Every year, after the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced, our brethren at Guardian US drop their roundup of Oscarbait failures, highlighting those poor films that didn’t earn any nominations despite trying the damnedest to do so. You know the type: big stars, lavish production values, a period setting, worthy subject matter, and a sense that they have been genetically engineered to win over Academy voters.
This year, per the list, there seem to be more Oscarbait failures than ever: take your pick from Dear Evan Hansen, George Clooney’s The Tender Bar, a Mark Wahlberg drama whose existence I wasn’t aware of until 38 seconds ago, and not one but two Ridley Scott films. There’s even that most dead cert of Oscarbait dead certs: a biopic, in the form of Jennifer Hudson-starring Aretha Franklin life story Respect. Strange days indeed.
Something seems to have changed among Oscar voters in recent years: the bait is being set but the Academy doesn’t seem to be gobbling it up in the same way. Instead its appetite has become more adventurous. Take the last two best picture winners: a virtuosic Korean comedy-thriller (Parasite) and an impressionistic road trip movie whose cast – bar one admittedly stellar name, and a few respected character players – was pretty much entirely made up of non-actors (Nomadland).
This year’s runaway favourite, meanwhile, is Jane Campion’s brooding tale of mangled masculinity, The Power of the Dog. It has common ground with more traditional winners of the past – a garlanded director, a lead actor (Benedict Cumberbatch) seemingly hellbent on winning a best actor gong, the sort of trad period setting beloved by older Academy voters – but in other ways it feels about as far from Oscarbait as possible: too opaque, too understated and just a bit too twisted for middlebrow tastes. Yet it earned a whopping 12 nominations, as many as perhaps the definitive example of an Oscarbait movie, The King’s Speech, managed.
Indeed, The Power of the Dog looks a positively safe choice when placed next to another of this year’s nominees, the Japanese drama Drive My Car – a two-hour 59-minute Murakami adaptation that muses meanderingly on death, creativity and Chekhov. Even the token blockbuster in the nominations list, Dune, feels about as arthouse-y as a blockbuster can get.
This isn’t to say that more typical ‘awards-y’ films are entirely out in the cold – Belfast, for one, definitely ticks that box – but there does seem to be an interesting broadening of tastes being exhibited, most likely a result of the Academy’s decision to expand its member base, making it younger, more diverse and international. Suddenly the prospect of wins for foreign language dramas, stories you haven’t seen before on screen, or films directed by people who aren’t white blokes (should Power of the Dog win best picture it would be the first time there have been two back to back wins by women in the category) feels far more possible. And, at a time when mainstream cinema seems to be an endless procession of superhero sequels, that is something to cling on to.
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