar ceremony. As if the notion that Oscar doesn't reward comedy needed fuel added to its fire - if only Tiffany could have ziplined over that fire and, well, put it out.
GLENN DUNKS: I had resigned myself to the obvious fact that Tiffany Haddish was not going to be nominated, but to then invite her to announce the nominees so we can witness that first hand? Yikes. I know the category was stacked - my heart aches for Hong Chau, thwarted by giving a great performance in a disappointing film that I don't feel people allowed themselves to see the virtues of (those visual effects! that production design!) - but it just came off as rude.
TEO BUGBEE: Lady Bird for Best Editing. Economic, elegant editing, but each cut has impact.
MATTHEW ENG: Paul Thomas Anderson’s funny, full-hearted, and deeply audacious script for Phantom Thread really couldn’t claim a spot in Original Screenplay amid Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s absurd fish-shtupping and Martin McDonagh’s clunky portents and insulting medley of gendered, racialized, and sizeist stereotypes? Sometimes the writers’ branch gets it, but other times it’s just a sucker for flashy narrative gimmicks.
DEBORAH LIPP: The haunting and heartbreaking Wind River could surely have earned one nomination somewhere. What pisses me off is, truth be told, not that it wasn't nominated, but that it never made it to the conversation. No one discussed it as a possibility, no one found it "buzzworthy." This wonderful movie deserved better.
TIMOTHY BRAYTON: I had cocooned myself in enough cynicism that I didn't expect good things to happen, but Call Me by Your Name missing both Supporting Actor bids was certainly... annoying.
KIERAN SCARLETT: Hong Chau for Downsizing. She's very good in that movie. Better than it deserves. And I was really rooting for her.
ILICH MEJIA: Not thrilled The Big Sick’s Holly Hunter missed out for making the concerned mother funny, intelligent, kind, and then some. Wish she’d have been there to heckle the announcement (if only to woo-hoo Lesley Manville’s nomination: heckling doesn’t have to be negative).
SPENCER COILE: Where on earth is The Beguiled? I would’ve been happy with a Kirsten Dunst nomination, an Adapted Screenplay nomination, a Costume Design nomination. Anything!
JASON ADAMS: My first thought was Stuhlbarg but I'm more sad than angry about that (I know he'll get his due soon) - I think I'm angrier about the lack of love for Luca Guadagnino all season long. There isn't an element of CMBYN that Luca didn't wrangle into a visual and aural feast, from the performances to the look to the music, the whole damn thing works, and it's both a departure for him (kinder, more bucolic and adult, less show-offy) while it also couldn't have been made by anyone else.
BEN MILLER: Armie Hammer. That performance is incredibly difficult to pull off. You have to toe the line between manipulation and adoration. At no point did I feel like Oliver was corrupting Elio and their romance became immediately intimate in ways film rarely shows. Transformative stuff. I will never understand why he failed to gain the traction he deserved while Richard Jenkins (who I always enjoy) gets a nod for a listless performance.
JOHN GUERIN: My heart truly breaks for Annette Bening, fantastic and eminently deserving of a nomination for Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool.
ERIC BLUME: James Franco. He was astonishing and found the heart of that crazy guy, without going soft. And what does Jessica Chastain have to do for another nomination? We've seen Meryl do what she does in The Post before, and her slot should have gone to Jessica's resourceful, smashing, funny work in Molly's Game.
But, as you might have guessed, dear reader. One name kept popping up in the conversation...
KATEY RICH: Justice for Michael Stuhlbarg! At this point he's just going to win for some subpar performance in two decades because everyone feels guilty for snubbing him so long, but it would have been so lovely to see him nominated for being the beating heart of his film.
SEÁN MCGOVERN: I join the chorus of queers lamenting the same name: Michael Stuhlbarg. There's a reason so many of us desired that this tender-hearted progressive father receive his just rewards. And it's a true supporting role: quiet, warm, unshowy. There's a place for these performances. Just not at the 90th Oscars!
NICK DAVIS: I don't really know what Michael Stuhlbarg had to do to garner a nomination or any awards traction whatsoever except be quietly but unmistakably stupendous in a genuinely supporting role in one of the three Best Picture nominees in which he appeared, but I guess that's just not enough. Runner-up is Félicité for Foreign Film, but I was already less optimistic about that one.
DANCIN DAN: The lack of Armie Hammer and/or Michael Stuhlbarg in Supporting Actor. If forced to pick one of them for my ballot, it would be Stuhlbarg, who would frankly win the category hands down with his line reading of "Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot" ALONE. It's the kind of small-scale, generous, film-elevating work that this category was designed to honor, and he was a key ensemble member in THREE of the Best Picture nominees this year! A nomination for his finest work of the year would have been the least AMPAS could do honor this hard-working, humble performer.
Your turn. Which snub sent you into a rage spiral?
Reader Comments (103)
I was hoping Killing of a Sacred deer would make it, if not for its screenplay, then for its score or cinematography. At any rate we live in thw age where the gothic horror has returned to prominence so Im content with that.
No secret, and I am repeating myself...
"Colossal": Picture, Director (Nacho Vigalondo), Actress (Anne Hathaway), Supporting Actor (Jason Sudeikis), Original Screenplay, Film Editing, Visual Effects (mostly because of the results with the tiny budget... it looks 100 times more expensive, as a film).
The Academy got Supporting Actor so wrong this year. This category is where you see the "old guard" of the Academy holding on with a tight fist by honoring mostly veterans (Dafoe, Harrelson, Jenkins, Plummer). I would have rejected at least 3 of those names. Plummer's nomination was as much of a fuck-you to Kevin Spacey as it was a nod to Plummer. The sound of Dafoe's voice is a grating rasp, but he also has no musicality to the way he says his dialogue - his performance (like all his others) is flat, monotone, and stoically unemotional (NOT a fan). And Woody Harrelson has been playing this same slow-talking, mumbling Southern cracker for almost two decades now.
In their places, I would have rather had Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Tracy Letts for Lady Bird. And Luca Guadagnino should have been nominated for Director. To those idiots who still wanted him to film graphic sex scenes, this was an arthouse film about first love, NOT A PORNO!!!!!!!!!!!!